So I'm sure you heard by now that Google announced their new OS, which is good news to me, not because I'm overly excited for a new browser, but because big companies are challenging big companies by releasing open-sourced technologies. It's genius really, a whole globally connected army of technologically-minded people are aching to get their hands on something that can compete with big markets, decentralization is the key here, the world's getting more and more connected and it's because of moves like this that allows them to create the future known as the free world.
I've become more and more opinionated on this subject the more I read into it. The Pirate Party, heard of them? They recently got a seat in the European parliament, it's a growing movement that basically wants to usher in the new age of technology by reforming information laws. Simply put, information should be free. Hard to say that to the thousands of starving artists out there that depend on people buying their music and art to feed themselves, but look at the bigger picture long enough, and you'll see all the money going to all the wrong places. I think it's better this new way and it will only take time before the system as we know it right now collapses and begins to foster a new era of write/re-write culture that will multiply art and entertainment ten-fold easy.
I mean, it's easy to talk as a futurist, we all live in an era where we can actually see the trends becoming apparent and being applied at faster rates, it's only a matter of time and more and more people are starting to realize it, I'm just glad I get to be a part of it, really.
On a different note, I personally have started to feel lethargic, I always had a sort of feigned interest in most of what I do in my day to day life and it's in desperate need of change, so I started a different train of thought to help me through this stage of life. But I quickly realize that if you have a life where you form a routine and a set of habits, you'll discover hundreds of things that will try to pull you away from any goals you might have. I've been researching this specific topic actually, in trying to find the true nature of how focus is maintained and distracted, and I think I'm really onto something. As far as my personal life goes though, I either have to take a significantly more active approach in finding opportunities, or I have to become more consistently aware of opportunities as they come to me. Either way, school and work don't leave too much time for anything else regardless, so it's a bulk equation as it is.
Well, there's hope to be had yet...
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Ladder Theory Criticisms
If you're not in the know, this is all you need to know about Ladder Theory, men have a metaphorical ladder for attraction, the more they want to have sex with someone, the higher up on the ladder they are. Women have two ladders, one for people they want to remain friends with, and one for actual sexual attraction. Also, men rate potentials by attraction and attainability, women rate potentials by a combination of attraction, (sub-divided into novelty, looks, and competition) money/power, and a small percentage is dedicated to things women say they want in men, but don't really: the usual sense of humor, sensitivity, intelligence, etc.
Of course when you hear a theory like this, most people's initial reactions would be to falsify it in favor of fleshing out the more complicated nature of human relationships, but I usually stop myself in these cases, and realize I don't have a better way of putting this subject into perspective, so who am I to destroy the pre-existing perspective?
I usually think this way, because I like to entertain people's ideas on things, see if they work at all, to see if I can gleam some sort of greater truth or insight on things. I have to do this, because if I actually maintain a paradigm, I find more often than not that I become less able to empathize with people's beliefs and thoughts that might oppose the viewpoint I hold. I usually associate this type of reaction as arrogance and ignorance, disconnection and generally becomes a problem, because even if you're right, it doesn't prove anything to anyone unless you have a clear agenda in mind.
So this intrigued me even more, because I just surrendered to the fact that more likely than not, the world will never agree on virtually anything, nor should they, lest they alienate everyone that ventures further outside the box. That is to say, forward thinking absolutely demands acceptance of all ideas, wrong or not, but truth isn't something that should be maintained, but rather recognized and appreciated. This viewpoint isn't all that negative actually, it actually lends itself to possibilities of more friendly intellectual adventures, suddenly ultimate truth isn't the aim, the objective rather is to push envelopes and expand the mind to encompass more and more, and that doesn't seem like such a bad thing, because in the end, the more a man expands his mind, the larger his capacity to understand the nature of truth anyway, but instead of becoming a fixated paradigm, it becomes a general intuitive understanding of how truth operates, and what we can learn from it.
So, my thoughts on ladder theory are playful, really, I can't say anything bad about it one way or the other. Sure, there may be more to human nature and relationships than perceived by ladder theory, but I couldn't honestly tell you, based on my experiences, that women care more about intelligence and personality than looks and power, just as I couldn't honestly say I would rather be in a relationship with a mentally stimulating and fun-loving woman than a drop-dead gorgeous chick. It hurts to say it, spite has a funny effect on people, and while mentally engaging myself is one of my life's ultimate pursuits, you simply can't deny human nature and take yourself seriously.
Of course when you hear a theory like this, most people's initial reactions would be to falsify it in favor of fleshing out the more complicated nature of human relationships, but I usually stop myself in these cases, and realize I don't have a better way of putting this subject into perspective, so who am I to destroy the pre-existing perspective?
I usually think this way, because I like to entertain people's ideas on things, see if they work at all, to see if I can gleam some sort of greater truth or insight on things. I have to do this, because if I actually maintain a paradigm, I find more often than not that I become less able to empathize with people's beliefs and thoughts that might oppose the viewpoint I hold. I usually associate this type of reaction as arrogance and ignorance, disconnection and generally becomes a problem, because even if you're right, it doesn't prove anything to anyone unless you have a clear agenda in mind.
So this intrigued me even more, because I just surrendered to the fact that more likely than not, the world will never agree on virtually anything, nor should they, lest they alienate everyone that ventures further outside the box. That is to say, forward thinking absolutely demands acceptance of all ideas, wrong or not, but truth isn't something that should be maintained, but rather recognized and appreciated. This viewpoint isn't all that negative actually, it actually lends itself to possibilities of more friendly intellectual adventures, suddenly ultimate truth isn't the aim, the objective rather is to push envelopes and expand the mind to encompass more and more, and that doesn't seem like such a bad thing, because in the end, the more a man expands his mind, the larger his capacity to understand the nature of truth anyway, but instead of becoming a fixated paradigm, it becomes a general intuitive understanding of how truth operates, and what we can learn from it.
So, my thoughts on ladder theory are playful, really, I can't say anything bad about it one way or the other. Sure, there may be more to human nature and relationships than perceived by ladder theory, but I couldn't honestly tell you, based on my experiences, that women care more about intelligence and personality than looks and power, just as I couldn't honestly say I would rather be in a relationship with a mentally stimulating and fun-loving woman than a drop-dead gorgeous chick. It hurts to say it, spite has a funny effect on people, and while mentally engaging myself is one of my life's ultimate pursuits, you simply can't deny human nature and take yourself seriously.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Chaos Theory Applied to Human Interaction
I came across a theory today that came to a dead-end, but I found the premise to be profoundly intriguing regardless, so I'm posting it here, just cuz, k?
The idea came to me while laying down on a couch and fantasizing about the idea of mind-control via suggestion. Don't ask me why I was thinking about that, just know that I was thinking about it in a philosophical sense because the concept came to me while I was writing a story. But then, out of the blue, the idea seemed plausible, in fact, not only did it seem plausible, it seemed obvious, obvious to the degree that everyone on this planet is already mind-controlling everybody else without ever even quite realizing it.
Not to discredit free will, that's not what I'm getting at here, the thing is, it's aaaalmost impossible to gauge people's reactions, let alone the outcome of social situations, but the power of suggestion could conceivably allow virtually anyone to get virtually anything they wanted should they play their cards right. Sure, this is common knowledge to some degree, but the process I stumbled upon intrigued me enough to write this down, so just hear me out, alright?
First, the world is a complicated place, and operates at a level of detail so miniscule and undetected that we as humans willingly give into the idea of chaos theory, that forces so small and seemingly random are at work that even the smallest details can escalate into something big and unforseeable. This happens all the time, at any given situation, at any given time, the game can change. So if you accept this and you react accordingly and remain on top of the changing circumstances, you should be ahead of the curve and be able to 'ride the wave' in a sense, and be able to shift any circumstance to your advantage. This too, is fairly common knowledge, many martial arts are based off this principle, and I'm sure the world of self-help books is familiar with it as well, but there's more.
Human intuition is a strong ability, a person can subconsciously do things that far exceeds his own personal expectations. It's not too outside the realm of feasability for the average man to completely recite word for word a book he just read. Not likely, but possible, the circumstances and neural chemistry required to make this occur is specific at best, but human intuition does take over from time to time and usually in moments where the human is relaxed and kind of 'unaware' of his situation, which basically means the less he allows his consciousness to fuck things up, the better his subconscious is at handling a task.
So the theory I came up with is this: If a man can mentally block out virtually everything except the task at hand, he could theoretically manipulate his environment, including the consciousness of others, to work with him. The idea seemed to lend to itself fairly well, it requires a certain calm attitude and meditation to be able to fixate on present changing circumstances anyway that the subconscious should be able to do it's thing uninterrupted.
Food for thought, these are shots in the dark, maybe this is nonsense, maybe it's common knowledge, I dunno, I just thought it was interesting. :)
The idea came to me while laying down on a couch and fantasizing about the idea of mind-control via suggestion. Don't ask me why I was thinking about that, just know that I was thinking about it in a philosophical sense because the concept came to me while I was writing a story. But then, out of the blue, the idea seemed plausible, in fact, not only did it seem plausible, it seemed obvious, obvious to the degree that everyone on this planet is already mind-controlling everybody else without ever even quite realizing it.
Not to discredit free will, that's not what I'm getting at here, the thing is, it's aaaalmost impossible to gauge people's reactions, let alone the outcome of social situations, but the power of suggestion could conceivably allow virtually anyone to get virtually anything they wanted should they play their cards right. Sure, this is common knowledge to some degree, but the process I stumbled upon intrigued me enough to write this down, so just hear me out, alright?
First, the world is a complicated place, and operates at a level of detail so miniscule and undetected that we as humans willingly give into the idea of chaos theory, that forces so small and seemingly random are at work that even the smallest details can escalate into something big and unforseeable. This happens all the time, at any given situation, at any given time, the game can change. So if you accept this and you react accordingly and remain on top of the changing circumstances, you should be ahead of the curve and be able to 'ride the wave' in a sense, and be able to shift any circumstance to your advantage. This too, is fairly common knowledge, many martial arts are based off this principle, and I'm sure the world of self-help books is familiar with it as well, but there's more.
Human intuition is a strong ability, a person can subconsciously do things that far exceeds his own personal expectations. It's not too outside the realm of feasability for the average man to completely recite word for word a book he just read. Not likely, but possible, the circumstances and neural chemistry required to make this occur is specific at best, but human intuition does take over from time to time and usually in moments where the human is relaxed and kind of 'unaware' of his situation, which basically means the less he allows his consciousness to fuck things up, the better his subconscious is at handling a task.
