Vita Beans - Xplore the Magic in your Mind!

A long thank you note!

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:27:00 +0000

Almost an year & a half back, I met an interesting family at the Bangalore airport. They were a middle aged couple with 2 kids. A boy named Akash, who was in Class 7 and a girl named Nidhi who was in Class 6. I think the dad was somewhere in his early 40s. I remember them today, because a simple little conversation I had with them has turned out into a really powerful idea in the education space.

I was talking to them & telling them about how I run a company called Vita Beans. They were naturally surprised that a guy who looks like a high school kid had started a company & they wanted to know more. And since I anyway love talking about my startup, I started telling them about how we started as a research project almost 2 years before & how we built our first simulation engine that simulates human behaviour in a variety of environments. We had used a myriad of research frameworks from neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence & fuzzy logic. They didn't seem to understand much except that we were tremendously successful in getting high accuracies & quality results from our work.

Somewhere down the conversation, the mother said something very interesting. She said "There is something I always wanted to know. You know when I take Nidhi with me to a grocery store or a shopping market, the shopkeeper tells me the price of all the items I have purchased before billing me.... Item1 - 30Rs, Item2 - 217Rs, Item3 - 125Rs & so on. And within seconds of him completing the list, my daughter looks at me & says - Mom, it's 1231 rupees. Now... I know she's right because she has developed a habit of doing that every time and she is always right. But the shopkeeper does not know that and so he takes out a calculator, punches in the numbers... Voila! 1231 rupees it is. He then gives me a smile & a complicated look that says - Wow, you have a genius for a daughter there!. And I'm all smiles & proud of her" she was already beaming at her daughter when saying this.

She continued "But then we come home & an hour later, she shows me her marks card & it reads - mathematics... 42/100. I don't know why but I suddenly loose my cool & start yelling at her - You're so dumb at maths. You need to work hard, I'm sending you to tuition starting tomorrow. I know she is good at maths, but I don't know why she scores less. I don't know what to do"

She then looks at me & says "You said you do all those stuff about human behaviour simulation. Do you understand why she scores less in exams when she really is intelligent?"

Frankly, I did not know! When we were in school, my younger brother too was something similar. He could remember the batting averages of every damn cricketer from 1983 to the present day. But his super memory didn't work as well when he had to remember his lessons. And I had no clue why! Neither did my parents.

I just shrugged, looked at the mother & said "I don't know why! But I'm very sure it has nothing to do with mathematics as such" But that got me thinking. When I came back, we discussed it in my team, we spoke to some of the professors working in the field of learning & cognitive sciences. We took time, but we tried to understand why Nidhi was scoring less at maths.

After a while, we found that we were not alone. A few other research groups have also been excited about the connection between learning & cognitive functions. We looked more into such results & came up with frameworks of our own to translate many of the research findings that we learnt into something that kids can understand & use. It seemed like we were finally able to answer - why is it that kids fare differently in situations which demand the use of same skills, but in different ways.

But before we converted our frameworks into some sort of a product, there was another challenge that caught our attention. This has been a problem which grown ups (read parents, teachers, adults) would most of the time not even acknowledge as something that is a problem. And that is - we, as kids, are inherently lazy. We are lazy to get up in the morning, we are lazy to iron our clothes & if there is an exam on that day, we are lazy to even have breakfast. We wait for our Mothers to spoon feed our breakfast as we feverously glance through our textbooks. In spite of knowing about our laziness, our entire system of education & learning tries to pull us out of this laziness before it can teach us something that can change our lives. A tough job, ain't it!

On the other hand, we are also super-active & enthusiastic about certain other things. Things which we enjoy doing, things which make us happy. Grown ups often cannot even understand our excitement in many cases. So we looked at these two contrasting tendencies in children & thought - why not build a tool that puts the kids in a fun & addictive gaming environment & weave the learnings into the environment so that they automatically pick it up as a side effect?

And so we started working on the design for a tool, called MindMaps. It is a cognitive tool that lets you profile & train your brain functions in an addictive & enjoyable way. The brain functions can be the ones like Memory, Attention, Problem Solving, Learning & Flexibility or they can even be skills like Speech, Maths & Vocabulary.

We have been working non-stop to convert our designs into a tool that focuses as much on user experience (if not more) as on the utility and usefulness of the product. The learning has been great so far & the first opinions from folks in the industry has also been exceptionally good. And somewhere in between the excitement - I feel like thanking the couple & their kids, Akash & Nidhi, who got us into this space an year and a half ago.

I don't know what the names of Akash & Nidhi's parents are! I never asked, they never told. But here's me saying Thank You! with all my heart.

Revisiting - Blink !

