stevenberlinjohnson.com

Introducing MIND WIDE OPEN

After months of hints and innuendo, I'm finally ready to start talking in earnest about my new book: Mind Wide Open. The obligatory subtitle is "Your Brain, Neuroscience, And The Search For The Self." We're now about halfway through the edit cycle, which is the point at which my contributions become a little less time-consuming, though there is still room for me to change things based on responses here and elsewhere. It will be published in February of next year by Scribner in the US. (Penguin UK is releasing it in March, I believe.)

The book is an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual. There are a number of great books that ask questions like: How did the brain evolve? Or: how does the brain work? This book asks a related, but more intimate question: how does your brain work? In what ways can science shed light on your own personality traits, emotional habits, mental blindspots or strengths? In the book I've set myself up as a kind of guinea pig for this experiment: I take a number of tests that evaluate different cognitive faculties; I do a number of explorations with neurofeedback; I help design a series of fMRI experiments on my own head. I also have conversations with some of the world's leading brain scientists, who function as guides through this amazing inner landscape.

In many ways, the tone of the book will be familiar to those of you who read Emergence -- it's popular science with a literary gloss. (One of the sub-themes of the book is the way neuroscience echoes the insights of novelists like Woolf and James.) But there's a new first-person component to this book, something I've never really tried before in print. I talk about how understanding the brain has changed the way that I've experienced a number of personal events: 9/11, the birth of both of our sons, various frightening events, and a few happy ones as well. In a way, I've been developing this first-person voice simultaneously in the book and here on the blog, so I already have you all to thank for putting up with this work-in-progress over the past nine months. I hope you'll find the finished book worth the wait. In the meantime, I'm going to post an extended paragraph or two from each chapter over the coming week, and encourage everyone to free-associate on it -- further readings, personal anecdotes, hostile disagreements, factual corrections, haiku...

I'll start with a quote from the Preface, one that builds on what I've said above:

Every human brain is capable of generating different patterns of electrical and chemical activity. The promise of these new tools is being able to figure out what your pattern looks like. And then figure out what that pattern tells you about yourself.

It's likely that you've thought about the patterns of your own brain's wiring before. The general movement of popular psychology over the past century is one from deeply figurative descriptions of mental traits towards more physiological specificity: the movement, in a sense, from Oedipus to the neuron. Adrenaline itself has entered our everyday lexicon, as has the notion of our body administering quick chemical fixes for the pure pleasure of it: we do things, we say, for the adrenaline rush, or the endorphin high. Radio ads now tout various wonder drugs' ability to alter our neurotransmitter profiles as though they were selling dandruff shampoo. If you've read Listening To Prozac, you've probably met a person who seemed depressed and thought: hmm, very low serotonin. But these are just hunches about our inner physiological states, and crude ones at that. There are dozens of so-called "information molecules" in your body -- neurotransmitters, hormones, peptides -- each playing a key role in your shifting emotional response to external events, triggering everything from the nurturing instinct in mothers to the agitated surge of a panic attack. Could tools that measure the minute-by-minute levels of those substances in your body and brain teach you something about your own emotional toolbox? Could they help you make sense of your dreams, or your phobias? We've learned to track and monitor our mood changes with a statistician's exactitude, to explore our childhood memories, to keep our minds alert with exercise. But your moods and memories and perceptions are themselves just the sum of electrochemical activity in your brain. What could you learn about yourself if you could catch a glimpse of that activity directly? If you could see what your brain looked like when it was remembering a long-forgotten childhood experience, or listening to a favorite song, or conjuring up a good idea?

Brain imaging tools are miracles of modern science, but they are not the only inroads to your mind's inner life. Simply possessing a more informed understanding of your brain's internal architecture can change the way you think about yourself. Part of that process involves separating out mental routines that you conventionally experience in unison. If you know nothing about what's actually happening in your head, the neurological activity you experience is invisible: it's just you being yourself. But the more you learn about the brain's architecture, the more you recognize that what happens in your head is more like a symphony than a soloist, with dozens of players contributing to the overall mix. You can hear the symphony as a unified wash of sound, but you can also break out the trombones from the tympani, the violins from the cellos. To do something comparable with your own head, you don't need a million-dollar imaging machine. You just need to learn something about the brain's components and their typical patterns of activation.

Anybody intrigued?