So the theory I came up with is this: If a man can mentally block out virtually everything except the task at hand, he could theoretically manipulate his environment, including the consciousness of others, to work with him. The idea seemed to lend to itself fairly well, it requires a certain calm attitude and meditation to be able to fixate on present changing circumstances anyway that the subconscious should be able to do it's thing uninterrupted.
Food for thought, these are shots in the dark, maybe this is nonsense, maybe it's common knowledge, I dunno, I just thought it was interesting. :)
Thursday, June 18, 2009
And now for something a little different
I've been working a little in private these past few months, so I gradually forgot about updating this blog, but I suppose I've been more engaged in other activities than sorting through scientific articles and such, which I think is a shame, I've been learning about a lot, and I genuinely want to share quite a few findings and theories, since I'm still holding out hope that one day some people might actually cross this blog and find some insights here, but... I want to start over here, some things have come to light to me, and I realize what I made this blog for in the first place, so I want to revisit that.
Before I go on, know that I was inspired by this video directly before writing this. I've always been a fan of Bill Hicks, and it's hard to explain why to people because people have a tendency to think these sort of things have short explanations. Case in point, he's not the funniest comedian I know, but it's precisely the skits that don't make me laugh at all that I like the most, because there's times when the man shows you something by telling you a story, that makes you realize that there is something wrong with the way we do things, it triggers a sort of inspiration in me that wants to do something greater, and this video in particular reminded me that I don't know why I keep pursuing mediocrity. I've said it myself, many times in fact, that I find nothing particularly wrong with mediocrity, but that doesn't mean there's anything right about it either, the best is yet to come, so to speak, so keep pushing yourself, scare yourself even, do things you wouldn't normally do, and for fuck's sake, think outside the box.
That's the thing I really wanted to do, discover things people don't initially take notice of, dig into it a little deeper until you find that something special, and then share it with others. That's my mission, I suppose, but over these past couple years, I start to feel something wear down on me, and I realize that a part of me believes that these feelings are just remains of a more passionate youth. I mean, hell, I'm young, I'm really young, but this is the type of thing you can feel fade away from you and you can wonder to yourself where it's going, and you can try to fight to retain it, but what are you trying to prove, and to whom? No, there's more at stake, and everybody knows it, but people accept it, because you can only fight it for so long before it literally becomes fatiguing. It's illogical in principle to fight against the tide especially if your only basis is a small amount of hope that something good will come out of it. And then what happens? The right side of your brain turns it into a game of probability, if the probability of nothing happening heavily outweighs the possibility of some sort of transcendent experience, then fuck it, right?
Instead, I turn my focus away from myself for a second, and I think about the other people around me. I can sense it, you know, that everybody is succumbing to these kinds of feelings, letting it go for one reason and another, and I myself feel very strongly a sense of isolation in pursuing these matters. (Forgive me if this is starting to sound abstract, I tend to do that as I generalize things) I guess what I mean to say is, it seems like it'd be nicer if people felt more strongly about things, if we were allowed or perhaps even encouraged to push ourselves and think in exciting and new ways, pushing boundaries left and right, and slowly dismantled society's perception of a 'comfort zone', because I'm no fan of being alienated anymore, nobody likes putting on masks just to feel like they aren't being targeted, and people are so apt to do that that it kind of bugs me, it seems that unless you're truly doing something, unless you're genuinely making a point, a statement, you're going to be alienated.
This post is a little out of the ordinary, I know, but it's what I needed to say before continuing this blog. :)
Before I go on, know that I was inspired by this video directly before writing this. I've always been a fan of Bill Hicks, and it's hard to explain why to people because people have a tendency to think these sort of things have short explanations. Case in point, he's not the funniest comedian I know, but it's precisely the skits that don't make me laugh at all that I like the most, because there's times when the man shows you something by telling you a story, that makes you realize that there is something wrong with the way we do things, it triggers a sort of inspiration in me that wants to do something greater, and this video in particular reminded me that I don't know why I keep pursuing mediocrity. I've said it myself, many times in fact, that I find nothing particularly wrong with mediocrity, but that doesn't mean there's anything right about it either, the best is yet to come, so to speak, so keep pushing yourself, scare yourself even, do things you wouldn't normally do, and for fuck's sake, think outside the box.
That's the thing I really wanted to do, discover things people don't initially take notice of, dig into it a little deeper until you find that something special, and then share it with others. That's my mission, I suppose, but over these past couple years, I start to feel something wear down on me, and I realize that a part of me believes that these feelings are just remains of a more passionate youth. I mean, hell, I'm young, I'm really young, but this is the type of thing you can feel fade away from you and you can wonder to yourself where it's going, and you can try to fight to retain it, but what are you trying to prove, and to whom? No, there's more at stake, and everybody knows it, but people accept it, because you can only fight it for so long before it literally becomes fatiguing. It's illogical in principle to fight against the tide especially if your only basis is a small amount of hope that something good will come out of it. And then what happens? The right side of your brain turns it into a game of probability, if the probability of nothing happening heavily outweighs the possibility of some sort of transcendent experience, then fuck it, right?
Instead, I turn my focus away from myself for a second, and I think about the other people around me. I can sense it, you know, that everybody is succumbing to these kinds of feelings, letting it go for one reason and another, and I myself feel very strongly a sense of isolation in pursuing these matters. (Forgive me if this is starting to sound abstract, I tend to do that as I generalize things) I guess what I mean to say is, it seems like it'd be nicer if people felt more strongly about things, if we were allowed or perhaps even encouraged to push ourselves and think in exciting and new ways, pushing boundaries left and right, and slowly dismantled society's perception of a 'comfort zone', because I'm no fan of being alienated anymore, nobody likes putting on masks just to feel like they aren't being targeted, and people are so apt to do that that it kind of bugs me, it seems that unless you're truly doing something, unless you're genuinely making a point, a statement, you're going to be alienated.
This post is a little out of the ordinary, I know, but it's what I needed to say before continuing this blog. :)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
State of plasticity
One of me best friends goes by an on-line handle of "Shizukesa", which is Japanese for "serenity", a name he chose because he felt it best suited his temperament and life-goal. He consistently tries to find inner peace and to let the chaos of the world balance out into a relaxing state in which troublesome worries wash away. An interesting concept, another best friend of mine took on a similar name, one which he has long abandoned, but it played with a similar concept, and he chose the Japanese word "Rakusei" which is best defined as "completion", paralleling his own idea that life is a conquest with an end result and he must achieve that end and that would fulfill his purpose in life.
So in tagging along with this, I chose the word "Meikai", the best word I could find that compliments the idea of "clarity" by means of transcendence. I always thought my direction in life was to figure things out, to have things make sense in the grand scheme of things, to feel a sense of clarity and feel that sense of bliss you get when you have a revelation or an epiphany. To do this, I have incorporated analytical skills and lateral thinking into my daily habits, but I have a recurring enemy, one widely known as the Law of Gravity, built on the simple concept that what goes up must inevitably come down. On a similar note, Novelty Theory or 'Timewave Zero', which basically states that energy through novelty is an inherent quality of time and that it is reaching a climactic point, makes an argument that clarity might be a process to be achieved little by little until it hits a common singularity, and I like to think this theory nicely complements both the ideas of Nirvana (In that transcendence will break the cycle of rebirth and suffering) and the ideas of a Collective Consciousness which on this scale, would unite our planet on our conquest to discovering truth and clarity. Oddly enough, this whole philosophical fireball coincides quite well with my good friend's motivations as well, it's just a different way of looking at the same coin, albeit a coin with three sides.
But see, upon pontification, all of this jargon seems like pseudo-science to me, inter-laced theories while credible in their own right, seem to form something on the basis of wishful thinking, and has very little correlation with the real world, or at least the world as I see it. In part this is a bit of a shame because I can't attempt to explain the possibilities of the interactions of theories without disregarding a neutral point of view and credible sources as a basis for finding a universal truth. Rather it's based much more heavily on a sense of intuition and a sense of reasoning that makes more sense in my worldview than it would in anyone else's, and this is primarily because the whole idea of this theory is to find a model that finds its way outside the current western materialist way of thinking. I could go on to explain how I'm by far not the first to do away with the idea of thinking about "things" as anything other than "nouns" but by no means are they classified as "objects", I can take into account models such as the Big Bang theory and say that should that be the case, then we're all compromised of the same energy not necessarily interacting with each other, but giving the appearance of a harmonious relationship with the universe that seems chaotic to the individual, but is highly designed and pre-meditated before the burst of energy that started this all. I can get mystical about it or I can get scientific about it, but no matter what I do, it won't seem right because I'm talking about the whole thing from a very subjective experience, and for that reason I can't fully integrate or even take seriously the thoughts and theories of anyone else, though I do encourage them to speak their mind anyway in hopes that in a moment of pontification that one of us may actually stumble across something so irrefutable and true that a new age will dawn on us and everything will be wonderful in a sort of way completely unimaginable to the current worldview of things.
But in the end I'm just a dog chasing his own tail.
There's this idea that there is a universal truth to the universe, one that's worth discovering that will bring an end to the nonsense prevalent in the world today, but I think people might be thinking about this the wrong way, and I know to a certainty that it is healthy to at least question today's methodologies. Physicists today, for example, are looking for a unifying theory that explains virtually everything in an attempt to understand the universe by unifying all their theories into one to end the debate on the nature of existence and quantum mechanics and whatever. But I say to them, "Sure, maybe science will benefit greatly from this discovery, new technologies can be developed and a new era of science will ultimately benefit mankind, but... did you really explain the universe, or did you just create a model that makes sense in and of itself but has no real correlation to the true nature of the universe?" I would get all sorts of replies, sure, but I would imagine none of them would convince me short of satisfying my appetite for at least understanding the popular model for the explanation of 'everything'. In the end it's semantics, a general idea that can't truly be conveyed through language, instead we rely on metaphors to try to create a working understanding of what we 'need to know' about the universe so that we can move on with our lives together and still be able to ponder the little things in life that only the imagination can satisfy.
So in a sense this is all a game, a game that can be played many different ways depending on your own method of perceiving the inner workings of the universe, and it becomes a product of your own imagination to determine what could possibly be 'meaningful' as opposed to 'true but so what'. The worst thing is is that no one is even sure if this game is a product of their own identity or a product of the environment of which the organism is spawned. One day we might know the real answer, but if we can only learn through metaphors, then how long will that metaphor remain relevant before we revert back to our current state of plasticity?