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:46:00 +0000

Much of our understanding of mind-reading comes from two remarkable scientists, a teacher and his pupil: Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. Tomkins was the teacher.

He was born in Philadelphia, at the turn of the last century, the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers, and was the author of "Affect, Imagery, Consciousness," a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant. He was a legendary talker.

At the end of a cocktail party, a crowd of people would sit, rapt, at Tomkins's feet, and someone would say, "One more question!" and they would all sit there for another hour and a half, as Tomkins held forth on, say, comic books, a television sitcom, the biology of emotion, his problem with Kant, and his enthusiasm for the latest fad diets, all enfolded into one extended riff.

During the Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan's Upper East Side. At the track, where he sat in the stands for hours, staring at the horses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor. "He had a system for predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him, based on their emotional relationship," Ekman remembers. If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or something like that-- no one really knew for certain.) Tomkins believed that faces--even the faces of horses--held valuable clues to our inner emotions and motivations.

He could walk into a post office, it was said, go over to the "Wanted" posters, and, just by looking at mug shots, tell you what crimes the various fugitives had committed. "He would watch the show 'To Tell the Truth,' and without fault he could always pick the person who was lying and who his confederates were," his son, Mark, recalls. He actually wrote the producer at one point to say it was too easy, and the man invited him to come to New York, go backstage, and show his stuff." Virginia Demos, who teaches psychology at Harvard, recalls having long conversations with Tomkins. "We would sit and talk on the phone, and he would turn the sound down while Jesse Jackson was talking to Michael Dukakis, at the Democratic National Convention. And he would read the faces and give his predictions on what would happen. It was profound."

Paul Ekman first encountered Tomkins in the early 1960's. Ekman was then a young psychologist, just out of graduate school, and he was interested in studying faces. Was there a common set of rules, he wondered, that governed the facial expressions that human beings made? Silvan Tomkins said that there were. But most psychologists said that there weren't. The conventional wisdom of the time held that expressions were culturally determined--that we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions.

Ekman didn't know who to believe. So he traveled to Japan, Brazil, and Argentina--and to remote tribes in the jungles of the Far East--carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces. To his amazement, everywhere he went people agreed on what those expressions meant. Tomkins was right.

Not long afterwards, Tomkins came to visit Ekman at his laboratory in San Francisco. Ekman had just tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, who were hostile and murderous and who had a homosexual ritual where pre-adolescent boys were required to serve as courtesans for the male elders of the tribe. For six months, Ekman and his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, had been sorting through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes, focusing just on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen, in order to compare the facial expressions of the two groups. Ekman set up the camera. Tomkins sat in the back. He had been told nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses.

At the end, he went up to the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?" Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and, while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, 'I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too."

Demystifying -

Ancient brain circuits light up so we can judge people on first impressions

'Its almost instantaneous and you can't stop doing it': neuroscientists match scans to human decision making

Ancient neural circuits - the amygdala and posterior cingulate cortex - are active when people form first impressions of new acquaintances.

Photograph: Daniela Schiller/New York University/Nature Neuroscience

Scientists have recorded the gentle flicker of activity that lights up the brain when we form our first impressions of people. The study shows how age-old brain circuitry that evolved to make snap decisions on the importance of objects in the environment is now used in social situations.

Brain scans taken while volunteers formed opinions of new acquaintances found activity surged in an ancient neural circuit that helps us make a rapid assessment of a person's character.

"Humans have always been engaged in making decisions on what's important and what's not, and social decision making is taking advantage of these primary systems in the brain," said Daniela Schiller, who led the study at New York University.

"Whenever you need to assign value to something, you use the same mechanism, whether it's an inanimate object or a person. It's like there's one common currency in the brain."

Previous work by neuroscientists has shown we form our first impressions well within 30 seconds of meeting people. Often, our opinion changes very little after knowing them for longer.

"When you meet a person, they might say something, or look a certain way, or behave a certain way, but you have very little information on which to form an opinion, but it is almost instantaneous and you can't withhold from doing it," said Schiller.

In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, Schiller and scientists from Harvard University took brain scans of 19 volunteers who were asked to form a first impression of a series of fictional characters.

The volunteers were shown faces of men on a computer screen, followed by six sentences that described a mix of good and bad aspects of their character. For example, the person might have picked up his room mate's post on the way home from university, or told a fellow student they were stupid. After reading all of the sentences, the participants were asked to rate how much they liked the person on a scale from one to eight, with eight being the most likable.

Schiller's team then looked through the images from the scanner to see what brain regions had been most active while people formed their first impressions.

