Human brain series - Quick look at Animal instincts and the Modern brain

My thoughts

I can remember many times I've been discussing or arguing over something with friends, and I've put a certain emotion down to the idea that in the end were still just primitive animals, with layers of programming or learning clouding our thoughts. We have these wobbly things we call arms, and these wobbly things called legs, and we dawdle around making a mess, doing all this crap we don't need to. The idea that we have learnt to cover up our primitive basic instincts with layers of rules and meaning. That all laws and ideas of right and wrong are BS, and the reason so many people divorce, so many men cheat, so many people fight and kill each other is because we have instincts developed over millions of years, and have a thin layer of meaning maybe only 1000 years old which we have placed on top. A number of people I've suggested this to have been opposing to the idea, suggesting that we have evolved far beyond that.


One idea I've run through many times and feel like I have come to understand is as follows. I'm not sure if it's correct at all, but to me it seems logically correct. The reason women are clingy, and want to hold on to a man and be secure, while men are jumpy and want to have 20 wives (mistresses). Also the reason after a mutual break-up a woman is usually a lot worse off for a lot longer than the man. He usually seems to move on pretty quickly, right? If you think about the majority of animals, and their survival instincts, does this not suggest we are the same? It is well known, but often forgotten that the reason we are here, the reason we are alive, is to pass on our genes and knowledge, and keep our species alive. Nothing more. In most animals, the best way to do this is a combination of two things. Firstly, to spread the seed as far as possible in order to create healthy children with a mix of genes. Secondly, to protect our young at all costs, and teach them everything we know. So rather than both parents doing both, most species have one parent specialising in each, in order to best continue survival of their species. The male roams far and wide, looking for women. While the female brings up the young, and protects them with their life, teaching them everything they know along the way until they are old enough to go out on their own. That in essence is the way species have evolved. I always picture lions when I recite this idea. A male lion roaming the landscape looking for females. While the mother rears and protects her young at all costs. Would this instinctual male/female behavior, in the form of various hormones, not explain a lot of relationship mishaps in our society today? It has always made me think were not that far from animals. We still have the same raw instincts inside us, but have learnt to go beyond these instincts with multiple external influences and ideas, adding new meaning to things. But in the end, as a whole, it seems these feelings are still there in the general population.

So the question is, what is the link between animal instincts, and our modern brain? Do we have certain instinctual pathways, which we actually change and replace through learning over time? Or do those instinctual pathways remain, and we develop other thought patterns over the top, occasionally slipping up and going back to our primitive ways.
 My thoughts are they remain somehow, and in certain scenarios can be awakened. I think the modern thought processes overlap but don't replace them. I think our instincts are still there, but we have a whole lot of extra information over the top of them making you act differently. The reason I think this is when people drink, they lose their inhibitions, or their 'modern brain', and revert back to their primitive instincts. Men get aggressive, they lust after women, they fight each other over women. People enjoy music a lot more. A lot of the modern facade is removed and we fall back to our primitive thought processes. This tells me they are still there somehow, and the animal in us is really there, being held down by everything we have taught ourselves.


These are my thoughts before doing any research into the topic. It's just an opinion before I start digging to see how it actually works. From here on, the rest is based on other peoples research and essays that try to explain the link between animal instincts and our modern brain.

The real science

Humans have instincts, just like animals, that are hard-wired into our brains from the day we are born. They help us survive without thinking or requiring any learned input or decision making on our behalf. We have a bunch of instincts which don't seem necessary anymore. Scientists are still trying to find purposes for some of our instincts. Here is a list of a few interesting instincts humans have, and their purpose.

There are different kinds of instincts. There are 'primitive reflexes' which are exhibited in babies, but eventually cease as we learn they are no longer useful. One good example is the Palmar Grasp Reflex. When a baby's palm is stroked by something, its natural reflex is to grasp the object. This is a natural cling reflex that helps babies hold onto their mother while travelling for example. Picture baby monkeys being carried around in trees, or a baby holding your finger. Up until four months old, a baby will automatically turn its head toward anything that strokes its cheek. This was evolved to assist in breastfeeding.

A few primitive reflexes we have
Goosebumps appear when it is either cold, or you experience a strong emotional reaction like fear or pleasure or arousal. They can also appear as a response to anger or fear to make you look bigger, in order to intimidate an enemy.

