Science and Technology

Islands of Genius

Posted by Peter on December 28, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant, by Darold A. Treffert.

This book contains a fair amount of interesting information, but the writing style leaves much to be desired, and many parts disappointed me.

It describes savant syndrome (formerly known as “idiot savant”), where unusually good numeric or artistic skills coexist with some sort of mental disability (and usually prodigious memory).

Some people appear to have been born with savant skills, a few developed the skills in what appears to be a sudden insight. But the cases that seem to tell us the most about what is special about savants are the ones where the skills emerge after a brain injury. Savant skill seem to be often caused by a left brain dysfunction removing some inhibitions that prevented the right side of the brain from developing or displaying unusual skills.

This suggests that there may be some sense in which we all can potentially develop savant skills.

He doesn’t provide a good explanation of why the syndrome is defined so that savants with no disability fail to qualify. There seems to be some tendency for savant skills to coexist with some drawbacks (such as the drawbacks associated with autism), but the author denies that there’s any trade-off requiring that savant skill cause deficiencies in other areas.

Some of the weaker parts of the book claim some savants know things they couldn’t have learned, and attribute skills to genetic memory. I find it much more plausible that the savants learned their skills in ways that would look like an extreme form of normal learning, and that we just don’t know how to observe when and where they accomplished the learning.

Kratom Update

Posted by Peter on November 23, 2011
Posted in: Miscellaneous.

Just after my last post about Kratom, I noticed changes in my reaction to Kratom. I experienced hangover-like withdrawal symptoms. I cut back my typical dose to 1/4 teaspoon, occasionally 1/2 teaspoon. I still feel most of the benefits at those doses that I originally felt with 1 teaspoon. Plus the effects seem to last all day now. I’ve sometimes felt the stimulant effect last until I go to bed, but it doesn’t seem to have interfered with my sleep. I intend to continue taking it once or twice a week, but only when I have nothing important to do the next day.

Kratom

Posted by Peter on October 19, 2011
Posted in: Miscellaneous.

I’ve been experimenting with an herb known as Kratom for the past few months. I’ve been using about a teaspoon of getkratom.com‘s Bali Kratom. It produces as stimulant effect lasting 6 to 8 hours. I feel more alert, positive, and ambitious while on it. I’m probably less able to focus on one task but better at switching tasks.

It has been reported to be addictive, but I haven’t felt that it’s any more addictive than chocolate. One important caveat is that if I use it two days in a row, the effects are dramatically reduced on the second day. That’s probably what leads to addiction – people are tempted to use it every day, which creates a temptation to use much larger quantities. I’ve been restricting my use to once or twice a week, and I’ll try not to increase that frequency.

Alexithymia

Posted by Peter on September 5, 2011
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

As part of my efforts to improve my relationship skills, I read many of the posts on CharismaTips.com. It’s a site oriented towards male geeks who want better dating skills, but it appears to be useful for a broader range of personal interactions, and is oriented toward geeks.

I ran into more trouble than I expected when I tried to follow this advice:

Make a list of every positive emotion you can think of. For each emotion write down a short headline to a story, moment, or experience, when you felt that emotion.

After much research, I decided that a large part of the problem was connected with Alexithymia. According to Wikipedia it is:

a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions.

  1. difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings and the bodily sensations of emotional arousal
  2. difficulty describing feelings to other people
  3. constricted imaginal processes, as evidenced by a scarcity of fantasies
  4. a stimulus-bound, externally oriented cognitive style.

Talking about emotions is reportedly valuable in creating a feeling of closeness with another person, but when I try to think of stories I might tell about emotions, I often come up completely blank, or remember situations where the context suggests I felt something corresponding to an emotion, but for which I’m unable to find a memory of feelings. I think my mood is often best described as neutral, which I gather isn’t the case for most people.

from another paper:

Therefore, alexithymia is viewed as “blindfeel”, the emotional equivalent of blindsight. According to this thesis, alexithymia is a deficit in reaching the conscious awareness and in maintaining the voluntary control of emotions, rather than a disruption in the sensory/perceptual aspect of emotions.