So in tagging along with this, I chose the word "Meikai", the best word I could find that compliments the idea of "clarity" by means of transcendence. I always thought my direction in life was to figure things out, to have things make sense in the grand scheme of things, to feel a sense of clarity and feel that sense of bliss you get when you have a revelation or an epiphany. To do this, I have incorporated analytical skills and lateral thinking into my daily habits, but I have a recurring enemy, one widely known as the Law of Gravity, built on the simple concept that what goes up must inevitably come down. On a similar note, Novelty Theory or 'Timewave Zero', which basically states that energy through novelty is an inherent quality of time and that it is reaching a climactic point, makes an argument that clarity might be a process to be achieved little by little until it hits a common singularity, and I like to think this theory nicely complements both the ideas of Nirvana (In that transcendence will break the cycle of rebirth and suffering) and the ideas of a Collective Consciousness which on this scale, would unite our planet on our conquest to discovering truth and clarity. Oddly enough, this whole philosophical fireball coincides quite well with my good friend's motivations as well, it's just a different way of looking at the same coin, albeit a coin with three sides.
But see, upon pontification, all of this jargon seems like pseudo-science to me, inter-laced theories while credible in their own right, seem to form something on the basis of wishful thinking, and has very little correlation with the real world, or at least the world as I see it. In part this is a bit of a shame because I can't attempt to explain the possibilities of the interactions of theories without disregarding a neutral point of view and credible sources as a basis for finding a universal truth. Rather it's based much more heavily on a sense of intuition and a sense of reasoning that makes more sense in my worldview than it would in anyone else's, and this is primarily because the whole idea of this theory is to find a model that finds its way outside the current western materialist way of thinking. I could go on to explain how I'm by far not the first to do away with the idea of thinking about "things" as anything other than "nouns" but by no means are they classified as "objects", I can take into account models such as the Big Bang theory and say that should that be the case, then we're all compromised of the same energy not necessarily interacting with each other, but giving the appearance of a harmonious relationship with the universe that seems chaotic to the individual, but is highly designed and pre-meditated before the burst of energy that started this all. I can get mystical about it or I can get scientific about it, but no matter what I do, it won't seem right because I'm talking about the whole thing from a very subjective experience, and for that reason I can't fully integrate or even take seriously the thoughts and theories of anyone else, though I do encourage them to speak their mind anyway in hopes that in a moment of pontification that one of us may actually stumble across something so irrefutable and true that a new age will dawn on us and everything will be wonderful in a sort of way completely unimaginable to the current worldview of things.
But in the end I'm just a dog chasing his own tail.
There's this idea that there is a universal truth to the universe, one that's worth discovering that will bring an end to the nonsense prevalent in the world today, but I think people might be thinking about this the wrong way, and I know to a certainty that it is healthy to at least question today's methodologies. Physicists today, for example, are looking for a unifying theory that explains virtually everything in an attempt to understand the universe by unifying all their theories into one to end the debate on the nature of existence and quantum mechanics and whatever. But I say to them, "Sure, maybe science will benefit greatly from this discovery, new technologies can be developed and a new era of science will ultimately benefit mankind, but... did you really explain the universe, or did you just create a model that makes sense in and of itself but has no real correlation to the true nature of the universe?" I would get all sorts of replies, sure, but I would imagine none of them would convince me short of satisfying my appetite for at least understanding the popular model for the explanation of 'everything'. In the end it's semantics, a general idea that can't truly be conveyed through language, instead we rely on metaphors to try to create a working understanding of what we 'need to know' about the universe so that we can move on with our lives together and still be able to ponder the little things in life that only the imagination can satisfy.
So in a sense this is all a game, a game that can be played many different ways depending on your own method of perceiving the inner workings of the universe, and it becomes a product of your own imagination to determine what could possibly be 'meaningful' as opposed to 'true but so what'. The worst thing is is that no one is even sure if this game is a product of their own identity or a product of the environment of which the organism is spawned. One day we might know the real answer, but if we can only learn through metaphors, then how long will that metaphor remain relevant before we revert back to our current state of plasticity?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
More on game design
I was thinking about forming some sort of game design blog where game theorists and like-minded people could all weigh in about the direction games should take and new methods that developers could use to turn the medium into something more sophisticated and respectable. It's a topic I tackle myself quite a bit, but it's been hard finding these like-minded people, so what I thought I would do is accumulate a collection of game design theories I have myself and build a small compendium that I can show to others who might be interested. Once I have support, I might continue further down this line of thinking and form the game design blog and perhaps further support for a more active approach, but before I get ahead of myself, I'm just going to stick with throwing any ideas I have on this blog in the meantime.
Two huge problems with the game industry today is lack of artistic achievement and numerous cliches and tropes. Yes, I'm aware of all sorts of artistic achievements in video games, but they're few and far between, and they generally have a long ways to go despite their achievement to being regarded as a serious medium. Sony for example, made huge leaps with ICO and Shadow of the Collosus, not to mention Capcom's Okami, Jonathon Blow's Braid, and Nintendo's Wind Waker. These would all probably be considered aesthetically pleasing to anybody considering their hardware limitations, but that therein lies the problem.
Film for example, doesn't use technology to produce it's art, it simply captures the living world and the film helps us understand it from a certain perspective. Paintings and drawings don't use technology either (at least not in the digital sense) but they use tools to help convey the image and the emotions the artist tries to depict. Games however, rely on technology and a programming language to convey its art, it's mathematical by nature, the art is limited by the restrictions set by the game's engine, and the artist is usually not left with much to work with except pasting a bunch of sprites and models together hoping that the engine's particle system can help liven it up a little bit.
In this regard, games have a long ways to go before a plethora of game development designs are more well known. People re-iterating gritty space marines or campy cartoons isn't going to help the video game as an artform nor do it any justice, therefore right now more than ever it is important to recognize artistic advancement in the genre.
For example, why not deconstruct the whole idea of an engine and have a game operate outside normal rules? Why not have the game take place in an oil-painting, seemingly two dimensional but given a third dimensional element as perspective is added to the picture, changing scenes and content and the player intuitively finds out how to control the changing perspective shifts. Sounds like a good idea to me, but the problem is technological limitations, something like this would be difficult to do inside a game engine, and yet art students create linear versions of this type of thing all the time. Maybe we just need a little push to help wrap our minds on how to turn this into a dynamic and interactive experience, maybe all we really need is the artistry and the rest will work itself out.
Come to think of it, stagnancy of perspective is a problem in a lot of games. So many games have you follow the same perspective of usually the same character that developers drastically limit their artistic and story-related parameters. The difficulties in creating an engine usually cause developers to stick to one idea and hopefully the game mechanic can draw the experience out to 20 - 40 hours of gameplay, regardless of whether that entire time is spent doing something even remotely interesting. I think the entire concept of video-games should be consistently re-invented, I think more development teams need to tell the current rules to screw themselves so that they can have some breathing space to try something that defies convention.
Seems hard to believe that people are running out of ideas, and yet it seems that everybody's new idea is to take a generic FPS and add a new twist to it, like having it take place in Egypt or something. Whatever.
Two huge problems with the game industry today is lack of artistic achievement and numerous cliches and tropes. Yes, I'm aware of all sorts of artistic achievements in video games, but they're few and far between, and they generally have a long ways to go despite their achievement to being regarded as a serious medium. Sony for example, made huge leaps with ICO and Shadow of the Collosus, not to mention Capcom's Okami, Jonathon Blow's Braid, and Nintendo's Wind Waker. These would all probably be considered aesthetically pleasing to anybody considering their hardware limitations, but that therein lies the problem.
Film for example, doesn't use technology to produce it's art, it simply captures the living world and the film helps us understand it from a certain perspective. Paintings and drawings don't use technology either (at least not in the digital sense) but they use tools to help convey the image and the emotions the artist tries to depict. Games however, rely on technology and a programming language to convey its art, it's mathematical by nature, the art is limited by the restrictions set by the game's engine, and the artist is usually not left with much to work with except pasting a bunch of sprites and models together hoping that the engine's particle system can help liven it up a little bit.
In this regard, games have a long ways to go before a plethora of game development designs are more well known. People re-iterating gritty space marines or campy cartoons isn't going to help the video game as an artform nor do it any justice, therefore right now more than ever it is important to recognize artistic advancement in the genre.
For example, why not deconstruct the whole idea of an engine and have a game operate outside normal rules? Why not have the game take place in an oil-painting, seemingly two dimensional but given a third dimensional element as perspective is added to the picture, changing scenes and content and the player intuitively finds out how to control the changing perspective shifts. Sounds like a good idea to me, but the problem is technological limitations, something like this would be difficult to do inside a game engine, and yet art students create linear versions of this type of thing all the time. Maybe we just need a little push to help wrap our minds on how to turn this into a dynamic and interactive experience, maybe all we really need is the artistry and the rest will work itself out.
Come to think of it, stagnancy of perspective is a problem in a lot of games. So many games have you follow the same perspective of usually the same character that developers drastically limit their artistic and story-related parameters. The difficulties in creating an engine usually cause developers to stick to one idea and hopefully the game mechanic can draw the experience out to 20 - 40 hours of gameplay, regardless of whether that entire time is spent doing something even remotely interesting. I think the entire concept of video-games should be consistently re-invented, I think more development teams need to tell the current rules to screw themselves so that they can have some breathing space to try something that defies convention.
Seems hard to believe that people are running out of ideas, and yet it seems that everybody's new idea is to take a generic FPS and add a new twist to it, like having it take place in Egypt or something. Whatever.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Intelligent design and game design... not related
Usually I don't take too keen of an interest in theologian studies, I always considered it a branch of philosophy that tried a little harder than the rest to take itself seriously. But the idea of some sort of anti-materialistic approach to science has always intrigued me, it's why I have studied quantum mechanics as much as I have, it's why I take a keen interest in lateral thinking, it's why I listen to speeches on creativity and eastern philosophy, it's because there's actual substance there, it's practical and it resonates with you and you don't have to work to deny or prove it because it's well situated into our humanity.
Truth be told, one of the biggest reasons I want to be a biologist is so that I can understand the scientific model of the world as well as I can so that I can then begin to think around it. I believe the universe is capable of being further understood beyond our current realm of understanding, and I believe that materialism is simply the current layer we're digging through. If there's any hope of prying open the nature of reality and ultimate truth or whatever 'that thing' we're looking for is, we need to question everything and even entertain ideas that aren't completely comfortable with us. It's all part of the process, y'know.