Emotional contagion- An instinct all people show, where emotions can be passed between individuals. For example, if a child sees a parent crying, they will also get sad and start crying. This is a well studied fact and is the basis of many religions. A variety of emotions can be transferred, and is most effective when multiple people are involved. For example walking into a room full of happy people will make you happy too. Think of the laughing chain effect- if you see a bunch of people laughing and have no idea what they are laughing about, you cant help but start laughing yourself, even though you have no idea whats funny. Alternatively, a room full of mopey people will make you instantly mopey too.

Yawning- why the hell do we yawn, and why is it infectious? This is one scientists havent figured out yet, as each hypotheses has elements which make sense, and those that don't. The most promising theory is that yawning is a persons way of controlling brain temperature. It has been suggested that a yawn can increase or decrease brain pressure through some mechanical process at the back of the mouth. This is supported by the fact that people often yawn when changing altitude levels and their ears become blocked. Another theory is that yawning is a primitive group instinct that aims to stretch the muscles of the mouth, making you more alert. This supports the idea of yawning being contagious. Imagine a group of dogs hunting- one yawn spreads through the pack keeping them all alert. Also many animals hunt with their jaws as a main weapon, so this theory also supports that creatures hunting in packs stretched their mouth muscles to ready themselves to attack.
It has also been suggested that yawning is a territorial reflex. When you yawn you tend to stretch your arms out too. This makes you appear bigger, and opening your mouth bares your teeth. Studies show that when humans witness an animal yawning, their reaction is to look at the teeth of the creature. So it could well be a territorial instinct. Imagine a pack of dogs hunting. They yawn, baring their teeth and making them look big and mean. Now imagine this being contagious, and spreading through the pack. Ten dogs baring their teeth at you. A pretty intimidating visual if you ask me. Or maybe they are all flowing with Testosterone at this point and are showing out to each other? An interesting primitive instinct either way.

Diving Reflex- An interesting reflex shown in all aquatic mammals including humans. When water below 21 degrees touches your face, your heart rate drops 10-25%, and the blood gets pulled away from your extremities towards your core. This is an instinct that cant be helped, and helps the oxygen you have in your lungs last longer keeping you alive longer. It is likely a reflex for when we are accidentally submerged in cold water. It even happens if you are unconscious, giving you a bit of extra time before you drown. The diving reflex has led some scientists to study our ancestry and create an Aquatic Ape hypothesis, suggesting our common ancestors took some time evolving to be aquatic creatures before veering away from it to what we are now. This theory explains a few features we have which dont seem useful for other purposes, and would be necessary for an aquatic being. For example, our loss of hair, our hooded noses, the location of our hair, voluntary breath control, the waxy coating on newborns, and this diving reflex. Maybe we were once destined to be mermaid-like creatures.



Human instincts
Many of our ancestral instincts were considered adaptive back then, and would have affected us positively leading us to safety, and helping us avoid future crises. However, some of these in our modern-day world are considered as hinderances, actually threatening our survival.
Some negative human instincts we have carried on from the past are revenge, tribal loyalty, greed, and our urge to procreate.

Tribal loyalty and revenge made sense with our ancestors, protecting them in certain situations. But these are now considered 'immoral' emotional reactions and are no longer necessary. In ancient times, if a caveman bullied your clan, you would go and put yourself at risk to seek revenge and hurt/kill him. This would result in him likely not bothering your clan again. It was a useful idea when we grew up in very small clans, to ensure safety and survival. But now it is useless. We simply hold onto it in the form of religions or political party, which as we can see does not help anyone, but rather hinders our larger modern society in the form of wars or gangs.

Greed is another hard-wired emotion which we cannot avoid. Imagine our ancestral cave people- the greedy one who collected more food for himself and didn't share it with others during the winter was more likely to come out in the end healthier, and thus more likely to be selected for courtship and reproduce. As a result, greed and selfishness is hard-wired in our brains. We are all greedy and selfish at heart, even though we have been taught as children to avoid and overwrite this. Makes you really think about our materialistic society, and how unnecessary it all is. I'm pretty sure we are all going to survive the winters regardless of whether we share or not.

A very interesting article I read about animal instincts pulling apart the modern world is summarised nicely in the following paragraph. Irrelevant bits have been removed.

