- gavin & stacey
- taxi swipes bus
- cookshop - Mr Rogers, Hunter S. Thompson, Rabbit
- pastis
- paris commune - chicken with Fred, China
- cafe select - hidden backroom behind the kitchen, magic tricks, ji
Psychology Support for the Caching Theory
Thanks to Hillary (via Chuck) for sending on this article.
Kids Have Better Memories Than Parents
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Next time, maybe you'll believe your kid. Small children apparently have better memories than their parents, researchers reported on Thursday.
They found a 5-year-old could beat most adults on a recognition memory test, at least under specific conditions. And the reason is that adults know too much.
"It's one case where knowledge can actually decrease memory accuracy," said Vladimir Sloutsky, director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, who led the study.
For their study, researchers showed 77 young children and 71 college students pictures of cats, bears and birds. The study was designed to make the volunteers look at the pictures but they did not know what was being tested.
Writing in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers said the children, with an average age of 5, were accurate 31 percent of the time in identifying pictures of animals they had seen earlier, while the adults were accurate only 7 percent of the time.
The reason, Sloutsky believes, is that children used a different form of reasoning called similarity-based induction when they analyzed the pictures. When shown subsequent pictures of animals they looked carefully to see if the animal looked similar to the original cat.
Adults, however, used category-based induction -- once they determined whether the animal pictured was a cat, they paid no more attention. So when they were tested later, the adults didn't recognize the pictures as well as the children.
"The adults didn't care about a specific cat-- all they wanted to know was whether the animal was a cat or not," Sloutsky said.
And when taught to use category-based induction like adults, the children's ability to remember dropped to the level of adults.
Courage, Courage, Courage
Six months since we've seen each other. Too long to not talk with a good friend.
We really began with a book entitled Little Children. He described it as about parents in their 30's and, yes, saddening.
"What kind of sadness? What was the lament?"
"Well, it's sort of like Chekhov, simply factual. That's the way it is."
"Chekhov is a wuss. Unrequited whatever. 'It' never happened. I never got what I wanted."
"As a generation, we are a pathetic group of cowards. We have gotten so many great things - education, sympathetic and caring parents, general peace. But we also got this horrible ambiguity, a lack of mooring posts, moral reference points. And so we are equipted, able, perceptive, and yet totally adrift when it comes to real courage. Maybe as a result we are profoundly unmotivated."
We talked about a story of a woman who discovered that there was a need to provide shoes to a group of impoverished children. She began soliciting people and then collecting them in her garage. The idea swelled and now she is looking for warehouse space to house the donations.
Both of us agreed there was something remarkable. Part of it was her automatic action. It wasn't a plan, it was more like a muscle. She had to do it, it was who she is. There is a purity in that and we have an admiration for be who do what they are, especially if it is generous.
That's the other part: in the service of others. The nobility of an act that is entirely for their benefit. As naturally selfish creatures, we have an fascination with people who natually tend towards generousity.
So what about us? We see a certain heroism and yet we want it to almost 'happen' to us. Don't you, God or imagination or courage, recognize the desire to do good? Why don't you pick me to emerge, tap my shoulder as a chosen one?
"I'm lazy. I know all this and yet I still do what I do."
Whatever you want to call it, the thing degrades into an unbearable irony. And that whacked tone is that of our generation. One of the impacts is that we have lost our teleological (toward some end) sense entirely -- unlike our recent ancestors who believed in progress, a destiny and human goal. We, in fact, very recently have lost complete faith in technology to not deliver more liability than the benefit or any other human design to accomplish anything over the longhaul. We're not intending (nor is anything else intending) towards anything. That is a phenominal shift.
Back to Chekhov, David was right. Here is a quote that sum it up brilliantly:
Chekhov belonged to the age which followed the heroic generation of Tolstoy and Dostoevski. At times his characters live, or think that they live, in the world of his predecessors. One is tempted to say that they all seem to have read Tolstoy and Dostoevski and are trying to be Tolstoy and Dostoevski characters. But Chekhov has lost the passion of his predessors because he has lost the faith which sustains it. He and often his characters are skeptics rather than believers. The soul searchings of his personages are not terrible but, frequently, ridiculous, and it is their futility rather than their tragedy which most impresses him. Whereas Tolstoy and Dostoevski were prophets, he is a critic and a satirist. They believed; he doubts. They saw tragedy; he sees, at most, pathos, usually tinged with absurdity.
