Philosopher's Stone in NYT

I really like a lot of the stuff I read there, and today's reading was no exception:

Kant’s insight was that, in order for the knowledge we get from our senses at any given moment in time to mean anything, our minds must already be distinguishing it and combining it with the information we get in prior and subsequent moments in time. Thus there is no such thing as a pure impression in time — no absolute, frozen moment in which we know the sun is rising now without being able to infer anything from it — because such a pure moment without a before or after would be nothing at all...

Apt summary

I no longer have a facebook page, but my significant other does. Using their facebook page afforded me the opportunity to check up on some old friends from my hometown. When I did this, I found one person's wall that I felt compelled to save and share. You see, it captures the hilarious mixture of religion and ignorance that I grew up in:

Two books

I never get around to reading books anymore. Maybe soon. Young children just aren't helping me with productivity...although they may be providing me with two things that seem pretty important to most people: the meaning of life and an afterlife.

Organization psych in NYT Mag

Adam Grant's money quote:

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

Great read. I will check out the book.

Lessig's "Lesterland"

You must watch this video on the corruption of our democracy:

Genius

I found a few interesting resources from this page that I wanted to highlight / bookmark. I am reading through Basic Neurochemistry (Siegel, 8th) right now and am interested as a scientist in the effort to model intelligence based on the brain. There are a lot of variables that people try to plug into equations to predict IQ: brain volume overall, correlations between the amount and/or ratio white matter (myelin sheathing), gray matter, folding, interhemispheric interaction, density, wave patterns...etc.

Now that all this money is supposed to be poured into the Brain Activity Map Project or whatever they'll call it, I just figured I'd put out my prediction:

We tend to think of the brain in computer-related terms. The speed at which it processes information. How its "circuits" are designed and how signals propagate through them. But there is something as a biochemist that leads me to reject the binary on/off nature. Rather than thinking of neurons as in an "on / off" state, and trying to model the brain like a CPU, it is important to realize that the strength of the signal is a function of chemistry. The actual electrochemical potential (voltage) that we are discussing here goes back to the concentration of ions and transmitters. And since this concentration can vary, so can signal strength.

So now imagine trying to model a very simple brain, like C. elegans, studied by Bargmann and others,  with only 300 or so neurons. In the simplest computing model, you would have the firing patterns of the neurons mapped so that, for instance, odor recognition lights up a certain portion of the brain in a certain sequence. But this assumes each of these neurons to be in a true "on/off" state. They are more along a spectrum of signal strength. Let's say for simplicities' sake you round off the observed concentrations into 10 brackets (zero, near-zero...near-maximum, maximum). The complexity inherent in mapping 300 different possibilities is exponentially magnified because it isn't 2^300, but instead it is now 10^300. So now you've gone from 2 * 10^90 to 1 * 10^300 possible "states". And if you aren't mathematically inclined, 10^90 is more than the estimated number of atoms in the universe. You would have to assemble 10^200 universes to approach the number atoms equal to the possible states in C. elegans brain.

Where would we put that kind of map, assuming a computer could draw it for us? ;) And do you think that reading it would be any different than an ant reading Melville?

As I've said before, I don't put too much stock in IQ tests that fall within one standard deviation or so from the mean, but I put a lot more in them when the measurement indicates significant outliers. I put zero stock in the effort to link brain activity meaningfully to behavior or intelligence.