The driving force behind all living entities is Darwinian natural selection, or reproductive success. Unfortunately, natural selection is blind to the long-term future -- natural selection rewards just one thing: offspring. One of our most powerful instincts is the urge to procreate, which manifests itself in different ways in males than in females. Males simply want lots of sex whereas females are programmed with nesting behaviors that involve a safe home place for their family (of course, sexual selection is much more complex than that one sentence brief synopsis). Primitive humans did not even know how babies were formed, but nevertheless they made them. By favoring parts that fit and nerve endings that tingled in just the right places, natural selection, that ultimate puppet master, made certain we’d reproduce. Hence we are programmed to have instincts to breed. And breed, we do, in fact, we are much too good at it for our own good, all 7 billion of us. If we don't stop reproducing soon, human civilization is doomed.

A few articles I found went on to link the breeding instinct to the worlds resources and overpopulation. A lot of people suggest we are heavily overpopulated, and have combined our two big driving instincts of greed and procreation to eventually tear the world apart. Suggestions are made that we are in denial about our overpopulation crisis. That as our population increases, we reduce the per capita share of resources people have (disregarding individual access to these resources). What is our instinctual response to such an idea? A combination of denial and greed. Those who have access to resources collect them, and hush the idea that resources are scarce. As long as we have a nice hoard, the world is fine. Have we learnt to institutionalise greed? Do we promote runaway greed and call it success? Greed is the underlying driving force of the modern world. We give it names like entrepreneurship. We have set up structures to facilitate runaway greed. Think capitalism, politics, corporations, banks, insurance companies. Something as simple as fixed interest from a bank. If someone who has $5000 in a bank is compared to someone who has $5,000,000 in the bank, is earning 5% interest a fair thing? The poor person gets $250 while the rich one gets $250,000. We heavily reward greed. The better you are at being greedy and hoarding resources, the more you are rewarded.
So essentially we have designed an economic system that rewards greed, but spins it in a way so that we can deny having any part in it, since we have also been programmed to think that greed is a bad thing. Aren't we smart creatures :) Also funny to think that one of the basic animal survival instincts are what we have built our world around. It's when you notice this that the way you perceive the world starts to change.

So in response to my original question, about what the link is between animal instincts and our modern brain; I seem to have been veered a different way. It sounds like what we call 'animal instincts' are still prevalent in our minds and the way we act. Maybe we don't program ourselves to overcome these instincts as much as we think we do. Maybe they aren't such 'primitive' thought patterns. Maybe we just give them a new name, and pretend they're something different.

Although I didn't dig too deep and only really looked at a few examples, the concept is pretty interesting. That many of our primitive instincts are no longer useful for our survival; that most of them are actually negative thoughts that hinder our humanity; and that some of these negative and now useless instincts actually still manifest themselves in our everyday lives very strongly, potentially under a positive light.

I have never felt so greedy in my life :)  Are we really just a bunch of animals that started out hoarding resources for that cold winter's day, so we could survive longer and have a better chance of looking nice and healthy to the opposite sex at the end of winter? Did these two basic driving instincts of greed and procreation get out of hand and lead us to where we are now? Can war and religion really be described by basic tribal loyalty and the revenge instinct? It sure sounds like the basic animal instincts that once helped us to survive, no longer apply, and that all the turmoil in the modern world is a result.

Makes you think.





Few references to interesting reads:

Actualfreedom.com article on instincts
University of Texas course on Human Instincts
SMH Article- Do animal instincts challenge morality of human nature


-Attila

Blog being commandeered!

I feel the urge to delve into piracy this morning, and as a result have decided to commandeer this blog as my own!

While I think the private blog space between friends was a good idea, I don't think we all have the same amount of spare time or motivation to write things. I'm pretty eager to get out at least one extensive post a week, so figured I'll just claim it as my own, and open it up to the public and facebook world to get some followers and views.

Blogs been up a month and i'm the only one that's posted, so I think its a reasonable choice.
I'll leave those who are admin at the moment as authors, so you guys can feel free to make posts if you like.


-Attila

Live Forever series Part 1- The concept of Ageing, and a look into the idea of 'Calorie Limits' or lifetime energy intake

I've done a fair bit of research and reading on ageing and how to extend our lives forever.