So our lack of courage is what bothers me. We far more pathetic and need to inspire each other towards possibility. In the word of 1001 Arabia nights, the purpose of it all is to cultivate enthusiasm.
Travel and the Cache
One more piece on time. A reply to a comment on the original post:
The next piece of the puzzle (as the person alluded) is that it is possible to travel and, alas, never leave. There are certainly obvious ways to do this -- eat at McDonalds in Prague, stay at the Four Seasons in Bombay -- but there are less obvious mis-takes we all tend to make.
Even those of us that are lucky enough to adventure and go to new places will often fail to see things with innocence, instead dropping into an all too habitual mode of comparisons.
We have this bias towards seeing things as 'like' other things (as with the cache problems of false assumption). You look at an arch and it reminds you of one you saw in a book. You have this tea and it reminds you of an orange. Part of it is how we learn, part of it is overreaching on the part of our somewhat pathetic brains (out of fear, maybe just trying to keep rational balance).
(I think there was a New Yorker cartoon or a David Byrne lyric where the person is looking out at a great mountain vista and turns to his companion to say, "gosh, it's so beautiful. It almost reminds me of this postcard I saw.)
This is NOT an easy thing to solve. Even being very conscious of this problem, you'll find that many of your conversations with locals will involve descriptions based on what things are like in America or more often
your conversations with traveling companions are about things familiar.
There is this Concept that the poet Keats came up with - a bit heady but worth a remark - Negative Capability. It is a state in which a person "is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason". I like that "irritable reaching after the fact" part the best. It's could be looked at as similar to the tendency to reach into the cache.
I found an academic interpretation of Negative Capability that is better than anything I could hack together. It described quiet perfectly what 'seeing the world' can be, especially in travel. So here it is:
"It implies the capacity to engage in a non-defensive way with change, without being overwhelmed by the ever-present pressure merely to react. It also indicates empathy and even a certain flexibility of character, the ability 'to tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment' (Hutter, 1982: 305)."
Phew. It's a lot, but it's so right on. To really experience those new places without any processing. Just to take them in, not think as much. It really is telling the commentary of the mind to chill out and take a
breather.
There is no doubt in my mind (ha) that this is our problem back home but I'm not sure in our modern existence we can do much more than treat it like an unruly kid. Keep it on a balanced diet (not too much sugar) and give it a timeout when appropriate.
I don't know how much this does change as one gets older than I am. I do have a sense the some folks do arrive at a greater peace. Some anxieties die down and with it some of the commentary. There may be an opportunity to re-open one's eyes, see things anew, but it's probably very individual. Maybe you can talk about having come to some resolution about 'you' if that's opened more space to see more other things (people more clearly, the world more clearly). Essentially, can one more easily take oneself out of the picture?
Theories of Time's Passing: Clearing the Cache
This letter was in response to a posting on TimeGoesBy.net - a phenomenal blog on growing older. Here's the editor's original post.
For the sake of intellectual efficiency, our minds cache vast amounts of information for quick, later reference. Just as Web browsers store images of frequently and recently visited sites, the human brain stores parts of the world that we interact with everyday such as the shape of an eggplant, the golden retriever that belongs to our neighbor, our neighbors themselves.
As a result, much of what we think of as experience is actually the act of accessing the cached data rather than processing the real-life visual or auditory or other experience.
As there are fewer experiences, over time, involving new data and an increased number using cached data, the world seems to move faster because we are processing old data for the second, fiftieth, hundredth time (so it really is faster). And because there is a fundamentally different experience in seeing something for the first time and seeing it again, in one sense, we do not experience cached data, we merely process it.
To explain it another way, think of the computer again. If we access an image locally (the cache in our minds), it is pretty much guaranteed to be exactly what we saw before (yawn). If we have to go out to the network (ah, the world) to get the information, there is the chance the world may surprise us with something different.
Metal and silicon computers use the cached data only when it is exactly the same as the current reference. Humans, however, are much less strict. We are willing to replace even modestly similar experiences with a cached reference. This is a separate abstracting function in our mind: this golden retriever is close enough to the last one I saw that I don’t have to “see” it again. It could be a very different animal – a temperamental golden lab, for instance - but a person still sees that other referenced benevolent dog.
(A digression: as my nine-month-old son is learning what a book is, he uses what seems to be a parallel process in learning the abstraction that his Very Hungry Caterpillar and my Incomplete Education are both books.)
