Starting my HCCS course at Sussex

Havn't blogged for ages, but Ive just started my course Human Centred Computer Systems at Sussex, and two of the courses require me to keep an online diary. So... I will post the links to them here. Any readers feel free to read, comment, etc. 

http://josephyhci.blogspot.com/

http://josephyhccs.blogspot.com/

The course looks really good and I am well looking forward to letting my theoretical Cog Sci knowledge work with a more practical and massively expanding research area. One thing I did think was bloody ridiculous was that they make everyone do an academic development course. I mean shouldn't MSc students be pretty dam well developed academically. We have to take a test next week which involves a 200 word essay to test our ability to reference correctly, and they give us the source materials including references correctly listed. So what the hell is the point? haha. 

For most of the courses we've been told to look out for usability in the real world as we do our degree. Two things I can think off already. Firstly... I bought a new sound system for my laptop few weeks ago and you can only turn it on and off and adjust EQ levels with the remote. So if i lose it Im screwed!  Secondly... I lost my passport the other day (yer I know silly me) and the online lost passport form requires you to know your passport number. Who the hell designs these things????

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

This is a video talk by a brain scientist Jill Taylor, who experienced a stroke, which had a profound affect on her life. It gets pretty pretentious towards the end for my likings, but I found the description of what she experienced over the duration of the stroke very interesting.

Naiive realism

“Conscious experience never brings you into direct contact with external reality. Instead, experience as such, including your conscious experience of being a self, is a simulation created by your brain. And it is only because you are unable to recognize the simulational character of consciousness that you live your waking life—and, with the exception of lucid dreams, most of your dream life—as a naïve realist.”

~ Windt & Metzinger (2007)

The bizareness of colour

When I think of the presentation of sound at the phenomenal level of experience, its phenomenological character makes sense. Sound is perceived when air vibrates the ear drum and is transduced to a neural signal and processed; and sound does indeed often have a qualitatively vibrational character, particularly when the frequency is very low. Similarly with spatio-temporal vision, the pattern of light hitting the retina is transduced into neural signal and processed leading to a spatio-temporal phenomenological world. Of course there is still some strangeness from the phyiscal to phenomenal level in these percepts; but at least there is some understandable qualatative aquaintance.

Colour is a truely bazare percept. The differences of colour are due to the differences in wavelength (vibrational energy in a sense) of light entering the visual system. Why then should colour not be phenomenally perceived as somthing like different fuzzing surfaces (like static television)? Perhaps its because of the incredible speed of the electromagnetic vibrations that means colour is just experienced as... well like it is! Or perhaps its because of colours functional role; some suggest it evolved so that we could detect fruit in the trees. Hence a vibrational sensation might be confused with movement (I'm not convinced this would matter if it was fuzzing that fast). Nonetheless it does seem a very odd sensation; blue is so different from yellow in such a strong way, yet its difference in physical stimulus is merely a few hundred nanometres of electromagnetic wavelength.

Feeding the brain

It is interesting to note that it is perhaps our brain’s close proximity (i.e. in the skull) to most of our sensory apparatus, such as our eyes and ears, that we have the intuitive and somewhat phenomenal feeling that we are in our brains. Who knows perhaps if all our sense organs were around our belly it would feel like we were feeding our brain every time we ate.

Just a silly little quirk I came up with whilst writing my dissertation.

Emtotiv headset

By Xmas people will be able to buy a headset for £150 that enables you to control virtual objects on a computer screen using the power of your mind. It works by taking input from your brain waves and sending it to the computer for processing. Here are a couple of videos of it in action. The hand movements are just for show apparantly. In the second video the Emotiv team use the same technology to control a toy UFO. It all really highlights the pace of technology's acceleration. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxMux4uEkLI&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TKhPZAhlLA&feature=related

IPlant

I recently came across a very interesting article on the IPlant currently under devlopment by Chris Harris, a researcher at the University of Sussex. It outlines the IPlane, a electrochemical chip inserted into the brain, which could enable treatment of certain mental illnesses, by directly stimulating the brain in a similar way to deep brain stimulation. For example by having it wirelessly connected to a sensor in a shoe, running triggers small bursts of dopamine, so that the user feels motivated to run. From what I understand this has actually already been tested on humans and works. Other implications include simulating serotonine areas of the brain to treat anxiety and depression, and in the more distant future directly stimulating visual and auditory areas to produce internalised visual and auditory experiences. Imagine watching a movie with yours eyes closed; pretty crazy stuff although scary for many. It also highlights some of the related ethical issues. Well worth a read.

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/harris20080112/

Mystery of consciousness

“In Western science the existence of matter is often taken for granted, while the existence of consciousness is regarded as mysterious. Consequently, the conventional ‘hard problem’ refers to the difficulty of understanding how consciousness arises from (otherwise, insentient) physical matter, or, in other versions, about the seeming irreducibility of first-person accounts of conscious experience to third-person descriptions of the brain. But in truth, the existence of matter is as mysterious as the existence of consciousness, and there are similarly hard problems in physics. Why, for example, should electricity flowing down a wire be accompanied by a magnetic field around the wire, why should electrons sometimes behave as waves and at other times as particles, and why there should be any matter in the universe at all?” Velmans (2008)

The Twisted Matrix: Dream, Simulation or Hybrid? Clark (2003)

"In normal waking the mode (defined as the ratio between the activity of the two systems) leans towards the aminergic. Whereas in REM sleep, with acetycholine dominating, experience becomes increasingly dissociative, displaying “amnesia, hallucinations, bizarre mentation, anxiety, and loss of volition control” (Hobson, p. 91). All this, we now know, is matched by a shift in regional blood flow from (in waking) dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to (in REM sleep) subcortical limbic structures.” (Clark 2003).

"In REM sleep we are, in a real sense, drugged witless by our own brains. And the cure, as Hobson and Neo would probably both agree, is simple: it is called waking up!" (Clark 2003).

“In a normal Virtual Reality simulation, you cannot bend the rules just by willing it. By the same token, video-gaming would be a whole different sport were the underlying code directly susceptible to the will of the players!" (Clark 2003).

A Temporary change in style

Since I’m not going to be writing any blogs for a while thought I might just post some interesting and thought provoking quotes from Philosophy and COG publications I come across in my studies. Here are a couple to start:

"Experience with drawing and using Venn diagrams allows us to train a neural network which subsequently allows us to manipulate imagined Venn diagrams in our heads. . . there is no reason to suppose that such training results in the installation of a different kind of computational device. It is the same old process of pattern-completion in high-dimensional representational spaces, but applied to the special domain of a specific kind of external representation.’’
~ Andy Clark (1997)

“The role of public language and text in human cognition is not limited to the preservation and communication of ideas. Instead, these external resources make available concepts, strategies and learning trajectories which are simply not available to individual, un-augmented brains.”
~ Andy Clark (1998)

"External stores such as written language cause individual memory strategies to move towards heavy reliance on such stores. As a result these stores play an indispensable role in remembering processes, and thus these stores become proper parts of cognitive processes of remembering."
~ Mark Rowland (1999)

“If the cultural inheritance of an environment-modifying human activity persists for enough generations to generate a stable selection pressure, it will be able to co-direct human genetic evolution.”
~ Kevin Laland (1999)