The scans showed that two brain regions were involved in opinion-forming, the almond-shaped amygdala, which is linked to regulating emotions, and the posterior cingulate cortex, which is active in making financial decisions and putting values on the outcomes of situations.

"Even when we only briefly encounter others, brain regions that are important in forming evaluations are engaged, resulting in a quick first impression," said Elizabeth Phelps, a co-author on the study at New York University.

Understanding the biological circuits involved with opinion forming might help scientists learn what happens when they are disrupted or fail to activate properly. "It might affect the impressions you have of others, and that could feed into the basis of your relationship with them from then on," said Schiller.

Though, Gladwell captured it well without the mumbo-jumbo in his book, Blink.

Rapid cognition is the sort of snap decision-making performed without thinking about how one is thinking, faster and often more correctly than the logical part of the brain can manage.

Gladwell's discussion of 'thin slicing' is arresting: The secret is knowing which information to discard and which to keep. Our brains are able to perform that work unconsciously; when rapid cognition breaks down, the brain has seized upon a more obvious but less correct predictor.

There are things that can be done to redirect our mind along lines more conducive to accurate thin slicing: we can alter our unconscious biases; we can change products' packaging to something that tests better with consumers; we can analyze numerical evidence and make decision trees; we can analyze all possible facial expressions and their shared meanings, then watch for them on videotape; and we can evade our biases by blind screening, hiding the evidence that will lead us to incorrect conclusions.

They Read Minds

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 05:47:00 +0000

... or thought reading (as they say)

For the basics about multivariate fMRI "mind-reading" techniques, see the video below. Some of it is based on this 2007 Haynes et al paper from Current Biology, described in more detail following the video.

What Haynes et al have done is to ask 8 subjects to freely decide either to add or subtract two numbers, and to select among 4 options an answer corresponding to the task they chose. After repeating this process many times, the authors ran a pattern classifier on the metabolic activity recorded in the brain.
This pattern classifier was run on the unsmoothed fMRI data - smoothing is normally applied because fMRI is thought to be a relatively noisy recording technique. Critically, the use of a pattern classifier allows the use of unsmoothed data (and in fact requires it) because buried within the noise is a distributed signal reflecting the distributed neural patterns encoding the subject's intention. Such data is presumably lost in averaging/smoothing operations.

Haynes et al trained their pattern classifier (a linear support vector machine) using a "multivariate searchlight" (described here) approach. This means that for every recorded voxel, they fed the classifier information about both that voxel and those surrounding it. The classifier was trained on 87.5% of the data (using 8-fold validation), and maps were produced of the classifier's accuracy at each voxel in the brain. These "accuracy maps" were averaged across subjects to produce the following figure:

As you can see above, the results showed that intention is decodable both prior to and during the intended response in numerous regions in the prefrontal cortex. In particular, the anterior & posterior medial prefrontal cortices as well as lateral frontopolar cortex, right middle frontal gyrus, and left operculum contained information that allowed the decoding of intentions at a level significantly above chance. Intentions prior to responses were also decoded based on activity in the temporo-parietal junction, although it is not illustrated in the above figure (see the supporting online material here). Much debate focuses on the precise roles of these regions, but their involvement here would be predicted by the majority of cognitive neuroscientists.

Conspicuously absent from these maps is the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), which has been argued to reflect numerical processing. An interesting possibility is that the numerical processing accomplished by this region cannot be distinguished based on the numerical operation (addition vs. subtraction), which would support a process-independent representation of quantity. Note that this conflicts with some theories of numerical processing in the IPS.

What's fairly amazing about this work is that they used a pretty standard scanner (only 3 tesla) with a reasonable sampling time (a TR of just over 2.7s). Peter Bandettini has suggested that this unsmoothed multivariate approach would benefit from higher resolution MRI, but Haynes et al have demonstrated surprising success with much more widely-available technology.

Soon we'll be reading your mind!

However, all we ask you to do is create your Vita profile sitting on your bean bag in your apartment by just clicking your mouse/pressing space bar. And, I can assure you that although it wouldn't involve any mumbo-jumbo and wouldn't put a hole in your pocket; it would for sure help you understand and explore things about yourself that you'd never expect a machine to be able to figure out! !

Split Brain - Literally

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:49:00 +0000

A marvel to observe and know which side of your brain does what !

To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemisphers (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway.

Here's what happens as a result:

Psychology quote of the day

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."

- William James, American psychologist and philosopher (1842 - 1910)

Letting my common sense do its bit ... new study shows this ! ( why do people even bother and take all that pain, I fail to grasp ?)

Special ain't so special?

