Mice and men and memory

NPR Cosmos and Culture reports that false memories have been successfully implanted in mice by observing the memory-forming areas of their brains. So why is this interesting?

Two reasons stand out.

Working together, the brain and body inhabit a world that continually imparts jolts and jabs. The whole embodied enterprise, for us, is a cooperative effort to make sense of day-to-day life. So I'm wondering to what extent any false memory will last once the mouse's brain and body once again begin to correspond without the experimenter's electric mat tazing the poor creature's feet.

Nonetheless, the writer, Barbara King, suggests that the sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome may one day benefit from this research insight. Let's hope so.

She also raises this unexpected point:

Scientists have known for a long time that human memory is both unreliable and reconstructive, that is, we modify our memories heavily as we revisit them. But why would evolution have allowed the brain to be built in such a way? What's the benefit?

Speaking to the The New York Times, study scientist Susumu Tonegawa speculated that the benefit may have to do with the creativity that underlies human artistic and scientific endeavors, which depends on thinking freely about both real and imagined events. This thought makes sense to a biological anthropologist like me.

I too find a bit of worldly solace in the idea that an unreliable memory might also let us think freely about "real and imagined events," or that this imperfection makes room for the creative spark.

IdeaFestival 2013 speaker Oliver Burkeman, in fact, expands on that thought when he talks about the undesirability of pushing aside all bad memories or unpleasantness in a (futile) quest to be happy. Getting outside our comfort zones expands our creative horizons. We grow. For a tease on this and other themes on which he will no doubt expand in September, I encourage you to watch his video.

Stay curious!

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by kjarrett

We know what we are, but not what we may be

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5

Beginning at the 15:45 mark in this video at RSA, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the generative dynamic of learning, comparing it one point to the exchange between actor and theater-goer.

I like that.

Jane McGonigal, who spoke at IdeaFestival 2008, has written extensively about play and alternate reality gaming as a performance of belief, and I think the festival is theatrical in a particular way.

It is to understand that when John Barker said "what is, is possible" last year, he was making not just a comment on the regenerative potential of human biology, his research interest, but saying something about the staggering ability of the human mind to hold out other worlds for examination.

It is to understand that when serial entrepreneur Peter Sims said that "success is a terrible mentor," he was making a comment on the choice to believe in only what we can see or feel at the moment. On this account, failure, likewise, has far less to do with what has happened. It has a much more to do with what we are thinking now.

Even though the festival has featured many incredible people talking about many amazing things, it is really about no-thing at all - that missing limbs are not disqualifying, that that last failure is not defining, and that when it comes to what is, the human mind deals in mere fractions. Battered as it may sometimes be, it is the belief that there is more than this.

"What we are" is worlds away from "what we may be." Harnessed to a worthy goal, make-believe has the generative potential to become belief-made.

Festival Passes for IdeaFestival 2013 are now on sale. But don't wait too long! We're expecting to sell out again.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image of the Globe Theater: Some rights reserved by Arbron

There is a danger to search

If you've been following the latest Five Questions interview series - and if you haven't watched them, do so right after reading this post - you may have heard IdeaFestival 2013 speaker and Technology Review editor Jason Pontin reference the digital critic Nicholas Carr.

Here's a January entry by Carr at American Public Media's Marketplace on how "search" means something much different than it once did.

When we talk about 'searching' these days, we're almost always talking about using Google to find something online.

That’s a big change for a word that long carried existential connotations -- a word that had been bound up in our sense of what it meant to be human. We didn’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We searched for truth, for meaning, for transcendence. Searching was an act of exploration that took us out into the world, beyond ourselves, in order to know the world, and ourselves, more fully.

On his blog he writes that "a true search is as essential as it is dangerous."

I love that idea.

The searches at the IdeaFestival are as much about meaning as they are answers, and the danger, such as it is, is strictly personal. That's good. Because while the questions at the festival are often thought provoking, difficult, even, the rewards are worth the effort: the answers your find will always be yours.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by ºNit Soto

Awe, "opensure" and happiness: Five Questions with Oliver Burkeman

If someone handed you a piece of paper tomorrow that told you exactly how the rest of your live would unfold in every detail, you would hate it, even if what was on that sheet of paper was all good.