I'll write up some of the basic concepts which i find very interesteing, a few sources here and there and then go on to focus on a discussion of lifetime calorie limits. I don't know a huge amount of the science behind it, but I know the basics. The idea is that every human organism tends to have a rough amount of calories it can eat and digest before ageing problems really start becoming evident and the organism starts to break down and die. Tests have shown that different animals seem to have different numerical 'limits'. If one human reaches this 'limit' faster than another, they will start developing life degrading effects of ageing first, and all other factors aside they will die sooner. 

Introduction to Ageing

The study of ageing is called Gerontology. It is fast becoming a very big industry in our world, as medical technology reaches a point where we can seemingly fix most problems somehow. We must fully understand the science behind a particular aspect of ageing before we can design medicines or other technologies which counter it. If you are interested in Life extension, general health, simple things you can do to extend your life, or future medical sciences; I highly recommend you read the book 'How to live long enough to live forever' by Ray Kurzweil. He is a renowned Gerontologist, philosophist, and writer. His book provides great insight into all aspects of ageing, and is seperated in such a way that you can learn about the basic mechanisms of ageing, the progression of medical technology, general nutrition for longevity, the complex science behind nutrition and ageing, and future technologies which are beign developed and will help us become cyborgs. Its broken up in such a way that you can flip past the complex science if you want to, or dig deep into nutrient profiles and biological processes affecting each aspect of ageing mentioned.

The basic concept of ageing is that as your body gets older, individual cells lose their ability to do their thing as efficiently, and slowly they get weaker and slower at their processes. Eventually they cant move nutrients around fast enough, or cant remove toxins fast enough that they eventually die.

This image shows a single cell. As you can see it has all kinds of bits and pieces inside it, which each do a specific thing to keep it alive. Some of them create waste by-products that float around inside the cell. These by-products are eliminated by some workers inside the cell. As the toxins build-up, it gets crowded in here, so the organelles cant do their thing as well because its so busy inside. The more toxins build up inside a cell, the slower all processes become. This brings us to the idea of a 'detox'. There are heaps of ways people tend to 'detox' their systems, but this model will help you understand what that actually means. They stop eating crap so toxins stop building up, and the cleaning organelles have time to clean out everything, leaving you with a clean fresh cell. So a 'detox' isnt necessarily a 'fad'. If done properly, it really does clean out crap from every cell in your body, leaving you feeling rejuvenated and allowing all cellular processes to work efficiently and healthily again. But if you keep eating and drinking crap, you will keep building up these toxins in your cells.

Eventually the organelles get weaker, and start working slower. This is why as you get older, your body isn't as efficient at removing crap from your body. Think of the dreaded hangover. When you were 18, you'd wake up fine. When you hit 30, it takes a lot longer to recover. This is why. So as you get old, everything starts slowing down, and cleaning slows down too, so you really have to start eating healthier, otherwise toxins build up really quickly and you get sick a lot more often. This is the act of ageing in a nutshell.

DNA life instructions

This image below shows the basic double helix structure of our DNA. It is the instruction booklet for every cell in our body. Every cell as shown above, has a nucleus inside. Inside the nucles we have giant strands of this DNA giving instructions to everything. 

Each cell has an identical giant string of DNA. They are made up of chains of 4 amino acids as shown above. Each chain of DNA is apparently 2metres long, with each little connection being 0.34 nanometers long. So that's a huge length of chain. Sections of DNA have been found to represent certain things. The human genome project is our attempt at finding strings of DNA that represent certain things. The hair colour brown might for example be shown by a string  like above with 500 links. The idea of mapping the genome is that we will hopefully find a certain string of DNA that is consistent with say breast cancer sufferers. These strings that apparently encode something are called 'genes'. Scientists have claimed that they have mapped the entire human genome as a list of these 4 amino acid combinations. They say they've found between 26,000 and 40,000 genes or strings which mean something. However, this only accounts for 2% of the entire length of DNA. The other 98% is called 'DNA-junk' and brushed aside. Who knows what that code contains, maybe the secrets to the universe.

Telomeres and Immortality

Each DNA strand is coiled into a chromosome shape. In our case, X and Y shapes. The ends of the strands of DNA have protective tips called Telomeres, as can be seen below.