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 04:04:00 +0000

In 1920, a few villagers caught 2 girls in remote countryside west of Calcutta. They had been spotted previously with adult wolves and were found in a wolf den with two wolf cubs. The den was dug up, the mother wolf killed and the girls taken away. J A L Singh, an Anglican missionary, who ran an orphanage, took them in and gave them their names - Kamala & Amala.

Kamala was thought to be five or six years of age and Amala around two years old. They were dishevelled, ate raw meat in the manner of dogs, and howled but could not talk. The were indifferent to temperature - a characteristic of people leading rugged lives - had sharp hearing, good vision in the dark and a strange gleaming look in their eyes.

Kamala and Amala stood and walked on all fours. Kamala was so adept as a quadruped that she could outstrip on four legs anyone on two legs and climb and jump easily. But like many other children of her feral background she never seriously mastered walking upright and resorted to hands and knees when needing to. Amala died the year after she was found. Kamala survived into her teens and managed to learn only some three dozen words.

It is interesting to note that Kamala & many other feral children successfully managed to blend very well into the lifestyles of animals they were raised by. If Kamala continued to live with the wolves, she would never realize that she had the ability to speak & master a language, or the ability to walk upright. To Kamala, these ordinary human abilities might have appeared as superpowers!

It makes me wonder if there are many such superpowers hidden inside all of us. Take the example of Kim Peek (The Rain Man). Kim remembers everything, literally everything. Ofcourse it comes with a price - social & developmental disabilities (especially motor skills). While the origin of Kim's abilities have been traced to congenital abnormalities in the brain, it becomes exciting once we remember that the human brain is extremely malleable in our early years. In other words, it is highly possible that a child can grow these abnormalities during it's early development purely because of the way it is raised. Kamala & other feral children have more than proved this to be true.

But why then is it so rare to find guys like Kim with extraordinary abilities? My bet is that the answer lies in the human tendency to outcast everything that is 'not like them'. Kim himself is still considered a disabled person - someone who needs to cured. No wonder that most people who display special abilities today are either raised by non-humans or picked up these abilities even before they were born amidst us. The rules & guidelines based on which our society is built, only promotes those behaviors & abilities that make it easy for new kids to blend with the adults - be like everyone else.

Maybe it is possible to develop abilities like that of Kim & many more like him, without having to compromise social skills or any other essential abilities of the human mind. If only we were more open to explore lifestyles that appear alien, in comparison with the majority that form our social order.

Unconnected Dots

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:25:00 +0000

Leslie Brothers attached electrodes to the brain of a monkey which was watching videotapes of the face of another monkey. She found neurons selectively responsive to the other monkey’s facial expression of emotions. An identical behavior is found in human infants where the selectively repond to expressions on adult faces.

A child invariably stares longer at an object that you drop out of your hand, but does not fall down. Somehow, it knows that all objects are supposed to fall to the ground - gravity. We all are prejudiced even before birth, that the light (sunlight) always comes from the top, which is why the same shaded-circle appears bulged when seen at an angle & depressed when seen upside-down.

All these support Darwin's view that emotional & cognitive behaviors are remnants of actions that were functional in evolutionary history. Since the feeling of self-awareness & consciousness is invariably linked with emotions, this suggests that the notion of Self itself might be an evolutionary functionality.

On the other hand, William James held that emotions are internal perceptions of physiological processes in our own bodies — tense facial muscles, sweaty palms, and especially the effects of the autonomic nervous system, such as a pounding heart, faster breathing, and higher blood pressure. Recent works on Somatic Theory by Antonio Damascio also strongly uphold this view. This seems to suggest a bodily (somatic) source for Self.

In a very different plane, Donald Griffin has studied the mental abilities of insects and animals. He associates consciousness with complex and novel behavior in changing or unfamiliar circumstances. For instance, Bees can communicate the direction and distance of food sources and can distinguish between water, nectar, and a possible hive site; they do their waggle dance only when other bees are around, but they have limited ability to modify their behavior in new circumstances. African Grey Parrots can talk excellently but they fail to comprehend the meaning of Self. They often refer to themseves in third person saying - "Polly needs water" instead of saying "I need water". Some apes can recognize parts of their body in a mirror & even communicate to some extent symbolically & even with the use of sounds. But their communicative abilities are greatly dwarfed in front of that found in humans to reveal anything more than evolutionary impressions of Self.

But works of Griffin & others bring out a curious observation - the notion of Self began to emerge only after organisms started to indulge in a social life. Greater the complexity of social interactions & social needs, the more expressed the recognition of self & our feelings towards it.

Though there are many such alternate views to view the source of emotions, self & consciousness, they don't seem to be in contradiction with each other. They just seem to be talking about the same source, seen from different angles. Will all the views converge? Can there be a unified theory for defining everything that is human?

I was - I am

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 05:18:00 +0000

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.