Anyway, I've come across two links that have stirred my philosophical juices, and made me re-question my spiritual orientation. The first is an essay that explains the nature of consciousness and why we view it the way we do in modern society. Very enlightening. The other is a lecture given by Keith Ward on how misguided our viewpoints really are concerning different schools of thought. It is very outright inspiring to see people discussing intelligent design in an educated fashion, using actual reasoning to inspire and encouraging people to think for themselves. In that regard, I hate to say it, but a part of me hopes that religion would just kind of die, and in its ashes be reborn a passionate and vigorous reshaping of spiritual ideals. I don't like living in a society where people spend their time debunking other people's beliefs rather than building on their own, so I kind of wish we could do away with fundamentalism so that we can continue to evolve science and religion's relationship with each other. Anyway... there's nothing I can say that those two links don't say already, so just click them. :P
In other news, I'm interested in game design again. I actually wanted to be an AI programmer once, it was my first career choice, but I quickly opted for other fields that I felt were more adequate for my thinking style, but I learned a few things from my temporary foray into programming and I still regret not becoming more familiar with it, because game design is one of those hobbies I have that all I can do is think tank on without ever actually being able to test my hypothesis on. It's a shame because I highly admire independent game designers that think outside the box concerning interactive entertainment because they know more than most how much of an unrealized medium games actually are. It's a shame because video-games today, I feel, are viewed upon as juvenile and counter-productive. The game industry as a whole is doing very precious little to change its reputation into something more respectable, and I believe that ultimately has to do with nobody really knowing how because people are kind of 'stuck' on perceiving games in a certain way that the mold has hardened to a degree that's hard to break out of. The state of our current economy sure isn't helping, but I digress, that's not the point I'm getting at...
So I was trying to figure out what exactly constituted a 'game', so I took the simplest game I could think of and thought of its components. Pong, right? You need a control mechanism with clear established limits, (the paddle's ability to either go up or down) you need a game-play system that responds to the controls, (the ball's very simple physics engine) and you need a reward system. (the points that accumulate when the ball breaches the opponent's paddle) I continued this line of thinking until I realized I was falling in the same trap every other game designer falls into, I was following a specific mold, not actually analyzing the core of game-play.
As a kid, I remember my funnest hobbies being exploration, going through the woods and wetlands, treating it as some sort of large sandbox where I could pretend to be anything I wanted, part of any world I could imagine. This was me 'playing' but I wasn't limited by game-play mechanics or being rewarded with a meaningless point system. The reward was in the experience, the act of discovery, the act of figuring out the 'system'. I realized this type of playing differs from traditional games like sports is because the reward isn't in the competitive aspect, but the creative aspect, the process of discovery and understanding.
Anyway, I thought I was on the right track so I searched for games that followed similar approaches. I was already inspired by two games by Jason Rohrer: Gravitation and Passage. Make sure to read the notes after you play them, it will help give insight into what kind of experience you just had. I don't want to spoil anything, but these two games were different in that the game isn't about reaching some type of goal, but trying to understand what the game-play means in a deeper and emotional sense. They're reflective in nature, meaning at first you're just dicking around but when the game reveals something to you, you take a look back and analyze your own actions, you realize there's meaning there, and it makes you contemplate the premise in mind.
Then I came across this pecular site, Towlr, which turns out explores the same basic idea but in more of a mechanical way. There's no theme or underlying message in these games, but the idea of using the process of discovery as a game-play mechanic is right there in its rawest form. The point is not only to win the 'game', but to figure out how to win the 'game'. Interesting method, because it plays with the idea that most of what constitutes a game actually occurs inside the player's mind, and not necessarily just his ability to do everything the game tells him to do. I still think something's not fully realized in these games though as they're entirely logic-based and don't deal with any serious themes, so something medium transforming would have to take this process and figure out a way to make it strike a chord with the players. Like in other art-forms, it's never about the actual product, but how it inspires the person viewing it.
Anyway, this is a work in progress, more as it develops.
Truth be told, one of the biggest reasons I want to be a biologist is so that I can understand the scientific model of the world as well as I can so that I can then begin to think around it. I believe the universe is capable of being further understood beyond our current realm of understanding, and I believe that materialism is simply the current layer we're digging through. If there's any hope of prying open the nature of reality and ultimate truth or whatever 'that thing' we're looking for is, we need to question everything and even entertain ideas that aren't completely comfortable with us. It's all part of the process, y'know.
Anyway, I've come across two links that have stirred my philosophical juices, and made me re-question my spiritual orientation. The first is an essay that explains the nature of consciousness and why we view it the way we do in modern society. Very enlightening. The other is a lecture given by Keith Ward on how misguided our viewpoints really are concerning different schools of thought. It is very outright inspiring to see people discussing intelligent design in an educated fashion, using actual reasoning to inspire and encouraging people to think for themselves. In that regard, I hate to say it, but a part of me hopes that religion would just kind of die, and in its ashes be reborn a passionate and vigorous reshaping of spiritual ideals. I don't like living in a society where people spend their time debunking other people's beliefs rather than building on their own, so I kind of wish we could do away with fundamentalism so that we can continue to evolve science and religion's relationship with each other. Anyway... there's nothing I can say that those two links don't say already, so just click them. :P
In other news, I'm interested in game design again. I actually wanted to be an AI programmer once, it was my first career choice, but I quickly opted for other fields that I felt were more adequate for my thinking style, but I learned a few things from my temporary foray into programming and I still regret not becoming more familiar with it, because game design is one of those hobbies I have that all I can do is think tank on without ever actually being able to test my hypothesis on. It's a shame because I highly admire independent game designers that think outside the box concerning interactive entertainment because they know more than most how much of an unrealized medium games actually are. It's a shame because video-games today, I feel, are viewed upon as juvenile and counter-productive. The game industry as a whole is doing very precious little to change its reputation into something more respectable, and I believe that ultimately has to do with nobody really knowing how because people are kind of 'stuck' on perceiving games in a certain way that the mold has hardened to a degree that's hard to break out of. The state of our current economy sure isn't helping, but I digress, that's not the point I'm getting at...
So I was trying to figure out what exactly constituted a 'game', so I took the simplest game I could think of and thought of its components. Pong, right? You need a control mechanism with clear established limits, (the paddle's ability to either go up or down) you need a game-play system that responds to the controls, (the ball's very simple physics engine) and you need a reward system. (the points that accumulate when the ball breaches the opponent's paddle) I continued this line of thinking until I realized I was falling in the same trap every other game designer falls into, I was following a specific mold, not actually analyzing the core of game-play.
As a kid, I remember my funnest hobbies being exploration, going through the woods and wetlands, treating it as some sort of large sandbox where I could pretend to be anything I wanted, part of any world I could imagine. This was me 'playing' but I wasn't limited by game-play mechanics or being rewarded with a meaningless point system. The reward was in the experience, the act of discovery, the act of figuring out the 'system'. I realized this type of playing differs from traditional games like sports is because the reward isn't in the competitive aspect, but the creative aspect, the process of discovery and understanding.
Anyway, I thought I was on the right track so I searched for games that followed similar approaches. I was already inspired by two games by Jason Rohrer: Gravitation and Passage. Make sure to read the notes after you play them, it will help give insight into what kind of experience you just had. I don't want to spoil anything, but these two games were different in that the game isn't about reaching some type of goal, but trying to understand what the game-play means in a deeper and emotional sense. They're reflective in nature, meaning at first you're just dicking around but when the game reveals something to you, you take a look back and analyze your own actions, you realize there's meaning there, and it makes you contemplate the premise in mind.
Then I came across this pecular site, Towlr, which turns out explores the same basic idea but in more of a mechanical way. There's no theme or underlying message in these games, but the idea of using the process of discovery as a game-play mechanic is right there in its rawest form. The point is not only to win the 'game', but to figure out how to win the 'game'. Interesting method, because it plays with the idea that most of what constitutes a game actually occurs inside the player's mind, and not necessarily just his ability to do everything the game tells him to do. I still think something's not fully realized in these games though as they're entirely logic-based and don't deal with any serious themes, so something medium transforming would have to take this process and figure out a way to make it strike a chord with the players. Like in other art-forms, it's never about the actual product, but how it inspires the person viewing it.
Anyway, this is a work in progress, more as it develops.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Tidbits of mind-shattering stuff
I registered to go back to school for Spring quarter at Seattle Central Community College, the only essential class I could take was in math, but I decided to take Introduction to Chemistry as well as Human Genetics to keep up with science-related classes, as well as to brush me up for chemistry for summer quarter. Not too interesting, huh, the quarter doesn't even start until April 6 so this seems like useless information, but whatever, now you know.
So I was browsing the internet today, and, as I often do, I started thinking about what the internet truly means, you know, in the broader scheme of things. I always appreciate these lines of thinking, because not only can I think about new ways of using the internet, but I can actually use the internet to help broaden my views on whatever subject matter I choose to pursue. This led me to a line of thinking that maybe it's time the internet began to shift into a model that more closely imitates the human mind, and treat the internet more like what it is, a sort of collective consciousness.
Anyway, I started playing around with ideas in that vein, thinking about doing away with analog time and implementing weather and sun-positioning into a user-interface, things of that nature, but I quickly got bored and started browsing the internet for other cool, new, and innovative ideas, so one of my obvious stops was TED. I stumbled across two interesting talks this time, one being about the creative process, which I found personally quite stimulating because Elizabeth Gilbert didn't take the usual route of explaining the creative process as an innate power to be stirred on command, but the traditional ancient Greek method of treating creativity as a heavenly muse, a spiritual genius of sorts.
However the second talk really got to me, where Juan Enriquez pretty much sums up my entire viewpoint of how the future is going to play out. I don't want to spoil it, go ahead, watch it, I'll wait.
I wanted to think about the future in a realistic sense, and yet I'm starting to take a holistic approach to it. After all, everything I know comes from my own ability to perceive the world and make my own judgments, and I realize how easily one's own judgment can be swayed. My intuition tells me we're heading into a world that is quickly going to become one we can't really understand at this point, so the best thing one can do is at least try to prepare for it.
Oh yeah, in related news, turns out eating less improves memory. Good news for an information-hungry generation, I hope the research pans out.
So I was browsing the internet today, and, as I often do, I started thinking about what the internet truly means, you know, in the broader scheme of things. I always appreciate these lines of thinking, because not only can I think about new ways of using the internet, but I can actually use the internet to help broaden my views on whatever subject matter I choose to pursue. This led me to a line of thinking that maybe it's time the internet began to shift into a model that more closely imitates the human mind, and treat the internet more like what it is, a sort of collective consciousness.
