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| Even Better Than the Real Thing | ||||
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Steven Pinker mocks your foolish delight in a past that doesn’t exist.
Carolyn Abraham pens an exhaustive and balanced article on embryo selection. If you are honest with yourself about trying to understand the situation new parents will be facing in the coming decades, you’ll read this article.
Sherry Turkle is awesome. A good buddy of mine, Tyler, sent me the link to David Zax’s interview with Turkle about her new book Alone Together thinking it would get my hackles up. Turkle is perhaps one of the most perceptive thinkers on technology and society. She is not eternal pessimist David Carr, nor is she a paranoid technological survivalist like Douglass Rushkoff. I’ve written about her before at Discover and her ability to understand both what humans need and what technology can do makes her an essential mind for navigating the coming century. She artfully captures our culture’s current weaknesses:
If you get into these email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you’re alone, you get into this situation where you’re continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation. You’re alone but looking for approval as though you were together–the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody’s validation. I make a statement in the book, that if you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We’re raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it’s your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook…we’re losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.
Alone Together is what You Are Not a Gadget, The Shallows and Program or Be Programmed so desperately wanted to be. Buy her books. Read them. Highlight them. Sherry Turkle gets it.
IQ is not the same throughout your life. Like physical fitness, the amount you workout, stay active, and push yourself alters your overall intelligence. Your brain gets better at thinking if you make it.
A higher IQ can get you more than admission to Mensa and bragging rights on online-dating sites. IQ, measured by a battery of tests of working memory, spatial skills, and pattern recognition, among others, captures a wide range of cognitive skills, from spatial to verbal to analytical and beyond. Twenty points is “a huge difference,” says cognitive scientist Cathy Price of University College London, who led the research. “If an individual moved from an IQ of 110 to an IQ of 130 they’d go from being ‘average’ to ‘gifted.’ And if they moved from 104 to 84 they’d go from being high average to below average.” Her study was conducted on people ages 12 to 20, but given recent discoveries about the capacity of the brain to change—a property called neuroplasticity—and to create new neurons well into one’s 60s and 70s, Price believes the results hold for everyone. “My best guess is that performance on IQ tests could change meaningfully in adult years” too, she says. “The same degree of plasticity [as seen in young adults] may be present throughout life.”
So how to best utilize that plasticity? Memory and attention:
“There is some controversy over whether brain training can enhance cognition,” says neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries about the cellular and molecular basis of memory. “But if you really work on memory by, for instance, memorizing poetry—Shakespearean sonnets work—it probably improves some aspects of cognitive function.” …
The other brain element you can train in order to raise your IQ is attention. Neuroscientists have shown over and over that attention is the sine qua non of learning and thus of boosting intelligence. Only if you pay attention to an introduction at a party will you remember that cute guy’s name. Effects on attention may explain why stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall help some people some of the time with, especially, recall (hence those drugs’ popularity among students cramming for a test). Both stimulants raise the brain levels of dopamine, the neurochemical that produces motivation and a feeling of reward, which make it more likely that the task at hand will rivet your attention. Similarly, action-based games such as Space Fortress and strategy-heavy games such as Rise of Nations have been shown to improve both memory and attention switching. Another way to the same end, says UCL’s Price, is “passion.” If you don’t care about what you’re reading, seeing, or hearing, it won’t be retained.
Peg O’Conner in the New York Times relates her battle with alcoholism to Plato’s famous allegory. Addiction is the right word for those who return, who need, the Cave and the shadows on its wall to be their reality:
In various scenarios of addiction, the addicted person’s fixation on a shadow reality — one that does not conform to the world outside his or her use — is apparent to others. When the personal cost of drinking or drug use becomes noticeable, it can still be written off or excused as merely atypical. Addicts tend to orient their activities around their addictive behavior; they may forego friends and activities where drinking or drug use is not featured. Some may isolate themselves; others may change their circle of friends in order to be with people who drink or use in the same way they do. They engage in faulty yet persuasive alcoholic reasoning, willing to take anything as evidence that they do not have a problem; no amount of reasoning will persuade them otherwise. Each time the addict makes a promise to cut down or stop but does not, the chains get more constricting.