- Kurt Lewin (American Psychologist)

I'm often tempted to believe - I means everything that is unique to my existence. Just to see if such a definition has any relevance in the chain of evolution, let's take a blue-green algae with a boring lifestyle. Broadly speaking, it does 3 things over the course of it's life -

Interact with the environment.
Reproduce.
Die. (Woah! Isn't it remarkably similar to our lives)

So all that can be unique to an algae's existence is - the way it interacts with the environment. Within the lifetime of an algae, this way is completely determined by its genes. Crude as it may seem, millions of years of evolution has added just 1 more category of activity in the lives of humans -

Store our interactions & learn from them.

While an algae can learn only from it's genes, humans can learn in innumerable ways. But this small change is sufficient to completely alter the meaning of I. While the way an algae interacts with it's environment evolves over thousands of generations, the way we interact with our environment evolves with every interaction. So apart from the way we interact, the interactions themselves become a part of us, part of I. No prizes for guessing what takes care of this - the human brain.

Looking through the glass, this essentially means -

I = genes (in algae) = genes + brain (in humans)
Understanding an algae = understanding it's genes + it's environment ; Understanding humans = understanding our genes + brain + environment
While I evolves over generations in an algae, it evolves continually in humans

While most of the things I've mentioned above might appear common sensical, they give a direction to delve deeper. On a different note, returning to common sense is also essential to discard some of the long held prejudices & start afresh.

Amidst all this, am I suggesting that - it is I or the notion of Self which has been driving evolution all along?

Weird Connections

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:39:00 +0000

"Truth is but a feeling, which is just chemical & electrical signals in the human brain. So what then do we mean by a quest for truth? Where then, do we hope to reach in pursuit of truth?"

Often, explorations in the areas of Cosmology, Human Mind/Brain and similar fields tend to blurr the difference between science & religion. Because they are all lands of uncertainty. And like every other uncertain world (any world for that matter), they are founded & built on beliefs, not established facts.

The root cause of this uncertainty, is multiplicity of interactions - too many wires in the circuitry. What brings life to the whole design is not the wires, but the way the wires are connected. It is the connections that make the design - alive!

Ironically, these very connections that keep us alive, also make it extremely difficult for us to comprehend everything that is connected with being alive. Here's why - Can an organism alone, without it's environment be called alive? Can there be a mind to think, if there is no world to cause thoughts? Philosophical as they may sound, I feel it's very necessary to understand this relation between our mind & our environment, the society & all the other minds around us.

#1. In a particularly interesting case, a lady by name Diane Fletcher was being treated by David Milner, a neuropsychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife. She had been blinded in the traditional sense of the world because of a gas tragedy. At one point, Dr. Milner held up a pencil. "What's this?" he asked. As usual, Diane looked puzzled. Then she did something unexpected. "Here, let me see it," she said, reaching out and deftly taking the pencil from his hand. Dr. Milner was stunned, not by her ability to identify the object by feeling it but by her dexterity in taking it from his hand. As Diane reached for the pencil, her fingers moved swiftly and accurately toward it, grasped it and carried it back to her lap in one fluid motion. You'd never have guessed that she was blind. It was as if some other person—an unconscious zombie inside her—had guided her actions.

(from Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran)

Cases like the above revealed that even the simplest of human abilities like vision (you may say it's not so simple after all), is not something that is realized in a specific region of the brain. Even if the pathway to give you the sensation of vision is damaged, the pathways to help you process the information your eyes receive & act accordingly may be intact, like in the above case - multiplicity.

So in the above example, can we say that Diane knew what the world around looked like even though she did not feel the knowledge? Doesn't it mean that our existence has much more to it than the feeling of existence? What then does it mean when we say - "I pursue ..." , if there is another (or many) I within us that pursues something else that we might be completely unaware of?

It's precisely such a multiplicity of existence (of particles) that drove classical physics into the quantum arena. Can there similarly be a new way to define/redefine the way we understand - I ?

Certainly Uncertain

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:18:00 +0000

"Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."

- Stuart Sutherland (British psychologist)

#1. More than fifty years ago a middle−aged woman walked into the clinic of Kurt Goldstein, a world−renowned neurologist with keen diagnostic skills. The woman appeared normal and conversed fluently; indeed, nothing was obviously wrong with her. But she had one extraordinary complaint — every now and then her left hand would fly up to her throat and try to strangle her. She often had to use her right hand to wrestle the left hand under control, pushing it down to her side — much like Peter Sellers portraying Dr. Strangelove. She sometimes even had to sit on the murderous hand, so intent was it on trying to end her life.

