Futurismic

In case you don’t follow Clarkesworld Magazine already (and you really should do, because they’re one of the finest genre fiction webzines about, managing to pay pro rates for about five times as much material as this humble organ every month, and still delivering it to you for free), you might have missed Luc Reid’s essay that went up earlier this month – and it’s time you amended that situation. “Neuroscience Fiction and Neuroscience Fantasy” looks at the leading edge of neuroscientific research and refers back to some of the more common mind-related science fiction tropes – like mind control, brain uploading, or memory replay and editing – in order to show how likely they are to ever come true. [image via Hljod.Huskona]

Understanding these things about memory — that we extract details instead of making recordings, that memories are stored in fragments all across our brains, and that a lot of what seems to be memory is really our brains filling in the blanks — it becomes clear that we’ll never be able to download or view memories per se: that would be like trying to show a film when all you have is a capsule review. However, it might be possible eventually to view someone’s imperfect recollection of a memory, along with other thoughts they have.

Well-researched and clearly written, it even has a list of references at the bottom! It’s a great overview of the topic from the layman’s perspective… even if it does debunk a lot of our favourite sf-nal tropes.

Move over, neurocinematics – neurocapitalism reaches far beyond the theatre and focus group in its all-pervasive influence! Well, not quite, but Martin Börjesson responds to an article that uses the term as its title in order to make a point about the increasing ubiquity of neuroscience and the effects that it will have on every aspect of our lives, be they public or private:

The real reason why neurophysiological knowledge will have huge impact is rather that we are heading into a world where 1st person experiences, emotions and perspective will dominate. This shift is very well matched to what neurophysiology is promising: e g to solve people’s (perceived) disorders and fix (perceived) shortcomings, but also to boost experiences and create (artificial) peace of mind. Institutions will, part from selling all the neuro-based drugs, devices and services to people, use the new knowledge to both manipulate people but also get new insight in what people wants in order to be able and develop and market products and services more efficiently and effectively.

So even if we will not have a Neurocapitalism, we will most likely have a market in where many, many products and services will be based on or transformed by the new knowledge, ideas and innovations that stem from neurophysiological research.

As with basic psychology, knowledge is power; if you want to be able to resist the imminent finely-crafted importunings of anyone who can afford the right neurological research, you’ll need to learn which tricks they’ve found effective so as to protect yourself against them. But start small – why not learn a little about the emotional psychology of retail as a warm-up [via BoingBoing; image via Hljod.Huskona]?

There’s a fascinating essay at Wired UK about a guy called Kevin Dunbar, who studies the science of science. The philosophy and theory of science – the seven-step method you had drilled into you at school, for instance – is very elegant, but it doesn’t reflect the way that real science gets done, and it doesn’t take into account our innate propensity to misinterpret anomalous results, so Dunbar went out and researched the way real researchers research. The results are an interesting mix of the obvious and the counterintuitive:

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Well worth a read, especially in light of the aspersions cast on science by the climate change debate. Individual scientists may make mistakes, but science as a system – as a communal project, as an evolving body of knowledge – turns those failures into new theories. [image by Horia Varlan]

By way of an experiment, I thought I’d round up a handful of links which made for interesting reading, but about which I felt no particular urge to editorialise (or waffle tangentially, if there’s any measurable difference between the two in my case). If you like the format, let me know in the comments and I’ll do more of them in future. Now, let’s see what we’ve got here…

• Have you ever wondered why it is that the good guys always wear white? If so, MetaFilter has a comprehensive round-up of pieces about the psychological and/or neuroscientific roots of our association of blackness and whiteness with badness and goodness.
• If you’ve ever wanted an insight to the world of the computer security professional, SlashDot points to an account by the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab about their recent beheading of the Ozdok botnet. Simultaneously fascinating in the manner of occult literature (e.g. full of bizarre words and phrases for which most of us have no context whatsoever) and mundane in the manner of a corporate progress report (it’s mainly lists of domain names and IP addresses), it’s an insight into the language and attitudes of a profession we largely ignore, and the sphere in which they work. Great research material for anyone writing a story featuring hackers and counter-hackers.
• And if you’ve wondered about my curious and relentless obsession with charting the withering of the nation-state as the uppermost level of global political structure, the two minutes it will take you to read this post by John Robb will explain it more thoroughly and concisely than I’ve ever been able to do, despite coming to a similar (though much less elegantly formed) conclusion some number of years ago. Here’s the first half:
  

  Globalization is in the process of eviscerating traditional loyalties. In the 20th Century, loyalty to the nation-state (nationalism, often interwoven with ideology), was supreme. In today’s environment, a global marketplace is now the supreme power over the land. It has drained the power of nation-states to control their finances, borders, people, etc. Traditional ideologies and political solutions are in disarray as the fluctuating and often conflicting needs of the global marketplace override all other concerns. As a result, nation-states are finding it increasingly impossible to govern and the political goods they can deliver are being depleted.

So, there’s some brain-food for your Thursday – tuck in! Do let me know if you’d like to see more of these bite-sized morsels on Futurismic.

It’s a simple question, and one we ask each other all the time… but it comes with a whole lot of psychological baggage, not least that of the barrier between the thoughts you choose to communicate and those you choose to keep confined to your own cerebrum. So here’s the trigger for your next Phildickian moment of existential paranoia – brain scanning procedures developed by scientists in the specialist neurological field of “neural decoding”show promise of eventually being able to analyse what you’re thinking about:

Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading “neural decoder” at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field’s most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.

Go read the whole article; neural decoding has the smell of a technology that’s about to get much bigger very quickly, especially when the military types hear about it and start throwing money in its general direction. And take note of the fact that although the success rates for algorithms guessing the correct connections between thoughts and subjects are pretty low at this point, they’re still above raw chance… and way above what most “professional psychics” can muster.  [image by mararie]