Anyway, I started playing around with ideas in that vein, thinking about doing away with analog time and implementing weather and sun-positioning into a user-interface, things of that nature, but I quickly got bored and started browsing the internet for other cool, new, and innovative ideas, so one of my obvious stops was TED. I stumbled across two interesting talks this time, one being about the creative process, which I found personally quite stimulating because Elizabeth Gilbert didn't take the usual route of explaining the creative process as an innate power to be stirred on command, but the traditional ancient Greek method of treating creativity as a heavenly muse, a spiritual genius of sorts.
However the second talk really got to me, where Juan Enriquez pretty much sums up my entire viewpoint of how the future is going to play out. I don't want to spoil it, go ahead, watch it, I'll wait.
I wanted to think about the future in a realistic sense, and yet I'm starting to take a holistic approach to it. After all, everything I know comes from my own ability to perceive the world and make my own judgments, and I realize how easily one's own judgment can be swayed. My intuition tells me we're heading into a world that is quickly going to become one we can't really understand at this point, so the best thing one can do is at least try to prepare for it.
Oh yeah, in related news, turns out eating less improves memory. Good news for an information-hungry generation, I hope the research pans out.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Dream on, dream on!
I don't usually like talking about dreams, people generally have their own interpretation, and I know all too well that people usually groan when someone is about to tell them about a dream they had. But for the sake of understanding the science of it, which is important in the field I'm considering, I thought I'd break it down a little bit.
First of all, I never bought into Freud, who mostly determined dreams to be stimulation of our primal unconscious. Instead, I was always fond of the Jungian approach, whom saw dreams as a sort of window into the self, they were the ego's way of figuring out itself, that it was an innately spiritual experience.
Jay Dixit however, explains in more concrete details, that dreams are a sort of theater of threat rehearsal, they help us problem solve foreseeable practical problems, whether instinctual or empirical. This particular article is quite interesting, in that it explains a lot of things we already know about dreams, and gives them a perspective that actually makes a lot of sense, while still implicating that there's probably a lot more to the puzzle that we've yet to figure out.
As far as the possibility of using dreams as a therapeutic device, it seems completely rational to me to use dreams as a really effective tool for solving personal problems, traumatic or otherwise. If we could somehow harness the power of suggestion and apply them to dream-like scenarios, then people could solve these problems in their dreams by confronting them head-on. I've never heard of a dream where someone knowingly takes the wrong approach in solving a problem, so I'm leaning towards the thought that if therapy could become effective enough to introduce a potential dream scenario, and suggest possible solutions, then when the actual dream scenario occurs, the patient reinforces in his own mind the solution to that problem, while gaining the benefits and confidence associated with that particular feat.
I'll look more into this as a possible experiment opportunity.
In other news, registration opened up for Seattle Central Community College, I almost signed up for the classes I wanted, only to find out that since I didn't attend Winter quarter, they temporarily locked my registered status. I fixed it by calling them, but apparently I can't officially register until tomorrow. No biggie. Unfortunately, there aren't very many relevant courses for me to take this quarter except for math, so I'm just going to take a couple semi-related classes just for fun, and because I want to become used to taking a full load for the remainder of my school career. And I want to reap the benefits of financial aid. (Which is counter-productive since financial aid on three classes doesn't outweight the full cost of one class, but the other points are still valid.)
That's basically it. Sorry I haven't been posting items too often, I'm going to try to make them shorter and more numerous from here on.
First of all, I never bought into Freud, who mostly determined dreams to be stimulation of our primal unconscious. Instead, I was always fond of the Jungian approach, whom saw dreams as a sort of window into the self, they were the ego's way of figuring out itself, that it was an innately spiritual experience.
Jay Dixit however, explains in more concrete details, that dreams are a sort of theater of threat rehearsal, they help us problem solve foreseeable practical problems, whether instinctual or empirical. This particular article is quite interesting, in that it explains a lot of things we already know about dreams, and gives them a perspective that actually makes a lot of sense, while still implicating that there's probably a lot more to the puzzle that we've yet to figure out.
As far as the possibility of using dreams as a therapeutic device, it seems completely rational to me to use dreams as a really effective tool for solving personal problems, traumatic or otherwise. If we could somehow harness the power of suggestion and apply them to dream-like scenarios, then people could solve these problems in their dreams by confronting them head-on. I've never heard of a dream where someone knowingly takes the wrong approach in solving a problem, so I'm leaning towards the thought that if therapy could become effective enough to introduce a potential dream scenario, and suggest possible solutions, then when the actual dream scenario occurs, the patient reinforces in his own mind the solution to that problem, while gaining the benefits and confidence associated with that particular feat.
I'll look more into this as a possible experiment opportunity.
In other news, registration opened up for Seattle Central Community College, I almost signed up for the classes I wanted, only to find out that since I didn't attend Winter quarter, they temporarily locked my registered status. I fixed it by calling them, but apparently I can't officially register until tomorrow. No biggie. Unfortunately, there aren't very many relevant courses for me to take this quarter except for math, so I'm just going to take a couple semi-related classes just for fun, and because I want to become used to taking a full load for the remainder of my school career. And I want to reap the benefits of financial aid. (Which is counter-productive since financial aid on three classes doesn't outweight the full cost of one class, but the other points are still valid.)
That's basically it. Sorry I haven't been posting items too often, I'm going to try to make them shorter and more numerous from here on.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The muse is a fickle bitch
So it seems our good friend Ray Kurzweil has recently received support and funding from both Google and NASA for his Singularity University, which has set off a certain signal in me that maybe his ideas might be publicly adopted a lot sooner than expected. Even if given a tiny bit of credentials for his theories, 2030 isn't too far away, the current deadline for total convergence. But enough about that, read my prior blog post that explains all about the Singularity in pretty good detail.
What interested me about the article about the Singularity University was the question of how a generation could possibly prepare for such an event. Trends are definitely useful, but when these trends hit a point where we can no longer accurately predict any future event with any relevance, what's the point of preparing in the first place? The trends suggest that convergence will act in humanity's best interest, but we might not be the end-all be-all of technological progress, especially if we actually do end up designing self-replicating super-human intelligent machines. There's simply no way to predict their motives and developments much in the same way I'm sure mice have no idea what the hell we're up to.
But honestly, I'm not too worried about it.
Speaking of trends, it seems that new technologies are making themselves more efficiently integrated into society increasingly by means of entertainment, (as opposed to military and medicine) later on this year we're going to see an influx of mind-reading games that I'm sure will raise an entirely new strain of general awareness concerning mental/psychological technology that's going to be more exponentially relevant in the coming decades.
Scientists are hoping that by 2019, we'll be able to genetically map every new-born Gattaca style in order to prevent and forewarn genetic defects. Beyond genetics, many new studies are focusing in on reverse-engineering the brain in hopes of grasping the technicalities of how the mind works in far greater detail.
But back to entertainment... yes, entertainment. Entertainment is a fickle industry, what works one year doesn't always work the next. Innovation is one of those fleeting things that we can't really maintain a firm grasp of, but its my hope that an integrated society will present itself with more opportunities for innovation by continuing its current inclusive trends. (See wikipedia, twitter, facebook, etc)
I've spent a lot of time trying to analyze what these trends mean, from the popularity of the Nintendo Wii, to the increasing trends in casual games, I'm seeing a market that's preparing itself for an explosion of some kind, but I can't quite foresee it yet. Games are only a part of the puzzle; Netflix Instant-Watch, iPhone's App Store, Steam-Powered; I don't see these ideas as simply as entertainment going digital, I see it as trends highly favoring an open-market free-exchange instant-access orgy of convergence and integration. It has already consumed the lives of so many, and that number's not going to drop - once production costs go down, once development becomes easier to use, once technology becomes so intuitive that the means of which we access it becomes invisible, then we're going to have an entire planet working together providing services and entertainment to each other to a degree that's simply impossible to keep up with and the ante's are going to raise much higher. (Kind of like how it is now, who can honestly say they can keep up with the entire internet? We can in general terms, but not specifically.)
But the game industry in particular, I find it to be an anomaly. It's a relatively new industry, sure, but it hasn't come even remotely close to being treated as a novel and artistic medium as comparable to other mediums such as film, literature, and music. Granted, it's the youngest, most expensive, and most difficult to produce for, which is why it's so important to help guide trends to solve some of these problems to work out the quirks of the industry. In my humblest of opinions, for lack of a better word, video-games need to go Indie. The stakes need to be made lower so that developers can put more resources into creativity and originality. Big game producers can stay where they're at, there's no problem with having a Hollywood for video-games, but they can't be relied on to push the industry forward, there's simply too much money at stake to take massive risks, which is exactly what the video-game industry is to investors.
Thinking back on it, innovations in games are really far and few between, considering the limitless potential of the dynamic implications of what a video game really is. You need to give the player control over something, you need to introduce a 'game mechanic', and you need a reward system to push the player along. That aside, the means of game-play and the player's relationship to the game could be anything, absolutely anything, and the artistic implications have been largely ignored, save a few exceptions. Largely, arcade games such as Tetris paved the way for many like-minded games up to Bejeweled and its many incarnations. Asteroids largely paved the way for top-down shooters, and while art direction has improved, (See, Ikaruga) the art direction and game-play have absolutely no correlation with each other whatsoever other than giving the player something pretty to look at while he shoots things. Doom becomes Crysis, Mario Bros becomes Metal Slug, Populous becomes Civilization IV, and, well, you get the idea.
The problem is that the experience doesn't match the game-play, the game-play becomes a monotonous and familiar experience with little twists built in that make the experience seem fresh and new again, but this is simply a mask. The challenge of the game is lost, at least as far as challenging the mind to truly allow itself to be immersed into a new and vulnerable experience. Modern games can't do this because the formulas are too thick, the experiences too familiar. The problem lies in the developers not engaging their art-form, and therefore the audience has no hope of engaging the product to a meaningful degree.
Of course none of this surprises me, the video game market is far from broken and as long as people buy into what is currently available, progress for deeper innovations will remain slow. But, what if, just hear me out here, what if there was an insurgence of artistic games, a re-examining of the very fabric of an entertainment experience, a movement, if you will, to revitalize the game industry into something deeply profound, something that got along much better with the way the world is headed in... what if? Its not a dream, really, it's the natural progression of things, it's just a matter of time, a question of when.