#2. Not long ago, at the Rivermead Rehabilitation Center in Oxford, England, I gripped a woman's lifeless left hand and, raising it, held it in front of her eyes. "Whose arm is this?" She looked me in the eye and huffed, "What's that arm doing in my bed?" "Well, whose arm is it?" "That's my brother's arm," she said flatly. But her brother was nowhere in the hospital. He lives somewhere in Texas.

(from Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran)

The above two cases are only a handful of clinical examples which have repeatedly questioned the nature of what we call as Self or Consciousness. A few cases have even ended up as interesting lawsuits that fell deep into moral, spiritual & psychological grounds.

During my college life at BITS Pilani, I've had a good share of conversations that revolved around selfishness, altruism, social definitions of good-bad & so on. And at all those times, it was very evident that most issues related to human values, behavior & evolution, inevitably lead us into uncertain grounds. The reason for uncertainty being - the lack of objective understanding of everything that is remotely human. But I've always believed it is possible, to understand ourselves in a much deeper & scientific way than we presently do.

This blog will be my attempt to put together everything that comes close to answering the mysteries surrounding our understanding of Self, Consciousness & Human Behavior. I'm not sure how well individual posts I write here connect later on, but here I am.... pondering on things that are certainly uncertain.

Vita Beans - The Story

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:18:00 +0000

An Intro

All that today's mind-reading tools can tell you is that you are intuitive-extrovert-thinking-etc.. type or something like that. With new breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology & Artificial Intelligence algorithms, we see an opportunity to add predictive advantage to the technology behind understanding how the human mind works.

Vita Beans gives you something which you always wanted - A tool to tell you how your mind works! Whether a specific experience makes you happy, sad & even better, what specific decisions you are likely to take in real-life situations.

The Science

"Psychology! It's just a play of words. Deliberately fuzzified theories to hide the fact that psychological models are no better than ordinary guess work in most cases..." - that reflects what many people feel about the apparent vagueness that is a part of traditional psychology. However, recent findings in Neuroscience and a great deal of work done at several major universities over the last few years have provided ways to make psychology more precise.

Not surprisingly, the study of how we make choices has revolved a lot around situations where we surrender ourselves to a choice - addiction. A few years ago, major findings in neuroscience explained how different regions of the brain influence addiction. Since 2005, a lot of new discoveries have succeeded in building models of how these regions & a few more, influence our everyday decision making and preferences that we exhibit.

The Connection

A lot of these theories are used to refine the way we understand and treat patients with psychological disorders. Hence many of the neuropsychological findings have been neglected outside the realm of clinical studies. At Vita Beans, we have integrated many of these models to build a closed system of perception, processing & decision making.

Before we can simulate a person's behavior, we would naturally need a lot of information about the person itself. Most of the methods that exist rely on inductive data representation techniques. However we use deductive data maps which get data from game based interactions with the person. This greatly reduces the amount of data that we need to profile & simulate a person. Our game based interactions also enrich user experience by making it enjoyable as opposed to traditional questionnaire based methods.

An Outro

The thing with non-incremental advancements in technology is that you easily get confused with the multitude of opportunities that it brings to life. It has been the same with us at Vita Beans. Though we are currently targeting areas of recruitment and employee management, we keep building things to quench our curiosity & some of them just for fun!

However, we hope that the dreams that lay ahead will shine much brighter than the ones that lit up the path that lies behind us. This pushes us everyday to nurture new ideas, build new things & get excited about new opportunities. We'd love to hear from you if you think the mysteries surrounding the human mind makes your heart beat faster too...

- Team Vita

10 Tips to...or was it 299 guidlines for ... nah nah its Encyclopedia for ...

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:58:00 +0000

I know you would have gone through all such tips, guidelines, books, lectures, sessions, conferences, talks, clubs ... so on. Else you wouldn't have landed up on this ( I know because I tagged this post under entrepreneurship, startup, iPod, and all those keywords you have subscribed to.)

Encylopedia says : All the above you have done are of NO use^{(conditions apply)}.

(rude shock eh? guess ... if you were smart enough you would have seen it coming yet it feels as a pretty rude shock !)

Lets figure out ... what you encounter during the first 6 months of your startup ( your baby/dream project/ invention or patent cum ATM ... or so to that effect)

Let me walk you through ...

Usual Chores : Yes... you figure out your own means to get these chores done, like getting your company registered, PAN & TAN, Trademarking your logo, Bank account, filing returns et al.

Then while scrolling through your google reader you come across this -

"There's no doubt about it - being a startup in any economic condition is rough, and in the current tumult, mind-bending challenges aren't out of the ordinary. However, I, like most other entrepreneurs I've encountered, am a staunch optimist and thus, even in the face of hardship, seek the silver lining. Tonight, I'd like to share a few of the diamonds in the dung pile that are closest to my heart."