The way we live, is our cells split, producing exact copies of themselves to replace older versions. This is our natural attempt at immortality. As decribed above, cells get weak and die. So as they get weak, the DNA quickly copies itself and a new cell is born, nice and healthy. Each type of cell does this at a different rate. Skin cells replicate stupidly fast, muscle cells are pretty quick too. However bone cells aren't so quick, and take longer to split. That's why a broken bone takes months compared to skin that takes days. Cells in our heart are extremely slow at replicating themselves. This is why we have to take care of our heart, as any damage will take years to fully repair. 

Now, we can ask ourselves if our cells do this, why don't we last forever? The answer lies in these Telomere tips on our DNA. If these tips are removed, the entire string of DNA unravels and is destroyed. So these tips essentially hold everything together. The problem is, while DNA proteins are readily available from our food, and the sugar and fat based minerals which make up the sides of the ladder are as well, the Telomeres cannot be replaced. Every time our cells split, the DNA splits, and the Telomere tip gets a bit shorter. Each cell can split a certain number of times before the Telomere tip runs out, and the DNA strand falls apart and implodes. This is our essential weakness stopping us from being immortal! There are ongoing studies in Telomere therapy trying to find ways to reverse the Telomere degradation. One day we will find it, then the world is our oyster :) I think stem cell research relates to this as well, since stem cells introduce new cells, that copy the DNA of existing cells, but have new length Telomeres. One idea is that we could eventually get blood transfusions full of stem cells every now and then, replacing all your blood with fresh cells with full Telomeres, distributing 'young' cells throughout the body, rejuvenating you.

Calorie Limits

The above rant describes all the basic mechanisms of ageing, and the basics you need to know to understand the concept of Lifetime calorie limits. As mentioned in the Intro, it is believed that each living organism has a certain calorie limit. If a human eats 5 times what it needs to daily, it will start developing signs of ageing much earlier than someone who only eats what they need. Calorie restriction is proven as the most healthy way to live, and results in you living the longest life. But you must understand the concept of undernutrition without malnutrition. There is a very fine line between the two. If you overindulge, you will apparently die younger. If you underindulge, you will not get all the nutrients your body needs, which will lead to health problems as well. So there is a very fine point you are trying to reach, where you get all the nutrients you need, and thats it!

Here is a link to one such study on mice. Calorie restriction showed one group of mice living 65% longer than the normal group. Funny that their calories were restricted by 65% compared to what they would normally eat too... 

Calorie restriction study on mice

It has been shown that each organism has a certain number. It might be related to the length of their Telomeres, but this hasnt been proven yet. Funny to think of that. Mice can eat 1million calories, Dogs can eat 10million calories, humans can eat 50million calories (these numbers were pulled from nowehere, jsut to emphasize the weirdness of everything having a rough limit before their cells start dying).

The idea relates back to Telomeres and cell ageing. I have read that the reason for this, is that our digestion and metabolic process activity is directly related to the amount of food we eat. If we eat more, our metabolism works harder, resulting in more cells splitting, and faster shortening of Telomeres leading to cell death. So while there are a million other factors leading to our health and longevity, be aware that this is one of them. The more you eat, the shorter you will live- if you avoid all other risks present in the world. 

Edit 29/09/2014:
Just read a good analogy of seeing Telomeres as the plastic bits on the ends of your shoelaces, stopping the shoelace from fraying apart. Also read that Telomere shortening has a steady natural component from cell-splitting, and an accelerated component from external lifestyle factors such as stress, smoking, drinking exercise etc. It was stated that the natural telomere lifetime is 125 years.
So this suggests  with all external factors removed, our bodies can live for about 125 years. Any reduction from this number is a result of lifestyle habits leading to premature ageing.

-Attila

Video Game Nostalgia

So the other night Artimus told me he has an old nostalgic video game tune as his ringtone (the music in Links treehouse in the Kokiri forest in Zelda Ocarina of time). So this morning I thought hey I need a new ringtone im sick of mine and downloaded the Kokiri Forest tune. Such nostalgia. I was overcome with this longing to not go to work but instead to call in sick and play Zelda all day. But then I thought about the last time I had done that (lol yes you read that correctly), and how surprisingly unfulfilling the game was. Got me thinking. Why do we get so nostalgic about video games we grew up with? What the heck is the purpose of nostalgia? Sometimes it makes you sad thinking how good emotions you once felt towards something were. Sometimes it makes you feel great about how lucky you were to have such and such experiences. Sometimes you just get enveloped in the same emotions and you instantly get euphoric just thinking about it, almost like the same paths in your brain have been reawakened.