For your consideration: A rant on intelligent software

There may be no experience more maddening in the digital world than allegedly "intelligent" software acting irrationally. I'd be curious to hear if others have had the same experience, but for me, I find that Microsoft products, especially Word, are the most consistent offenders -- they're filled with all these automated shortcuts designed to anticipate what we want to do, only their "educated" guesses seem to have stopped at about a fifth-grade level.

As I've mentioned before, I'm in the middle of doing the final edits on the new book, and one of the things that happens in this stage -- as you stitch together end notes, bibliographies, old passages and quotes you'd left out of earlier drafts -- is that you're doing a lot of cutting and pasting between different open documents. On my version of Word -- the version released for OS X a year or two ago -- this sort of behavior causes Word's autoformatting and stylesheet tools to descend into literal madness. Practically every other change I make triggers some bizarre unintended change in formatting.

The one that really put me over the edge: I paste two paragraphs from two different documents into my master end notes document. They're both in 11 point Times Roman. When I delete the hard return at the end of the first quote, collapsing them into a single paragraph, all of a sudden the combined block of text switches to 18 point Courier. Smart, very smart. How did Word realize that just by hitting that backspace key I secretly wanted to make my text look like a ransom note?

The problem with this little anecdote is that I'm pretty sure this random behavior isn't a bug. It's the autoformatting system working the way it has been designed to work. I spent a few minutes exploring after my Courier outbreak, just to figure out what the hell had happened. Here's what I think was going on: one of the documents I was pasting in from had a style sheet -- called "plain text" -- that was set at 18 pt. Courier. I had long ago manually switched the formatting of the text itself to 11 point Times Roman, but the text still carried its old "plain text" styling around with it, lurking invisibly behind the Times facade. When I pasted it into my new document, it brought the "plain text" style with it. And when I collapsed the two paragraphs together, they were each a different style, and so for some reason it chose "plain text" over the other, and converted the entire combined passage to the Courier.

I suppose there are some scenarios in which that kind of automation would be exactly in sync with my needs, but I'd wager there are far more where the behavior just seems random. I've obviously never designed a stylesheets tool, but can it really be that hard to make something like this work in a more intuitive way?

It occurs to me that this kind of automation showcases another interesting difference between Apple's and Microsoft's software principles: Apple software is famously easy to use, but you'll rarely see Apple software anticipating your needs. Part of their ease-of-use comes from the deliberally limited number of functions available, but Apple also gives you a sense that you're viscerally in control of your information. There's autoformatting in programs like iDVD, of course, but you trigger the layout changes directly. The software doesn't suddenly decide that the "beach" theme would be better than the "birthday" theme. Microsoft's attitude is that the software will be easier to use if the computer does some of the thinking for you, while Apple's is to get the computer out of your face as much as possible, so you can do your thinking without trying to figure out why the hell that paragraph just switched to 18 point Courier.

Or is it just me?

Google, cont.

As I was sifting through the many responses to the Googleholes piece (which have been much more thoughtful and probing in the comments area here, thank you very much), I kept thinking to myself that there was a quality to the tone of the comments -- particularly the angry comments -- that reminded me of something. I finally figured out what it was: they share the very same how-dare-you-suggest-any-imperfections outrage with the responses I've received anytime I've written anything vaguely critical about Apple.

The passion is certainly warranted (in both cases, I happen to believe) -- Google really is an amazing service, and Apple has been on a complete roll of late. But thinking about the two companies together made something clear to me about Google's extraordinary position right now. They have the fanatical brand devotion of Apple, and the market dominance of Microsoft. That's a powerful combo, one you don't see very often.

One other followup: a few days after I suggested that Google was pushing research away from books towards PDFs of articles, the NY Times runs a story about how Amazon is toying with adding full-text search of non-fiction books to its site. This will be very interesting to see, particularly because they won't be able to filter the results (at least initially) based on user contributions, a la PageRank. I wouldn't be surprised, given Amazon's track record, if they figure out a way to make it really useful out of the gate, though.