What interested me about the article about the Singularity University was the question of how a generation could possibly prepare for such an event. Trends are definitely useful, but when these trends hit a point where we can no longer accurately predict any future event with any relevance, what's the point of preparing in the first place? The trends suggest that convergence will act in humanity's best interest, but we might not be the end-all be-all of technological progress, especially if we actually do end up designing self-replicating super-human intelligent machines. There's simply no way to predict their motives and developments much in the same way I'm sure mice have no idea what the hell we're up to.
But honestly, I'm not too worried about it.
Speaking of trends, it seems that new technologies are making themselves more efficiently integrated into society increasingly by means of entertainment, (as opposed to military and medicine) later on this year we're going to see an influx of mind-reading games that I'm sure will raise an entirely new strain of general awareness concerning mental/psychological technology that's going to be more exponentially relevant in the coming decades.
Scientists are hoping that by 2019, we'll be able to genetically map every new-born Gattaca style in order to prevent and forewarn genetic defects. Beyond genetics, many new studies are focusing in on reverse-engineering the brain in hopes of grasping the technicalities of how the mind works in far greater detail.
But back to entertainment... yes, entertainment. Entertainment is a fickle industry, what works one year doesn't always work the next. Innovation is one of those fleeting things that we can't really maintain a firm grasp of, but its my hope that an integrated society will present itself with more opportunities for innovation by continuing its current inclusive trends. (See wikipedia, twitter, facebook, etc)
I've spent a lot of time trying to analyze what these trends mean, from the popularity of the Nintendo Wii, to the increasing trends in casual games, I'm seeing a market that's preparing itself for an explosion of some kind, but I can't quite foresee it yet. Games are only a part of the puzzle; Netflix Instant-Watch, iPhone's App Store, Steam-Powered; I don't see these ideas as simply as entertainment going digital, I see it as trends highly favoring an open-market free-exchange instant-access orgy of convergence and integration. It has already consumed the lives of so many, and that number's not going to drop - once production costs go down, once development becomes easier to use, once technology becomes so intuitive that the means of which we access it becomes invisible, then we're going to have an entire planet working together providing services and entertainment to each other to a degree that's simply impossible to keep up with and the ante's are going to raise much higher. (Kind of like how it is now, who can honestly say they can keep up with the entire internet? We can in general terms, but not specifically.)
But the game industry in particular, I find it to be an anomaly. It's a relatively new industry, sure, but it hasn't come even remotely close to being treated as a novel and artistic medium as comparable to other mediums such as film, literature, and music. Granted, it's the youngest, most expensive, and most difficult to produce for, which is why it's so important to help guide trends to solve some of these problems to work out the quirks of the industry. In my humblest of opinions, for lack of a better word, video-games need to go Indie. The stakes need to be made lower so that developers can put more resources into creativity and originality. Big game producers can stay where they're at, there's no problem with having a Hollywood for video-games, but they can't be relied on to push the industry forward, there's simply too much money at stake to take massive risks, which is exactly what the video-game industry is to investors.
Thinking back on it, innovations in games are really far and few between, considering the limitless potential of the dynamic implications of what a video game really is. You need to give the player control over something, you need to introduce a 'game mechanic', and you need a reward system to push the player along. That aside, the means of game-play and the player's relationship to the game could be anything, absolutely anything, and the artistic implications have been largely ignored, save a few exceptions. Largely, arcade games such as Tetris paved the way for many like-minded games up to Bejeweled and its many incarnations. Asteroids largely paved the way for top-down shooters, and while art direction has improved, (See, Ikaruga) the art direction and game-play have absolutely no correlation with each other whatsoever other than giving the player something pretty to look at while he shoots things. Doom becomes Crysis, Mario Bros becomes Metal Slug, Populous becomes Civilization IV, and, well, you get the idea.
The problem is that the experience doesn't match the game-play, the game-play becomes a monotonous and familiar experience with little twists built in that make the experience seem fresh and new again, but this is simply a mask. The challenge of the game is lost, at least as far as challenging the mind to truly allow itself to be immersed into a new and vulnerable experience. Modern games can't do this because the formulas are too thick, the experiences too familiar. The problem lies in the developers not engaging their art-form, and therefore the audience has no hope of engaging the product to a meaningful degree.
Of course none of this surprises me, the video game market is far from broken and as long as people buy into what is currently available, progress for deeper innovations will remain slow. But, what if, just hear me out here, what if there was an insurgence of artistic games, a re-examining of the very fabric of an entertainment experience, a movement, if you will, to revitalize the game industry into something deeply profound, something that got along much better with the way the world is headed in... what if? Its not a dream, really, it's the natural progression of things, it's just a matter of time, a question of when.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
The formation and inspiration of a hypothesis
So I'm sitting at my desk, drinking chai tea, browsing random tidbits through Google Reader, and I start to think about the brain, as I usually do, and a novel idea hit me: lateral thinking as a system to improve brain functionality!
Okay, so the idea isn't really all that novel, but it is a good enough idea to jump-start a line of personal research. Therefore, I'm going to incorporate the scientific method into this blog-post by creating a hypothesis, and my ongoing research will be aimed at either verifying or falsifying it. Why do I care so much about proving this? I think it could potentially lead to profound discoveries in psychological therapy and related fields. Easier said than done, however, most research I've conducted so far on this matter has led me to find more contradictions than proofs.
Take this article for example, which is a well-researched article on generally accepted neuroscience on different regions of the brain and how they operate. But it doesn't take neuroplasticity into question, a recent discovery that the brain is far more malleable and dynamic than previously thought, and has already led to amazing advancements for the sensory impaired. Basically this research heavily suggests that the brain is highly adaptable and is virtually unchanged from childhood into the adult years, and theoretically social conditioning is responsible for dumbing down our ability to retain information and think creatively.
There's a research project I have found myself frequenting recently called reciprocality, it tries to define concepts that are paradoxically impossible to define, but what they refer to as a condition that affects almost everyone that makes them more oriented to praise routine-based behaviors. The research started by noticing that some software engineers fared exponentially better at their jobs than most others with no clear explanation as to why. Because of the nature of the industry, employers have learned that if they wanted things done in a timely fashion, they needed people who were trained to do very specific tasks. Projects that treaded new territory or that were adapting to new technologies had no way of respecting any certain time-frame for their projects to be completed, since their obstacles are unforeseeable and took different levels of creativity to solve.
The research goes on to find the differences between people who think one way as opposed to another, how one group is more adaptable to finding solutions to problems and thinking outside the box while the other group is more likely to remain stuck 'in the box'. Its profound to some degree, people that do one thing well can only do that one thing well and have no frame of reference that will ever allow them to be able to get themselves outside the box they're trapped in, especially if they don't even know the nature of the box. The world we're turning into today is one where enough people are able to collaborate on projects where the variable areas of expertise allow hurdles to be crossed more efficiently, but I imagine we'll soon be treading into a world where everybody is more prepared to learn a more general set of skills that will allow them to solve more complicated and abstract problems.
That said, I have formed a general hypothesis: Abstract thinking may strengthen brain versatility and general problem-solving skills. The idea is based on the theory that linking different parts of the brain together in unusual ways allows for a greater level of idea association and the strengthening of neural pathways. Though more than proving this hypothesis to be true, I want to study the most effective way of strengthening the general adaptability of the brain in hopes that the mind will be more predisposed to exposing itself to new ideas and ways of thinking, you know, to be perpetually progressive. It might be the Buddhist in me looking for a scientific way of achieving transcendence, but hey, I don't see how this line of research could hurt anyone, so lets have it, shall we?
I won't go into too much detail about how I plan to support this hypothesis, but I will give updates on my research and findings periodically as well as show my experiment reports. This specific project will probably be running for a long time and I may decide to participate in smaller scientific pursuits to fill in the gaps. I will say however that I plan on using the principles of lateral thinking and apply them to more areas than just critical thinking. The idea is to find a system for linking different parts of the brain creatively and abstractly to see if causes significant changes in rational thought and problem solving skills.
In slightly different news, I continually find myself really enjoying lectures on how the brain works, the creative process, and discovering new and hopeful approaches to solving modern day problems. Anyone else that knows what I'm talking about has probably heard of TED, an annual conference where experts in a wide range of specialized fields are given a loud-speaker in order to exchange ideas with their colleagues. Appropriately subtitled as "Ideas worth spreading", the general public is encouraged to listen to these lectures in order to inspire a progressively oriented future. One incredible example of an inspiring lecture is Jill Taylor's recollection of a brain stroke through the eyes of a neuroscientist.
One of the reasons I find talks like these so fascinating is because it gives you a clearer view of how the brain operates in certain situations, giving us a glimpse of how our own minds could operate if we just knew how to control it better and take away the walls that limit the experiences of our day to day lives. It reminds me that the brain isn't just used for solving algebraic equations, but is actually necessary to witness beauty and profound experiences and to trigger dramatic life-style changes for the better.
Okay, so the idea isn't really all that novel, but it is a good enough idea to jump-start a line of personal research. Therefore, I'm going to incorporate the scientific method into this blog-post by creating a hypothesis, and my ongoing research will be aimed at either verifying or falsifying it. Why do I care so much about proving this? I think it could potentially lead to profound discoveries in psychological therapy and related fields. Easier said than done, however, most research I've conducted so far on this matter has led me to find more contradictions than proofs.
Take this article for example, which is a well-researched article on generally accepted neuroscience on different regions of the brain and how they operate. But it doesn't take neuroplasticity into question, a recent discovery that the brain is far more malleable and dynamic than previously thought, and has already led to amazing advancements for the sensory impaired. Basically this research heavily suggests that the brain is highly adaptable and is virtually unchanged from childhood into the adult years, and theoretically social conditioning is responsible for dumbing down our ability to retain information and think creatively.
There's a research project I have found myself frequenting recently called reciprocality, it tries to define concepts that are paradoxically impossible to define, but what they refer to as a condition that affects almost everyone that makes them more oriented to praise routine-based behaviors. The research started by noticing that some software engineers fared exponentially better at their jobs than most others with no clear explanation as to why. Because of the nature of the industry, employers have learned that if they wanted things done in a timely fashion, they needed people who were trained to do very specific tasks. Projects that treaded new territory or that were adapting to new technologies had no way of respecting any certain time-frame for their projects to be completed, since their obstacles are unforeseeable and took different levels of creativity to solve.
The research goes on to find the differences between people who think one way as opposed to another, how one group is more adaptable to finding solutions to problems and thinking outside the box while the other group is more likely to remain stuck 'in the box'. Its profound to some degree, people that do one thing well can only do that one thing well and have no frame of reference that will ever allow them to be able to get themselves outside the box they're trapped in, especially if they don't even know the nature of the box. The world we're turning into today is one where enough people are able to collaborate on projects where the variable areas of expertise allow hurdles to be crossed more efficiently, but I imagine we'll soon be treading into a world where everybody is more prepared to learn a more general set of skills that will allow them to solve more complicated and abstract problems.