It's got me confused. I've never really thought a whole lot about nostalgia or its purpose. So i'm going to do some reading now, and keep this as a draft post. As I read things which bring sense to the idea ill add them to my post and publish it when theres some learning behind it. I'll try focus on video game nostalgia as i think that is one of the really strong notions our generation feels. The era of Nintendo64! God bless :p


Nostalgia. Turns out the word is derived from two greek words- 'Nostos' and 'Algos' which translate to 'returning' and 'suffering'. So I guess nostalgia is a concept of being sad when you relive past joys?
From the Wikipedia page:

''The scientific literature on nostalgia is quite thin, but a few studies have attempted to pin down its essence and causes. Smell andtouch are strong evokers of nostalgia due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places where we have spent time. Music and weather can also be strong triggers of nostalgia''.

So Nostalgia has previously been considered as a mental illness, in the same class as homesickness. But recently, it seems people have started classifying it as a positive emotion that actually benefits you despite the feeling of sadness often lingering. Most recently, the functions of nostalgia are classified as follows:

• Improve mood
• Improve social connectedness
• enhance positive self-regard
• provide existential meaning

Having a read of the wiki, it suggests a very strong link present between nostalgic episodes and coping mechanisms. Studies suggested that people who are more prone to nostalgic episodes, always seem to show a positive correlation with their coping mechanisms. Such as stress, or loss. The conclusion was made that people who have frequent nostalgic episodes which are often portrayed as 'sad', develop better coping mechanisms which benefits them during stressful times in their life. So overall it suggests you will be a happier person, and nostalgia is a positive learning experience. 

The social connectedness also has some strong suggestions. Its proposed that since nostalgia generally revolves around past personal connections with others, it reinforces ideas of connectedness to people. It's also suggested that nostalgic episodes generally occur at times of loneliness. When you're alone they may be a bit sadder than when having a combined nostalgic moment with some friends. Either way, the idea is that when youre alone, you are more prone to have bouts of nostalgia, which in turn will counter the lonely thoughts by reinforcing your connectedness. So it could be our brains way to counteract loneliness, by reminding us of a past experience where you shared something great with people? I like this idea, that its a subconscious feat of the brain trying to stabilise. But this doesnt really relate to nostalgia in games does it.. unless we think of the fact that in the games we are really nostalgic about, we usually developed a strong character bond? So our minds might be tricked into thinking its a real person we shared a bond with? Interestign idea..

The third point, enhance positive self-regard is also interesting. Studies were done where two groups were questioned to determine their general characteristics and outlook on life. One team was exposed to a nostalgic influence, while the other was made to think about the future. It was shown that afterwards, the nostalgic team were much more positive about everything, and had a much more relaxed outlook on life, while the future team were a lot more self-centred and selfish with their approach to life. Also found that as a very interesting thought, that when you think of the future, you usually plan around yourself since you cant make up people that will be in your life. Compare this to thinking of the past, where all sorts of people are around and you think of all the people around you a bit more. 

So overall, people who frequently experience nostalgia are shown to have higher self esteem, find it easier to trust others and feel connected to them, and suffer from depression less.

Back to video game nostalgia. Heres an extract from an article ill link to later:

''Today, nostalgia is generally defined as a sentimental longing for the past, especially in reference to how things used to be better...... Researchers in psychology and consumer behavior have studied these questions, and what they’ve found out suggests that video games may have the potential to elicit more nostalgia than any other medium.''

Read a few papers about nostalgia in gaming. The general concept linked it directly to the above notions of good times with friends. It was mentioned a few times that while you may reminisce on a good single player campaign in say Starcraft or Total Annihilation, the real nostalgia comes from games you played with friends like Mario Kart, or an MMORPG, or at the very least bonding with them over the shared seperate experiences playing a Single Player campaign. The most nostalgic memories come from sharing the hobby with friends, making new friends through gaming, strong character profiles linking you to the characters and their emotions, and from a solid Tekken Tag or street fighter bender with the lads back in the day.

So in my opinion, a good summary of what nostalgia is, is an antidote to sadness or loss, that can be brought on most easily by a sound or an image that takes you back down the old neuronal pathway, bringing back all the euphoric emotions with it. Man our brain is a trippy place. I think the more of our subconscious mind we can learn to understand, the better we will be able to control it, and the wiser we will get.