Darwin In A Box

My latest "Emerging Technology" column is the lead story over at the Discover site. It looks at how genetic algorithms -- Darwin in a box, as the title calls them -- are being applied to solve real-world tasks. I wrote about GAs a little in Emergence, but the stories there were more proof of concept than practical application. In the column I talk about an amazing GA designed to teach a virtual character how to walk (a demo of which I first saw at the wonderful TED conference earlier this year.) But one of my favorite bits in the piece comes from a conversation I had with the always interesting Bill Gross:

Genetic algorithm advocates often talk about their software in the language of ecosystems: predators and prey, species and resources. But Gross has another idea –– less rain forest and more assembly line. "Let's say you give the software access to the entire McMaster-Carr industrial supply catalog. They have 400,000 parts in stock: screws, bolts, hinges, everything. So you've got the whole gene pool of those parts available." Somewhere in that mix is the machine you're dreaming of, and simulated evolution may well be the fastest way to find it.

"You state your objectives, let the thing evolve with the optimum combination of parts at the lowest price, and the machine will be there this afternoon," Gross says, his voice rising with excitement. "That's an extreme exaggeration –– but not that extreme!"

All Spin Zone

So I'd like to propose a new addition to the popular idiom, styled after our President's state of the union address. Any time you find yourself having to stretch the truth, or knowingly tell an fib, add a handy little opening clause to ensure that your statement is technically accurate. As in:

The British government has learned that those pants don't make you look fat at all.
These lipstick stains on my collar? The British government has learned that they're actually just ketchup.
The British government has learned that I gave at the office.

And they said George W. wasn't going to contribute anything to the art of rhetoric!

Googleholes

I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray:

The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them.

Here's a more real-world example of the bias at work, which is equally self-reflexive: search on "steven johnson emergence." The top ten results are either from blogs, Amazon product pages, or the O'Reilly Network (very big with the open source and blogging communities.) Now, Emergence was reviewed by the NY Times, the Economist, the Village Voice, the UK Guardian, and dozens of other major publications with huge readerships. But Google doesn't think those results are as relevant as blogger reviews. Now, I'm a blogger, and I love the blogging community, so I think in a way that this is not necessarily bad news. But it's hard not to see it as a kind of bias.

Sixteen Words

Three thoughts on Yellowcakegate:

1. The scandal is not just that a bogus claim was inserted into a State of the Union address to justify launching a war. The real scandal is that there were only five other he's-not-disarming justifications included in the speech. The material was so thin that they knew they had to pad a little, even if that meant throwing in intelligence that didn't look reliable. It's not just that they included material they knew was junk; it's that the junk was still good enough to make the cut, which tells you something about the overall persuasiveness of the argument.

2. The White House clearly inserted the "British government has learned" phrase just to be technically correct about it. (There's no other reference to anything but US intelligence in the rest of the section.) Subtext: "Sure, our guys think this report is worthless, but it's technically true to say that the British still believe it." It is too complimentary to refer to this level of obfuscation, with thousands of lives at stake, as Clintonian.

3. Condi Rice should have never started the "sixteen words" meme. It sounds too much like the missing eighteen minutes from the Watergate tapes.

Control Issues

Most days I'm amazed the technology around me works as seamlessly as it does: my Windows box and my Powerbook share a monitor and swap files with no problems; I can grab a wi-fi connection from about a thousand hotspots in the NYC area; I carry around the equivalent of 200 CDs in my iPod, and barely even think about how I'm transferring all that data.

But every now and then I drop down the rabbit hole into the world of Technology As It Used To Be. I've descended into just such a hole this week, ironically -- but not atypically -- as part of an effort to make my new AV setup more user-friendly. Don't get me wrong -- I'm personally thrilled with the home theater I've assembled. It's just that no one else in the house -- not to mention house guests -- has any idea how to use it, mostly because you literally need three separate remote controls just to watch a Frasier rerun.

I was under the impression that a simple solution existed for precisely this problem, a solution known as the "universal remote." The appeal seemed almost Tolkienesque in its simplicity: One device to rule them all. I did a bit of research online, and decided to go with a Philips product that seemed to have a passionate following: the Pronto TSU3000.

Part of the appeal of the Pronto for me was the fact that Philips manufactured it, since three of my components are Philips products. But it also included a built-in "universal database" of infrared codes for other brands, so I'd avoid the tedious process of "teaching" the Pronto all the codes on my other remotes.

Now, when I hear the phrase "universal database" what I think that means is that I'm going to sit down with my new Pronto, type in the model numbers of my AV equipment, and everything will work right out of the gate. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But alas, it was not to be. When I tried to enter in my Yamaha receiver, the Pronto turned out to have 20 separate IR codes listed under Yamaha -- no model numbers associated with them, just "Yahama 1", "Yamaha 2," etc. So what you have to do is select the first one, install it, and then test it on your machine and see if it works. If it doesn't, you move on to the next one.