That said, I have formed a general hypothesis: Abstract thinking may strengthen brain versatility and general problem-solving skills. The idea is based on the theory that linking different parts of the brain together in unusual ways allows for a greater level of idea association and the strengthening of neural pathways. Though more than proving this hypothesis to be true, I want to study the most effective way of strengthening the general adaptability of the brain in hopes that the mind will be more predisposed to exposing itself to new ideas and ways of thinking, you know, to be perpetually progressive. It might be the Buddhist in me looking for a scientific way of achieving transcendence, but hey, I don't see how this line of research could hurt anyone, so lets have it, shall we?
I won't go into too much detail about how I plan to support this hypothesis, but I will give updates on my research and findings periodically as well as show my experiment reports. This specific project will probably be running for a long time and I may decide to participate in smaller scientific pursuits to fill in the gaps. I will say however that I plan on using the principles of lateral thinking and apply them to more areas than just critical thinking. The idea is to find a system for linking different parts of the brain creatively and abstractly to see if causes significant changes in rational thought and problem solving skills.
In slightly different news, I continually find myself really enjoying lectures on how the brain works, the creative process, and discovering new and hopeful approaches to solving modern day problems. Anyone else that knows what I'm talking about has probably heard of TED, an annual conference where experts in a wide range of specialized fields are given a loud-speaker in order to exchange ideas with their colleagues. Appropriately subtitled as "Ideas worth spreading", the general public is encouraged to listen to these lectures in order to inspire a progressively oriented future. One incredible example of an inspiring lecture is Jill Taylor's recollection of a brain stroke through the eyes of a neuroscientist.
One of the reasons I find talks like these so fascinating is because it gives you a clearer view of how the brain operates in certain situations, giving us a glimpse of how our own minds could operate if we just knew how to control it better and take away the walls that limit the experiences of our day to day lives. It reminds me that the brain isn't just used for solving algebraic equations, but is actually necessary to witness beauty and profound experiences and to trigger dramatic life-style changes for the better.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Drugs make smart!
So the other day, me and a good friend of mine had a heated discussion involving nootropics (Smart-drugs) and the possibility of them invading the mass market. Considerably a null point, considering caffeine is already a wide-spread cognitive enhancer that apparently America alone consumes 45 million pounds a year of, but what is stopping scientists and researchers from developing far more effective and sophisticated smart-drugs intended for the general market? Nothing, obviously. People are already quite aware how easy is to get a hold of drugs like adderol and ritalin, as well as legal options such as Piracetam and other similar supplements. Cognitive enhancers is such an arbitrary term anyway that there's really too many examples to list.
But what I really want to know is what the problem truly is, why some people are more accepting of drugs like these while others would prefer to stay away. Some say it's an ethical choice while others would be more quick to source the stigma that surrounds each individual substance. To me however, the lines have become so blurred that I've just become downright fascinated by it. See, the brain is a complicated thing, and the way the brain reacts to different chemicals is such a diverse and complex process that I can tell quite intuitively that the science surrounding smart drugs has a long way to go, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that further research into these drugs can be nothing but beneficial. The logic is simple, if people are going to take drugs to boost performance, might as well make sure they're more effective and safer to use.
Though, I see the whole thing as somewhat of a trend, and will probably come and go depending on the directions that mind-performance science takes in general. You have to wonder though, we live in an age where people are becoming more accustomed to instant-gratification and laziness while becoming more obsessed with general self-improvement and Brain Age training that these trends seem kind of obvious in hind-sight. Its humorous in a way, if a little sad, but I remain optimistic, as long as this type of science is moving forward, things can only look upward.
But what I really want to know is what the problem truly is, why some people are more accepting of drugs like these while others would prefer to stay away. Some say it's an ethical choice while others would be more quick to source the stigma that surrounds each individual substance. To me however, the lines have become so blurred that I've just become downright fascinated by it. See, the brain is a complicated thing, and the way the brain reacts to different chemicals is such a diverse and complex process that I can tell quite intuitively that the science surrounding smart drugs has a long way to go, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that further research into these drugs can be nothing but beneficial. The logic is simple, if people are going to take drugs to boost performance, might as well make sure they're more effective and safer to use.
Though, I see the whole thing as somewhat of a trend, and will probably come and go depending on the directions that mind-performance science takes in general. You have to wonder though, we live in an age where people are becoming more accustomed to instant-gratification and laziness while becoming more obsessed with general self-improvement and Brain Age training that these trends seem kind of obvious in hind-sight. Its humorous in a way, if a little sad, but I remain optimistic, as long as this type of science is moving forward, things can only look upward.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Trends in Technology
So apparently nanotechnology is going to take the next step in advancing Moore's Law by making transistors on a chip using atom-sized 'quantum dots', semi-conductors that transmit information-carrying electrons on a circuit.
For those not in the know, Moore's Law dictates that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. While initially this was an interesting observation, it has since become a self-fulfilling prophecy among chip manufacturers. While this greatly increases technological potential, the law is reserved only for transistors, and not cpu power in general. The interesting thing about nanotechnology stepping in is that time and time again, critics of Moore's Law have been proven wrong in the physical limitations present in how developed a chip can actually get, and now that we're getting into molecule-sized conductors... I kind of wonder if we'll somehow even pass that hurdle. If we do, I'm not saying anything is impossible ever again.
These are interesting trends though. Certain futurologists, (not to be confused with the art movement of futurism) most prominently Ray Kurzweil, have this theory called the Technological Singularity, which notices technology trends that persistently change exponentially. These accellerated changes concerning technology, energy manipulation, and artificial intelligence suggests that unless it slows down in the very near future, eventually these exponential advancements are going to reach a point where we can no longer identify or predict future developments. The idea is that basically we're going to create systems or artificial intelligences or self-replicating machines that are smarter and more complicated than we are, and they in turn will replicate into something even more complicated and advanced.
The theory is actually pretty sound. Even 10 years ago we could barely imagine the technology we have today. Computer integration and speed is improving exponentially well, and phenomenons such as social networking, web 2.0, and other information integration services are suggesting something synonymous with some sort of collective consciousness. Again, these are just extrapolated trends, but the internet is an interesting phenomenon. In a way, its mostly a continuation of the printing press, just far more efficient, faster, and more capable. Even before that, civilizations have found numerous creative ways to exchange information, homing pidgeons come to mind. So why is this trend exponentially multiplying? Is it some sort of super-natural phenomon, nature's way of developing a consciousness capable of joining itself into one super-consciousness?
Sure, it sounds silly, but imagine if you will a future where people can find any information they went, whenever they want. They have some sort of device on them at all times that is capable of finding any known and documented resource in the world, they can instantly communicate with people that are experts in a field, and can relay their findings and discoveries to others that find it relevant right away. You might even call some device like this a smartphone. Sure, connecting the world through technology is nice and all, but it's not necessarily a collective consciousness, is it? Maybe, the brain works primarily by linking relevant parts. There's a central nervous system, but essentially all the parts of the brain work together fairly limitedly. Already I feel that my own ability to know anything about our universe is limited only by my own will to go and search for that information. Social networking will soon take bigger bounds and collectively scientists, politicians, scholars, and the workforce of the world will work together to expand the technology we have today. Eventually people will be utilized more and more efficiently, hell, robots might even take over basic labor relatively soon allowing more minds to join together in this epic cause. Obama's taking the first steps of many to assure more people have access to faster internet connections and helping to usher others into a digital age, and, and... y'know, I'm getting ahead of myself hardcore here, I'm gonna stop.
This is mostly optimism on my part, but thats what trend-reading does to me. Say all this is true, is it necessarily a better future? Not really, it could be worse in many ways, but it is fascinating on more levels than just technology, I think.
For those not in the know, Moore's Law dictates that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months. While initially this was an interesting observation, it has since become a self-fulfilling prophecy among chip manufacturers. While this greatly increases technological potential, the law is reserved only for transistors, and not cpu power in general. The interesting thing about nanotechnology stepping in is that time and time again, critics of Moore's Law have been proven wrong in the physical limitations present in how developed a chip can actually get, and now that we're getting into molecule-sized conductors... I kind of wonder if we'll somehow even pass that hurdle. If we do, I'm not saying anything is impossible ever again.
These are interesting trends though. Certain futurologists, (not to be confused with the art movement of futurism) most prominently Ray Kurzweil, have this theory called the Technological Singularity, which notices technology trends that persistently change exponentially. These accellerated changes concerning technology, energy manipulation, and artificial intelligence suggests that unless it slows down in the very near future, eventually these exponential advancements are going to reach a point where we can no longer identify or predict future developments. The idea is that basically we're going to create systems or artificial intelligences or self-replicating machines that are smarter and more complicated than we are, and they in turn will replicate into something even more complicated and advanced.
The theory is actually pretty sound. Even 10 years ago we could barely imagine the technology we have today. Computer integration and speed is improving exponentially well, and phenomenons such as social networking, web 2.0, and other information integration services are suggesting something synonymous with some sort of collective consciousness. Again, these are just extrapolated trends, but the internet is an interesting phenomenon. In a way, its mostly a continuation of the printing press, just far more efficient, faster, and more capable. Even before that, civilizations have found numerous creative ways to exchange information, homing pidgeons come to mind. So why is this trend exponentially multiplying? Is it some sort of super-natural phenomon, nature's way of developing a consciousness capable of joining itself into one super-consciousness?
Sure, it sounds silly, but imagine if you will a future where people can find any information they went, whenever they want. They have some sort of device on them at all times that is capable of finding any known and documented resource in the world, they can instantly communicate with people that are experts in a field, and can relay their findings and discoveries to others that find it relevant right away. You might even call some device like this a smartphone. Sure, connecting the world through technology is nice and all, but it's not necessarily a collective consciousness, is it? Maybe, the brain works primarily by linking relevant parts. There's a central nervous system, but essentially all the parts of the brain work together fairly limitedly. Already I feel that my own ability to know anything about our universe is limited only by my own will to go and search for that information. Social networking will soon take bigger bounds and collectively scientists, politicians, scholars, and the workforce of the world will work together to expand the technology we have today. Eventually people will be utilized more and more efficiently, hell, robots might even take over basic labor relatively soon allowing more minds to join together in this epic cause. Obama's taking the first steps of many to assure more people have access to faster internet connections and helping to usher others into a digital age, and, and... y'know, I'm getting ahead of myself hardcore here, I'm gonna stop.