One of the tests for Alexithymia suggests that it is associated with low interest in sex, although I can’t find much evidence on that subject. I certainly feel much less interest in sex than the average person.

I wonder if one of the reasons I don’t form many close relationships with people is that I don’t notice any reactions in me corresponding to what people call “love at first sight”. If I’ve ever felt even mild versions of that, I can’t recall them.

Alexithymia also seems to affect people’s reactions to music:

an apparent reduction in emotional responsiveness to music in the ASD group can be accounted for by the higher mean level of alexithymia in that group.

I don’t notice myself reacting to music by itself, but it does seem to manipulate my emotions when it’s part of a movie.

Alexithymia is clearly a separate phenomenon from Aspergers/autism, but it is reported to occur in 50% to 85% of autistic people. It could be responsible for a significant fraction of the problems autistics have relating to other people. In particular, autism by itself doesn’t seem to cause problems with eye contact:

only the degree of alexithymia, and not autism symptom severity, predicted eye fixation.

There don’t seem to be any good ideas for dealing with Alexithymia, although that might reflect how little research has been done so far rather than any inherent difficulty.

The most promising claim I’ve found is this:

So how did I “cure” myself? It’s a bit of a long story but I will give you some bits of it for now.

One of the things I did was to start to read about feelings. This might have started giving me the vocabulary.

Something else I did was I started taking time to think about my feelings. To reflect on them.

Then I also started to write about them in personal journals.

I’m starting to do this, but it clearly won’t produce clear results soon.

I’ve bought and used a dvd designed to teach people how to recognize emotions in faces. It’s got a lot of potentially useful information in it, but it leaves much to be desired – I’m fairly sure it’s mistaken to list lying as a detectable emotion (guilt or fear of detection are detectable, but the most rigorous studies seem to say that people rarely do much better than chance at detecting lies). I’m unsure whether I’m learning much from it.

The Ego Tunnel

Posted by Peter on July 25, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, by Thomas Metzinger.

This book describes aspects of consciousness in ways that are often, but not consistently, clear and informative. His ideas are not revolutionary, but will clarify our understanding.

I didn’t find his tunnel metaphor very helpful.

I like his claim that “conscious information is exactly that information that must be made available for every single one of your cognitive capacities at the same time”. That may be an exaggeration, but it describes an important function of consciousness.

He makes surprisingly clear and convincing arguments that there are degrees of consciousness, so that some other species probably have some but not all of what we think of as human consciousness. He gives interesting examples of ways that humans can be partially conscious, e.g. people with Cotard’s Syndrome can deny their own existence.

His discussion of ethical implications of neuroscience points out some important issues to consider, but I’m unimpressed with his conclusion that we shouldn’t create conscious machines. He relies on something resembling the Precautionary Principle that says we should never risk causing suffering in an artificial entity. As far as I can tell, the same reasoning would imply that having children is unethical because they might suffer.

The Rational Optimist

Posted by Peter on June 18, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics, Science and Technology.

Book review: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley.

Ridley is more eloquent than Julian Simon, but like Simon he seems like a lawyer focusing all the reader’s attention on the evidence most favorable to his conclusions rather than an objective scientist.

A lot of what he says is right, but I’m bothered by the frequency with which he exaggerates. E.g. he says “justice has improved” [since the 1950s] because 234 innocent Americans were freed due to DNA evidence. That seems like such a tiny fraction of the total injustices that’s it’s nearly useless – it’s easy to imagine that declining jury quality has overwhelmed the improvements.

The book has a bit more history than I wanted, much of it devoted to the idea that free trade is an important cause of progress. He has an interesting claim that trade an important factor in pre-agricultural human success – it reportedly was virtually nonexistent in other species (even Neanderthals), and it may have started around the time that human population began to grow significantly. But the industrial revolution has been discussed often enough elsewhere that I got little out of his summary of the causes.

I’m disappointed that he presented trends of slowing population growth as reasons for optimism. There are many ways those trends could change, such as evolution or cheaper ways reproducing. And there are good arguments that more population growth would be desirable at least for this century.