This was annoying enough -- given that there were 20 codes just for my receiver -- but it turns out that you can't do a quick test by hitting the on/off button, because some of the Yamaha code sets agree on the signal for "turn on the unit" but disagree about signals for other things, like "turn down the volume." Which means effectively you have to test all 20 of the codes -- and test them at dozens of different functions. It seems idiotic to me that different manufacturers can't agree on a common language for these things, but it is beyond incompetence -- borderline evil really -- that a single manufacturer can't just have one set of codes for all its products.

I'll spare you the endless headaches that followed -- after a day of tinkering with the device during my spare time, the only thing I'd managed to get it to do reliably was turn the TV and the receiver on. (And I'm supposed to be reasonably technically adroit.) After three days, I've got it mostly working, but I'm still running into amazing roadblocks just trying to get it to do what it's supposed to do. The unit comes with Windows software for editing the functions -- and importing new graphics, etc -- but after one or two successful communications between my computer and the Pronto, the software stopped recognizing the Pronto. I tried about fifteen different solutions, and then finally found a note in a forum on the web from someone who discovered that removing and then reinserting the Pronto's batteries before trying to connect to the computer seemed to fix the problem. Which in fact it did for me. Now, why hadn't I thought of that on my own?

My Independence Day Homily

I don't do a lot of flag-waving on this site, but since it's that time of year, I thought I'd try my hand for once. This morning my wife and I took our two boys out for a long march through Prospect Park (not exactly a march, of course, since one of the boys is only 20 days old). It was as moving a 4th of July as I can remember, partially because it was the first one I'd experienced with a family of four, and the first where our two-year-old was old enough to play catch with me. But it was moving as well because the Park was at its multicultural best. (It also happened to be at its horticultural best, thanks to our rain-soaked June.) I've seen this enough in Prospect Park to be somewhat inured to it, but somehow walking the great pageantry of the city on the 4th let me see it all with fresh eyes: the huge clan of Korean-Americans gathered under an elm tree, with the family of Hasidic Jews strolling down the path behind them; the white soccer moms picnicking on the lawn; the Puerto Ricans barbecuing up the hill, with the Williamsburg hipsters playing Frisbee between then; the rap and salsa and acoustic guitars; the old couple reading a Spanish-language paper I'd never seen before. There was literally a whole world hanging out together in the space the size of ten city blocks, and the space was as safe and green and at ease with itself as you could possibly imagine.

Once you get past the Macy's fireworks display, 4th of July imagery and rhetoric is usually full of old-time Americana: the small town's one firetruck decked out for the main street parade, the little league game, the white picket fences with their patriotic bunting. There's plenty to celebrate about the joys of small communities, but there's little that's fundamentally unique to the American experience. World history is teeming with small, successful communities united by a common culture and worldview, after all. What is rarer -- not quite uniquely American, but much closer to it -- is that scene today in Prospect Park. Few countries have figured out how to attract that kind of diversity, much less develop spaces where all those groups can somehow coexist. When some of our politicians make passing references to the "real America," what they're usually saying is that real America is everything that's not in our big cities. But if we're looking for a true site of American exceptionalism, something we've figured out how to do better than any other civilization on earth, today in Prospect Park wouldn't be a bad place to start.

There Is A There There

My latest Discover column combines two themes that I've been thinking about quite a bit over the past few years: online communications and facial expressions. It's a piece about the new online community, There, which I'd been tracking for a while, but first saw demoed at the incredible TED conference earlier this year. I've long been skeptical about 3D avatar-based worlds (my first book has a rant about how they're over-hyped), but There is the first iteration of the genre that actually looks habitable, precisely because they've built so much into your avatar's repertoire of facial expressions. Here's how I described it in the column: "There is a testing ground for one of today's most interesting experiments in communication, one that harks back to where we were just a little more than 100 years ago, when a technology first appeared that convincingly fooled our eyes into seeing the illusion of motion in a series of still images. We are exploring a comparable threshold point in our perceptual systems today –– only this time, the illusion at stake is that of emotion."

It was interesting revisiting this one this week, after exploring Apple's iChat AV software a bit, using their new videoconferencing tools. It'll be interesting to see whether real moving images (and real facial expressions) trump animated ones, or whether the online world finds room for both.