To summarize: time seems to accelerate as we get older because:
We tend to increasing refer to cached data because that cache seems increasing to encompasses our experience.
We tend to access cached data in cases where it is not an exact match with current experience (a false assumption).
The process snowballs as we gain a sort of self-righteous confidence that the world is what it is (the grumpy old man problem), and our ennui makes us lazy. Our mind-set biases us towards dipping into the cache versus dipping into the world.
If you accept this theory, the answer to slowing down time would seem to be to find creative ways to “clear the cache.” My modest experience has been that travel can do this. That is, if you go to a very different place and experience it as it is, then you can return to the your world and experience things fresh again. (A month in rural India or Morocco or, for most of us, The Bronx should do the trick.)
If travel is not available, there are more commonplace rituals we can use to clear our personal caches. Meditation and other methods of mindfulness may be a route.
It could be that one of our worst difficulties occurs interacting with other people. It probably accelerates the caching (Point 1); increases the false assumption rate (Point 2); and definitely exacerbates our belief in grandiose assumptions that we know what all people are like (Point 3). I haven’t really thought too much about this last part, but I have a gut sense this is true.
Lastly, I keep thinking of this Thomas Hardy quote from Tess of the d'Urbervilles:
“Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration.”
I think that’s really the crux. Experience (in time) is not really related to time (per se) but to intensity of the experience. And the level of intensity depends on how intimately or powerfully or emotionally we are interacting with the world versus our cache.
Tasting and Drinking
There is a theme recurring -- a growing distinction between appreciation and action. I recently heard it when a wine person was explaining the difference between tasting wine (looking at it, smelling it, whooshing in your mouth and observing the flavors) and drinking wine (unconscously pouring it down your trap). Clearly I was in the latter camp.
Then I began to see it more as I played with my son - 7 months - as we would have moments of great communication...if I was paying attention and not just doing those fun, annecdotal Dad-like things. You can gesture in life (very convincingly) because many life's gestures happen to be repeated. But to act, meaning somehow to derive from a particular presence, is oddly more complex.
I'm not intentionally trying to be Buddhist about this - be mindful, pay attention, be here now (mr. watts) - but there are similarities. The experience with my son can be very pleasurable in either mode, but there is a deep resonance and subsequently different, newer, creative actions when we are there, together. Another way to describe it is that there is a certain innocence or risk in a non-idomatic interaction with the world. Maybe it is even anti-idomatic, requiring an intentional opposition to certain chunks.
Software is a way of codification a set of routines, processes, and intellectual systems. It wouldn't or shouldn't be surprising to us that the pot should spill over that codification should begin to feel comfortable. We embed (word of the year) so many functions (delete, undo) given that we interact with computers and phone and the like, that one should expect that specific scripts become comfortable. We look for plug-and-play. We intend life to be backwards compatable, make it such, and then are troubled by a legacy-oriented life that is less interesting.
Enough things in human life were and are common - washing, moving, eating - and one can understand the desire to try to 'just get through them as fast as possible'. The intention is to get onto something else, something dramatically more enjoyable and meaningful. But the mode begats the mode. We find it hard not to add the next sequence onto the one that proceded it. Our approach carries over into a more enjoyable experience and we see, feel, hear less.
So after that wine thing, I decided, "Maybe I could ALWAYS taste. Maybe I could make a mission to bias toward interaction vs action."
From everything I can tell, it does require practice...or (shit) mindfulnes. You come around to having to repeat at minimum a (routine) approach to escape a routine experience. Sort of like having a certain rigourous discipline or training (say, music or mathematics), and then within that order finding a freedom (maybe because of that order?).
Well either way, it would suggest a certain inefficiency in meaning. I ate a dinner the other night at a restaurant Moto, where we were treated to course after course of flavor, invention, pun, riff and so much more that I couldn't understand. There were animals flown from across the globe to be on these plates, wine from 6 or seven countries (spaning about as many years in time), ideas that worked these pieces into forms and states (I'm not exaggerativing). Well, so much of the rich experience of this trip (nothing less) was the 50 or so stories that were part of it. The waiter tells us about the mollusk's shell forming from the beating waves, the diver who must pry it from the rock, the fedex that gets it hear every day. Later, someone explains the preparation of the ribeye - three dips, three flames - and you can then taste each layer of transformation.