Well, reiterating ... its a lot of high-flying motivation talk n BS ! What happens ( or might ) is

# Living on No Income

The first few months/years of startup life are often waged with salaries that would make college students cringe, but later on, this austerity can be a tremendous asset as you have massively talented engineers & execs that can live on a fraction of what larger firms would need. That extra income can be re-invested in the business for a significant competitive advantage.

# If You Can't Afford Talent, You Have to Learn It Yourself

Well, its the BEST case scenario. I tried it, but ...you can complete it. Instead you need to dabble all possible options and find(ASAP) the reason for your stickability._{(word coined by M.Bricks of Hustle)}

# Surviving Tough Times Frequently Leads to Success:

Couldn't control but put in this TIP :)

# Guerrilla Marketing is Valuable No Matter How Big Your Marketing Budget Gets

As a startup, you don't have money for big advertising pushes to brand your company/product/service, so you have to rely on word-of-mouth and the viral spread of your business. what it takes to spread the idea virus will give your business a huge leg up on the competition.

Caution: You should learn where, when and to whom to market and to what extent. (learnt only by experience or watching someone do it)

# Chaos Breeds Creativity:

Very obvious from your google reads, refer there for more clarification.

# Loneliness is a Rite of Passage

Leading a company is the loneliest job you would ever have. But the startup community, particularly in the tech world, is forging more and more bonds and those connections are helping to make all of it stronger & smarter( I hope so). Starting up demands a lot of belief and self motivation towards you know what !

Someone says,

"Don't take your detachment as a cue to devolve into a hermit; consider it the hazing process for entry into an exclusive new club forged by shared experiences and then reach out to your fellow entrepreneurs."

Wihtout the mumbo-jumbo - " do not compare yourself with your other friends who are pursuing different career plans, instead ..."

My only guideline : Do not read books like this.

Brain - Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:16:00 +0000

The 90s decade was dedicated to the Brain, as can be clearly seen from this. However, it seems that the scientists felt the need to study something that could have immediate application ... like the mind. The current decade has therefore been dedicated to Mind, (more here).

The Decade of the Mind initiative focuses on four broad areas:

Healing and protecting the mind: This is the notion of improving the public health by curing diseases of the brain that affect the mind. An example of such a disease is Alzheimer’s disease.

Understanding the mind: This aspect of the initiative seeks to understand how mind actually emerges from brain functional activity. Some of the key characteristics of the mind that are still not understood include consciousness, memory and dreams.

Enriching the mind: Improving learning outcomes in education is a key component of this part of the initiative.

Modeling the mind: A key approach to understanding the mind is to model it either analytically or using computation. Such models of mind may facilitate the creation of new hypotheses which can then be tested in the laboratory or clinic. Modeling the mind may also allow for the creation of new applications, technologies and inventions.

Which bring us to the question, Does activity in Brain result in Mind or is it the other way round? Though science likes to believe that its the former, the Hindu philosophy mentions that Mind controls not only the brain, but the whole body.

Tony Buzan a proponent of mind mapping and mind literacy has come up with various techniques to read mind. Yet, the most recent psychometric studies believe that they know nothing about how brain/mind works.

In James Randerson's "We know nothing about brain evolution" (Guardian UK, February 19, 2008) we learn that Harvard's Richrd Lewontin has pointed out the obvious:

"Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition". He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.

Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. "I don't have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means," Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?

Of course Lewontin is right! First, cranial capacity is not the best measure of intelligence, as brain absent humans show. While we are here, a number of studies show that some birds (notably crows) are smart - even though they do not have the brain parts we humans associate with smartness. At the time, I said,

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.

There is no "survival of the fittest" reason why humans should be conscious! None whatever. Bacteria are way more fit than humans, but do they have thoughts? And they are probably better off without them.

So we are stuck being human and having minds, and we really can't claim that our minds give us a survival advantage. Its more the opposite. We give our minds a survival advantage.

Wouldn't it be great to explore your MIND and know how it works ?!

Gossip - Good for you ! ... are u kidding ?

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:58:00 +0000

In today's Face Time, the gossip column that runs most days inside this section,

we learn that police believe last month's jewelry theft from Paris Hilton's mansion was an inside job, and the remaining Grateful Dead members are reuniting.

We'll pause here while you scurry away to read those tidbits, but only if you promise to come back rather than, say, poking around the Internet for more about Hilton's baubles.

There.

And now that you're back (thank you!), we promise not to censure you for your morbid curiosity, your prurient interest or your moral outrage.