I know what im doing next time I wake up feeling shit. Whipping out Pokemon Blue!

The one thing we need to be aware of is the marketing world being aware of this. Pretty sure as we go on, eventually there will be more mario and pacman in our faces than there was when they were cool.

Heres a few links. Mostly summarised above.

Psychology of video game nostalgia

Heres a few images to get the happy chemicals flowing :)

-Attila.

Futorology- Technological Singularity

Futurology post about Technological Singularity

-Attila  04/09/2014

Lets start off with a nice easy post about Technological Singularity. Nothing too heavy right?

In short, to win or lose readers, heres the first line from the Wiki page:
'The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technologies such as artificial intelligence will cause non-human intelligence to exceed human intelligence for the first time in history, causing human civilization to be radically changed or possibly destroyed '.

Here's a graph showing the idea.

The singularity is the name given to the point in time where artificial intelligence comes to equal human intelligence. At that point, a lot of things will change.

Our growth in intellectual power grows very slowly. Artificial intelligence however grows very rapidly. There will be a point in the near future, where artificial intelligence will reach the level of humans. Computers can run calculations and stuff better than us, but they dont know what theyre doing. The fear is when we start developing serious self-learning programs. The idea is that when a sophisticated enough program has been written, it will better itself. It will re-write its own code to fix any problems,and to expand its capabilities. In theory, it will keep going and going getting better and better, learning new things until it is shut down.

To some people this is amazing. It means we can have artificial intelligence doing things way faster than us. Developing cures for cancer, analysing data, inventing new technologies, new uses for existing technology. The whole lot.

But then theres the other side of it. The skeptics who fear there beign a being more intelligent than us on the earth. There are a few ideas of how singularity may happen, and what could occur when it does. It's all pretty crazy stuff that is hard to think about for too long.

Theres two main ways people think it will happen:

One is someone writing a piece of software that is self-fixing. It will progress itself until it runs out of computing power. It will have so many parallel operations going on, that it will use huge amounts of computing power. Imagine giant pieces of software for each emotion, all beign controlled by crazy rules and formulae on how to interact with any input etc. It gets busy. But if the software can write itself, then we dont have to understand. This idea takes form with a so-called intelligence explosion. It would likely lead to superintelligent artificial minds very quickly, that would surpass human intelligence  and go way beyond instantly.

The second form that is suggested, is through brain-computer interfaces. Think cyborgs. If we get to the point where we understand the brain well enough that we can completely model its neuron interactions, then we can essentially download a complete brain, as it is, including your so-called 'soul' onto a hard drive. Then we can turn you into a robot :) Or bring you back when you die by putting you into a new body that we grow. Crazy stuff.

The truth is, the programming scenario could potentially happen a lot sooner than the biological scenario.
I guess they are kind of different. Since one has created a new creature, and the other has simply given us the ability for our brains to live forever. Immortality vs. the matrix scenario.


There was a movie out recently- Transcendence.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/
 This movie was based on the concept of singularity. It kind of brought the two ideas together as one. There was a guy researching downloading his brain into a megacomputer which was a sentient being and could write its own code. He became the face of this megacomputer, and got his wife to give him more computing power so he could keep growing and getting smarter. It got to the point where he had a zillion computers in the desert running his brain and he was taking over the world. He had gathered all the intelligence of the entire world and gone further, developing some medication thing that linked you to him somehow. It made you immortal, as you could grow back limbs etc. They became his computer minions, taking care of his supercomputer desert and expanding it further.

Interesting movie. If singularity strikes you as interesting I suggest you watch it. Not a great movie in terms of plot and stuff, but if the content strikes you as interesting you will get something out of it. I think there might be some nip in it too!

Welcome to our Parea!

The definition of Parea just about sums up what I hope to achieve here. Write about things.
Teach. Learn. Think. Share. Except the part where its normally between a group of close friends. I decided to extend this blog out to the public a month or so after it was created.

Kind of for more substantial things than facebook or email. Stuff you dont want to disappear, and would want to reflect on. Whenever i get curious about something and spend a bunch of time learning and researching it, I like to send little summaries by email to friends. They get read, replied to and are lost. Hoping here they will be a little more permanent :)



-Attila