If you read certain fiction which does have layers of symbols such that you begin to watch out for them, then you begin to pick them up (another foot, another mention of the color red) and the clues (dear Hansel) create another frequency that you begin to hear more clearly. It does require a life where there are creators that lay down the lower frequencies of meaning (people actually creating vs recreating). I do not know whether being in an efficient mode (recreating) much of the time precludes use from being a fully experiential mode (creating) some of the time. But there is apparently some significant tradeoff. I think a mythic vision of things is being made much too difficult.
A quick link to slowly maturing wine notes.
Sleep for Beginners
The book is actually Sleep Disorders for Dummies, and the question is actually why there isn't tons more research on this. It's 1/3rd of our life (at least it's supposed to be) and we have no real sense (at least not anecdotally) how the process works, tricks of the trade (that sheep thing is nonsense) or what the REAL context is for our health. I'm fascinated by the shift between times of good sleep and bad sleep and horrible sleep. The impact of eating within hours, drinking, coffee, and most importantly images.
There is a connection that I'm trying to isolate between the our imagination and our dreams/sleep. Consider the imaginal experience you're having as you put your head to the pillow. Are there images involved (or just thoughts), are they measured (paced vs. manic), what are they referencing? Initial thoughts are some testing shows that there is something about TV pre-bed that seems to surpress to imaginal experience AS I'm falling asleep and reduce the depth of dream state during sleep. I've tried to replicated by using surfing intensely online before bed, and there is a similar effect.
My curiousity is in the spontaneous imaginal experience that is probably at the core of our dreams, and during our waking life, we usually encounter during reading or other non-intentionally meditative activities. Is the television experience an sufficiently powerful image experience that our own imaginal interpretation/referencing sort of gives up.
What's so interesting is that cinema doesn't have the same effect (at least some cinema) and the mind is provoked into further imagination. Admittedly, this is only one data point.
Last year there were two major research studies that showed correlations between TV/Video Games and screwed up sleep in children. Story . It suggests that flashing lights might be resetting circadian rhythms. Too simplistic.
Literary (Whale) Moose
The Dwaft is a remarkable Swedish novel from the 40's that so few people know about but keeps popping up in my life like a whack-a-mole. Written by Par Lagerkvist and helped win him the Nobel. It's the diary of the most evil creature since Shakespeare's Yago. He may be even more complex. The voice is so unique, so dark, you'll never forget it.
Despite working in a bookstore at one time, I would have never known about it unless it landed in my lap (which it did). And given that book has drifted in and out of print for a while, you first task is just to find it.
10 years ago I was introduced to it by Joel Jacobson who claimed it was a treasure. After reading it a few times (which I don't normally do), I decided to write a monologue from it. Try to distill the voice out. Maybe Wallace Shawn could play the role? Well, I had an actor read a few of my 'translated' pages and that pretty much shut down the project. I couldn't get down what I was hearing in my head.
Last year, I went into a friend of mine's office - he, Josh Schneider, is a very interesting guy inandof himself, and after talking business, he asked his secretary to, "give him a copy of the Dwarf". Sort of half-listening, sort of in shock, I looked down at this screenplay for the book. He too, had been taken by this 26-inch curmudgeon, and had spent the last 5 years trying to get the film rights from Lagerkvist's offspring. Multiple trips to Sweden, lots of convincing and begging, and Josh had secured the rights. Then he grabbed a writer and went to work.
The had a very different take but, hey, it was a take. I read through 3 different versions, gave comments and I keep up with the project. It's still very much in play.
So online tonight I stumble across this great commenary from a brilliant oddball reviewer. First, let it be renoted that very few people read the book, and a proportionally small number people write about it...at least in English. Everything that has been written is that much more out-of-print than the book itself.
This 'Literary Moose' has pretty much consumed a good chunk of high-end literature, especially the darker Nordic and Eastern European blends. Claiming to be very much in his youth (~30 yrs old), he's doing most of this reading in English (his third language, native is Polish) and writes a solid stylized review. Even better is his complete (and perfectly clear) rejection of soliticitation, ideas of adding comments to the site, compensation, etc. He pretty much says, "I enjoy reading, I enjoy writing about what I read. If you enjoy this site, so be it. But please, do not bother me." That's my paraphrase and my snip at the end. Lots of really good thinking on the site.
If you're really interested in learn more about Par, here's one of the few good places to start.
I've also found an actor who does a one-man play using "bodymasks and life-size puppets in Hebrew, English or German."