Beyond Boundaries

Posted by Peter on June 5, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines and How It Will Change Our Lives, by Miguel Nicolelis.

This book presents some ambitious visions of how our lives will be changed by brain-machine and brain to brain (“mind meld”) interfaces, along with some good reasons to hope that we will adapt well to them and think of machines and other people as if they are parts of our body. Many people will have trouble accepting his broad notion of personal identity, but I doubt they will find good arguments against it.

But I wish I’d skipped most of the first half, which focuses on the history of neuroscience research, with too much attention to debates over the extent to which brain functions are decentralized.

He’s disappointingly vague about the obstacles that researchers face. He hints at problems with how safe and durable an interface can be, but doesn’t tell us how serious they are, whether progress is being made on them, etc. I also wanted more specific data about how much information could be communicated each way, how precisely robotic positioning can be controlled, and how much of a trend there is toward improving those.

Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight

Posted by Peter on May 25, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World by Sharon Heller.

This book has lots of information about sensory overload and sensory integration problems, but left me confused about the extent to which I have the problems that the book describes and whether there are good solutions.

The book mostly focuses on problems of being overwhelmed by sensory input, but also says sensory numbness can be associated with the same kind of problems. Some of the symptoms discussed describe me rather well, but a majority do not. The book seems to suggest that almost any nonstandard reaction to stimuli might mean a person is sensory defensive, which makes me wonder whether many unrelated conditions have been lumped into one category.

Many reviewers seem pleased that the book tells them they’re not alone in the problems that they’re facing. But I kept having conflicting impressions about whether the people described in the book are like me.

The book lists many possible solutions to sensory problems, which are described as making up a “sensory diet” – more suggestions than the author could plausibly understand well enough to know whether they work. Many are supported by anecdotal evidence, some by evidence that appears to be moderately good science, and for some the evidence seems inconclusive. I believe that they are better than random guesses, but I don’t expect to get much out of them without a good deal of trial and error.

Auditory integration training sounds like the kind of help I’m looking for, and the book makes that and some similar programs sound promising. But the Wikipedia entry on AIT is rather discouraging, and the Wikipedia entry on Sensory integration therapy isn’t very encouraging.

The book reports some interesting claims about the benefits of natural full-spectrum light, such as a large decrease in cavities (see “The effects of lights of different spectra on caries incidence in the golden hamster” by I. M. Sharon, R. P. Feller, S. W. Burney). But how much of this becomes unimportant when we take vitamin D supplements?

I just tried a full-spectrum light (OttLite 15ED12R 15w) recommended by the book. It provides more illumination with 15 watts than the 20 watt fluorescent bulb I normally use, and it was immediately obvious that the book I was reading looked better because it was whiter. But it has a distracting hum. Shouldn’t a book like this be able to warn me of this drawback?

There isn’t a lot out there on the subject of sensory integration, and educated guesses are better than nothing.

Ashkenazi and the Industrial Revolution

Posted by Peter on February 15, 2011
Posted in: Miscellaneous. Tagged: .

Some of the ideas in the 10,000 Year Explosion have got me wondering whether the spread of the Ashkenazi culture played an important role in starting the industrial revolution.

The Ashkenazi developed a unique culture that was isolated for many centuries from the mainstream. Then around 1800, western Europe allowed Jews to interact much more with the rest of society (The 10,000 Year Explosion suggests that it started in 1791 in France).

At about the same time, the same region experienced a sudden shift in values that increased the status of merchants, which is what you’d expect if Ashkenazi culture that had previously been shunned became partially accepted. Those values may have contributed significantly to the industrial revolution.

The 10,000 Year Explosion explains why the Ashkenazi had some unique values that were somewhat unlikely to have been duplicated elsewhere, which would help explain why the industrial revolution didn’t start somewhere other than northern Europe.

This isn’t a complete explanation of the industrial revolution – for one thing, it doesn’t explain why England developed faster than France.

A completely unrelated idea of how agricultural diversity helped British farming productivity around the same time: Agricultural biodiversity crucial to the agricultural “revolution”.

Assorted Links

Posted by Peter on February 2, 2011
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: .