This is mostly optimism on my part, but thats what trend-reading does to me. Say all this is true, is it necessarily a better future? Not really, it could be worse in many ways, but it is fascinating on more levels than just technology, I think.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Brain adaption, it's a beautiful thing
I never felt comfortable explaining how the brain works, as the brain is an extremely complicated thing that's virtually unknowable even to experts, but never-the-less, when I read research pertaining to discoveries of the brain, I can't help but try to correlate the information to my own intuition of how my own brain works.
For example, an interesting excerpt about the function of new neurons in the hippocampus suggests that the reason neurons are generated in the adult brain (Popular science usually suggests the brain is pretty much complete and static by the time it reaches adulthood) is so that they give contextual cues to your brain for new short-term memories. The neural circuitry that develops as a result helps give the individual a general time-line for their new memories.
The interesting thing about this for me is that the brain is already equipped to deal with extremely complex things, there's virtually no limit to what the brain can accomplish, but is self-limited by the context of perception that cues the brain to function dependent on its environment. The more experiences we attain, however, the more neural pathways that are constructed between different parts of the brain and emergent memory properties are constructed. For example, taxi drivers develop a relatively large hippocampus because they not only have to remember a large quantity of locations and city details, but also how to get to any one place from any one other place. The implication is that these neural pathways are much more structurally complicated, and it's easy for me to imagine how this is relevant for other areas of our brain.
However, I would suggest that maybe it's not only the hippocampus that is capable of growing within the adult brain. Recent research heavily suggests the nearly endless potential for plasticity in recovering patients brains. (Plasticity refers to the brain's ability to use sections of the brain that were previously defined as being single-functioned, and using that part of the brain for completely different functions) People that have lost their sense of vertigo, for example, can change their brain's frame-work to use their other senses to help balance them out. This is complicated and difficult of course, but with the help of therapists and machines, is quite possible. The implications have even spread over to people with hearing loss, blindness, and other lost senses as well. So maybe if we learn enough about how the brain works and how to maximize efficiency in different areas of the brain, we might also be able to grow our entire brain by implementing certain life-style choices.
However the key-word here is efficiency. Take this guy for example, since he was 14 he's been losing huge percentages of his brain, about 50% - 75% smaller than the average brain, but he lives a relatively average life with only a slight decrease in the average IQ but by no means mentally disabled. I would imagine this person could even retain a higher IQ given his limited resources, but the fact that most brain scientists prior to the discovery of this man's brains would say that such a reduction in brain matter would be naturally incapable of basic survival speaks wonders to me about how little we know about how capable the brain is.
Anyway, enough about brains. I didn't make it clear in my first post, but I missed out on school this quarter. (I currently attend Seattle Central Community College) My procrastination led me to be too late to register for any of the classes I really needed, so I took a break this quarter altogether to help replenish my funds. (I have to pay for school all by myself, which I imagine is going to be hard on me when I transfer to a university) Not a good excuse, I know, I wish I hadn't missed the deadline and I probably could have done more to get in a class, but... February 17 is when I'll be able to register for spring quarter, I'll make sure I register the first chance I get.
For example, an interesting excerpt about the function of new neurons in the hippocampus suggests that the reason neurons are generated in the adult brain (Popular science usually suggests the brain is pretty much complete and static by the time it reaches adulthood) is so that they give contextual cues to your brain for new short-term memories. The neural circuitry that develops as a result helps give the individual a general time-line for their new memories.
The interesting thing about this for me is that the brain is already equipped to deal with extremely complex things, there's virtually no limit to what the brain can accomplish, but is self-limited by the context of perception that cues the brain to function dependent on its environment. The more experiences we attain, however, the more neural pathways that are constructed between different parts of the brain and emergent memory properties are constructed. For example, taxi drivers develop a relatively large hippocampus because they not only have to remember a large quantity of locations and city details, but also how to get to any one place from any one other place. The implication is that these neural pathways are much more structurally complicated, and it's easy for me to imagine how this is relevant for other areas of our brain.
However, I would suggest that maybe it's not only the hippocampus that is capable of growing within the adult brain. Recent research heavily suggests the nearly endless potential for plasticity in recovering patients brains. (Plasticity refers to the brain's ability to use sections of the brain that were previously defined as being single-functioned, and using that part of the brain for completely different functions) People that have lost their sense of vertigo, for example, can change their brain's frame-work to use their other senses to help balance them out. This is complicated and difficult of course, but with the help of therapists and machines, is quite possible. The implications have even spread over to people with hearing loss, blindness, and other lost senses as well. So maybe if we learn enough about how the brain works and how to maximize efficiency in different areas of the brain, we might also be able to grow our entire brain by implementing certain life-style choices.
However the key-word here is efficiency. Take this guy for example, since he was 14 he's been losing huge percentages of his brain, about 50% - 75% smaller than the average brain, but he lives a relatively average life with only a slight decrease in the average IQ but by no means mentally disabled. I would imagine this person could even retain a higher IQ given his limited resources, but the fact that most brain scientists prior to the discovery of this man's brains would say that such a reduction in brain matter would be naturally incapable of basic survival speaks wonders to me about how little we know about how capable the brain is.
Anyway, enough about brains. I didn't make it clear in my first post, but I missed out on school this quarter. (I currently attend Seattle Central Community College) My procrastination led me to be too late to register for any of the classes I really needed, so I took a break this quarter altogether to help replenish my funds. (I have to pay for school all by myself, which I imagine is going to be hard on me when I transfer to a university) Not a good excuse, I know, I wish I hadn't missed the deadline and I probably could have done more to get in a class, but... February 17 is when I'll be able to register for spring quarter, I'll make sure I register the first chance I get.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
First post!
Hello, my name's Matt, but you can call me Kainte. (As in 'faint', but with a 'k' sound) Why? Because this is Kainte's Blog and Matt's Blog is a less interesting title. But if you must know, Kainte is an alter-ego I made up back when I was about six years old and eventually became a fictitious auto-biographical character for a book I'm writing called "Ailsglyph". But that is horribly off-topic, see what you've done? There's more reasons I chose Kainte, but whatever, you get the idea.
The point of this blog in particular is to document my pursuit to become a finely established neuroscientist. Lofty goal, considering that I'm only a high school graduate with no scientific background to speak of. But, I'm gonna try anyway and you can't stop me. So there.
As well as documenting my progress, (I'm about a quarter of the way from achieving an associates of biological sciences) I want this to be my go-to place to talk and rant and ramble about science related topics, which I've been known to do all on my own my whole life anyway, so now I have a proper place for it.
But seeing as this is my first post, I guess I should start out by telling everyone a little bit about myself... lets see... well... I'm 22 years old as of this post, and I've spent the past 4 years since high school kind of moving about trying to get my act together. I've been to various community colleges between California and Washington State, pursuing degrees from philosophy to psychology to game programming to film to Japanese, until I finally settled on this whole scientist thing. Thing is, I've always been really ambitious, but never had truly dedicated goals until now, and I kinda still want to help put things in perspective, so readers of this blog will probably see a lot of that.
I've been a technology kid my entire life, I like keeping up to date on current events and things of that nature. Music, games, and movies have been three of my favorite hobbies since, like, forever. Among learning Japanese, I'm learning to play guitar (and to a lesser extent the piano and djimbe drum) and I'd be lying if I didn't say a part of me wants to be a hellbent rock star. As long as I'm being honest, though I'm clean now, (besides being an alcoholic) drugs have been a large part of my history and kind of acted as a precursor for my interest in psychology-related things. Oh man, acid is one helluva drug. But uh, sorry, I digress...
The brain, I think, is the future. The next frontier, as it were, right before space. Within' the next forty, even twenty years, we're going to see amazing neurological scientific advancements emerge. This year even you're going to start seeing various 'mind-reading toys' pop up, devices that read brain waves and act according to the thoughts of the user. This technology has been around for awhile, but pop-culture integration is going to spur a lot of activity on the scientific front about things just like this and a lot more. If there was ever a time to be interested in the brain, I would imagine it'd be now.
Anyway, this blog isn't going to be extremely structured, just know that it's generally about science and my pursuit into science. While this blog is mostly about me, I do intend to make this blog accessible to others, so feel free to keep up with me and talk about science! (Man, that sounds geeky)
So... okay, bye.
The point of this blog in particular is to document my pursuit to become a finely established neuroscientist. Lofty goal, considering that I'm only a high school graduate with no scientific background to speak of. But, I'm gonna try anyway and you can't stop me. So there.
As well as documenting my progress, (I'm about a quarter of the way from achieving an associates of biological sciences) I want this to be my go-to place to talk and rant and ramble about science related topics, which I've been known to do all on my own my whole life anyway, so now I have a proper place for it.
But seeing as this is my first post, I guess I should start out by telling everyone a little bit about myself... lets see... well... I'm 22 years old as of this post, and I've spent the past 4 years since high school kind of moving about trying to get my act together. I've been to various community colleges between California and Washington State, pursuing degrees from philosophy to psychology to game programming to film to Japanese, until I finally settled on this whole scientist thing. Thing is, I've always been really ambitious, but never had truly dedicated goals until now, and I kinda still want to help put things in perspective, so readers of this blog will probably see a lot of that.
I've been a technology kid my entire life, I like keeping up to date on current events and things of that nature. Music, games, and movies have been three of my favorite hobbies since, like, forever. Among learning Japanese, I'm learning to play guitar (and to a lesser extent the piano and djimbe drum) and I'd be lying if I didn't say a part of me wants to be a hellbent rock star. As long as I'm being honest, though I'm clean now, (besides being an alcoholic) drugs have been a large part of my history and kind of acted as a precursor for my interest in psychology-related things. Oh man, acid is one helluva drug. But uh, sorry, I digress...
The brain, I think, is the future. The next frontier, as it were, right before space. Within' the next forty, even twenty years, we're going to see amazing neurological scientific advancements emerge. This year even you're going to start seeing various 'mind-reading toys' pop up, devices that read brain waves and act according to the thoughts of the user. This technology has been around for awhile, but pop-culture integration is going to spur a lot of activity on the scientific front about things just like this and a lot more. If there was ever a time to be interested in the brain, I would imagine it'd be now.
Anyway, this blog isn't going to be extremely structured, just know that it's generally about science and my pursuit into science. While this blog is mostly about me, I do intend to make this blog accessible to others, so feel free to keep up with me and talk about science! (Man, that sounds geeky)
So... okay, bye.
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