Covering a rather large plot of psychological terrain, journalist and author of "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking," Oliver Burkeman talks with the IdeaFestival for our Five Questions series. Similar interviews have been done in the past three weeks with Maria Konnikova, Jason Pontin and Ariel Waldman.

Each of these terrific people will speak at IdeaFestival 2013.

Calling awe a mixture of wonder and fear, and the most "undervalued emotion," Burkeman describes the sensation as "not entirely pleasant." He offers attending the birth of a child as one example.

Burkeman also uses a term new to me, "opensure," or a fundamental openness toward the unknown, which contrasts neatly with what I judged in my question to him to be a widespread longing for certainty. And: "an ability to rest in mystery is a crucial 'negative' skill."

As for creativity and innovation in the business world, Burkeman argues that systems designed to avoid failure will inevitably fail. And breakthroughs that find cultural homes or financial success, are, like our happiness seeker, governed by paradox: it is often when "you are not focused on one specific endpoint, of knowing that things have to turn out one specific way, that you can hear opportunity knocking from other directions." 

Perfect.

Don't miss Oliver at IdeaFestival 2013! In the meantime, please enjoy an all-too-brief encounter in the video here. Have a great, great weekend.

Stay curious.

Wayne

1. Let's start with the obvious question: why would positive thinking be counterproductive?
2. The prolific blogger Andrew Sullivan often writes about the subject of doubt, comparing its virtues favorably to a cultural moment that would appear to crave certainty. Is doubt a "negative" power? 1:06
3. Buddhism and the monotheistic traditions have a long tradition of apophatic thinking, of triangulating, rather than directly appropriating, a big idea. Insofar as the experience of a becalmed and starry night, for example, is such a happy one, it would seem that people value awe roughly as much as knowledge. Why does "not knowing," as it were, produce this feeling? 2:58
4. You've written a couple of times at the Guardian about how a new purpose for an old object emerges once we overcome a predisposition toward functional fixedness. The process sounds like it may be useful to our happiness seeker. Perhaps once he or she stops thinking about what happiness should mean and pays attention to what, for them, it does mean, they're miles ahead. Would you agree or disagree? 4:30
5. What questions will IF fans have after your talk? 5:56
6. Do you have a favorite unanswered question? 7:25

Wait. Warp drives may be possible?!

Wait, warp drives may be possible?!

The New York Times yesterday:

Harold G. White [ a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA] has been working on instrumentation with the goal of using it to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer....

[He and a] team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possible.

Warp drive. Like on 'Star Trek.'

Whether a table top experiment might succeed, and the rather modest belief by White and others that its success may now be "less implausible," an actual warp drive bolted to a space ship is, for the time being, decidedly impossible.

But the laws governing these limits can nonetheless be probed. For example, the speed limit in special relativity applies to light's movement in the vacuum of space. Vacuum energy may be lowered further, however, to permit light to travel faster than its current limit of roughly 186,000 miles per second, a phenomenon known as the Casimir effect.

Other projects have demonstrated that the complementary states of two entangled but separate photons are maintained even at distances measured in miles. Though no information or matter is exchanged to maintain that reciprocal relationship, whatever happens does so at a speed many times the limit imposed by physical law. Similar experiments are planned between the ISS and Earth bound stations. Cryptology may never be the same.

Cosmologists also believe the repulsive and little understood force of dark energy is pushing galaxies away from us at speeds faster than light.

You too can probe the speed of light with the home experiment in the video here. You just need microwave and a chocolate bar. What the experiment may lack in precision, it more than makes up for in taste.

What Faster than the Speed of Light? suggests is that it may - and the stress is decidedly on may - be possible to travel faster than the speed of light, which could bring nearby stars hosting other worlds within reach of humanity. Whether there is a Zefram Cochrane out there to make that a reality remains to be seen.

Stay curious!

Wayne

Wikipedia: warp drive