Fertility, depression, Parkinson’s, fitness, hunger levels, pain, and asthma are a few of the things the inert wonder drug can help treat.
Why did the placebo work—even after patients were told they weren’t getting real medicine? Expectations play a role, Dr. Kaptchuk says. Even more likely is that patients were conditioned to a positive environment, and the innovative approach and daily ritual of taking the pill created an openness to change, he says.
Do placebos work on the actual condition, or on patients’ perception of their symptoms? In a study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Kaptchuk’s team rotated 46 asthma patients through each of four types of treatment: no treatment at all, an albuterol inhaler, a placebo inhaler and sham acupuncture. As each participant got each treatment, researchers induced an asthma attack and measured the participant’s lung function and perception of symptoms. The albuterol improved measured lung function compared with placebo. But the patients reported feeling just as good whether getting placebo or the active treatment.
“Right now, I think evidence is that placebo changes not the underlying biology of an illness, but the way a person experiences or reacts to an illness,” Dr. Kaptchuk says.
The list of evidence in the article at WSJ is impressive. I’m amazed by how our experience of medicine is so closely tied to the qualitative outcome of medicine.
They are compliments. Consider the digital 3-D cadaver system being used by NYU Medical:
In the N.Y.U. lab, Chana Rich, a 21-year-old first-year student from Fairfield, Conn., dissected an older, female cadaver. But the dead woman had undergone a number of surgeries during her lifetime, and her body was now missing its appendix, spleen and right lung.
“She’s skinny and female,” Ms. Rich said, “so sometimes it’s hard to visualize the smaller vessels.”
A few minutes later, Ms. Rich was in the projection room, isolating the liver of the virtual cadaver and examining the blood vessels connected to it.
“In a cadaver, if you remove an organ, you cannot add it back in as if it were never removed,” she said as she adjusted her 3-D glasses. “Plus, this is way more fun than a textbook.”
But her colleague, Susanna Jeurling, a first-year medical student from Washington, disagreed. Dissecting a real cadaver, she said, gives students a unique, tactile understanding of the body.
“I don’t think this will ever replace cadavers,” said Ms. Jeurling, 24. “There’s something about being able to hold it and turn it in your hand.”
It isn’t either/or – both Rich and Jeurling are right about the benefits of their preferred way of learning. Combining resources instead of presuming one replaces the other is a far better way to think about new tech.
Ekso Bionics is a company to watch. Building exoskeletons for everyday use by paraplegics is their goal by 2014. Erika Strickland’s “Good-bye, Wheelchair, Hello Exoskeleton” highlights the progress of some of Ekso’s first patients and the potential in the near future:
[Eythor] Bender, Ekso Bionics’ CEO, is confident that controlling Eksos will come to feel utterly natural for the people who rely on them for mobility. “People talk about robots taking over, especially in factories, and taking away our jobs. But the way we see it is, if you can’t beat them, join them!” says Bender. “We are joining with the robots. And this has the ability to make us stronger, more productive, and to improve our quality of life.”
As the technology gets lighter, more powerful, and less expensive to manufacture, it’s hard not to imagine exoskeletons proliferating.
What people are able to do with the Kinect and Wii continues to blow my mind. Nintendo and Microsoft would do the world a great service if they opened-up their tech to the mod community for non-profit purposes.
Eddy Nahmias explains why if you’re going to argue free will doesn’t exist, we better make damn sure we’re all talking about the same thing:
The sciences of the mind do give us good reasons to think that our minds are made of matter. But to conclude that consciousness or free will is thereby an illusion is too quick. It is like inferring from discoveries in organic chemistry that life is an illusion just because living organisms are made up of non-living stuff. Much of the progress in science comes precisely from understanding wholes in terms of their parts, without this suggesting the disappearance of the wholes. There’s no reason to define the mind or free will in a way that begins by cutting off this possibility for progress.
Our brains are the most complexly organized things in the known universe, just the sort of thing that could eventually make sense of why each of us is unique, why we are conscious creatures and why humans have abilities to comprehend, converse, and create that go well beyond the precursors of these abilities in other animals. Neuroscientific discoveries over the next century will uncover how consciousness and thinking work the way they do because our complex brains work the way they do.
Philosophers and scientists alike, take heed: define what it is you’re talking about. Don’t presume shared jargon.