It's only a matter of "doin' what comes natur'lly," as it was phrased in the show tune debuted by the four-times-married Broadway star Ethel Merman, whose 32-day hitch to actor Ernest Borgnine in 1964 presaged Britney Spears' brief betrothal to Jason Alexander in 2004.

It's easy to get caught up in today's riptide of gossip. The Internet has turned it into an ever-present force, like spam e-mail and gravity, and traditional media have responded to the competitive pressure by offering more of it.

Celebrity babies, divorces and dalliances are as inescapable as daybreak, and the result has been a rise in people bemoaning the form's ubiquity and what they see as concurrent cultural debasing. Even with names that aren't often written in bold, social networking tools, from Facebook to Twitter, allow us to keep up with "status changes" in the lives of both friends and "friends" to a degree that gives many of us pause.

But we should all relax, at least a little. As much as we may hold our noses while reading it, as much as we profess to skip right past it (or wish we could), having a taste for gossip, it turns out, is as fundamental as sleep.

Gossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn't care to find out what was going on, you were more likely to die and less likely to pass on your incurious genes.

"People who had no interest in the private affairs of other people just got left in the dust," says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, who has written about gossip.

To that end he wrote a cover article for October's Scientific American Mind magazine, "The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves."

For his purposes, McAndrew chose to ignore the negative effects as self-evident and often discussed. After a brief acknowledgment that gossip can, obviously, harm its targets, can separate those who indulge in it from real life and, McAndrew says, "can undermine the cohesiveness of the group when group members become careless or aggressive in the use of gossip among themselves," we'll set aside the negatives as well, condensing them to a common-sense reminder: You can gossip, but don't be a jerk about it, and don't become consumed by it. Even if Britney's life actually is more interesting than yours, you can't trust that what you read about her is anything more than well-placed spin from a highly paid press agent.

In his article, McAndrew summed up the voluminous research on gossip: In addition to providing vital intelligence—Why is the tribe leader behaving erratically? Where are the berries?—it teaches social norms, deters deviance from group values, reinforces bonds among group members and lets us rank ourselves in comparison to others.

Among the topics: Who's in rehab? What's the latest about Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie and their mutual interest, Brad Pitt? Are the Pitt-Jolie babies showing superior style to the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes baby?

Eckert's use of gossip underscores two of the other functions it serves, says Gary Alan Fine, the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern.

"One is compensation," says Fine, co-author of the 1976 book "Rumor and Gossip." "People look at their own lives, which tend not to be so interesting, and celebrities provide this other side, this fantasy life. Some are leading lives we're envious of, and others are—I guess the term of art is 'train wrecks.' "

More compensation: In a time of "Bowling Alone," as Robert Putnam's book labeled the contemporary tendency to lead more isolated lives than our parents', we do less chatting in barbershops or over actual back fences. Celebrity gossip columns are a metaphorical back fence.

The second function, Fine said, "has to do with consumption. Rather than compensating for our own lives, it is entertainment in itself. You're going ... for the story. And there's an economics to it. It's a product. It's a form of consumption."

"Gossip is really a way that people show we're all part of the same sort of human community," says Grove, who now writes a much more detailed interview column for Portfolio's Web site. "The appeal is: We like reading about the high and mighty and knowing they're just like us"—members of the same tribe, hunting for the same necessities.

So the next time you think of gossiping ... do us a favour; tell your friends about Vita Beans !

...or would you be interested in this ?

Journey to the centre of your mind

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:36:00 +0000

Before approaching the core of your mind, let us get a glimpse of a few pointers that everyone must know about their mind !

The Hidden Workings of Our Minds

How great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you'll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: "The picture just formed in my mind." Writers tell us that: "I don't know where the words come from." Scientists say they: "Just had a hunch."

Walk the Line

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:37:00 +0000

How about I shut up for today and pass you on this,( oh ya ...go on click on it) so that, I could be as said... Predictably Irrational and yet let you get a glimpse of what I want to tell you.

Psst: Once you are done, you could hop on to this, and get to know how you could apply that to waggle your web marketing strategy !

When you had wished you had a damaged brain

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:52:00 +0000

Lets try the below ...

Can you move a single matchstick to form a valid mathematical ?

No sticks can be discarded, an isolated slanted stick cannot be interpreted as I (one), and a V (five) symbol must always be composed of two slanted sticks. The only valid symbols are Roman numerals and "+", "-" and "=". OK, now try this one:

If you had trouble with that last puzzle, fear not - it means your frontal lobe is probably intact! Healthy adults are frequently outperformed by patients with frontal brain damage on that test, according to a 2005 study by Reverberi et al.

The authors tested 35 patients with focal brain lesions to the lateral or medial prefrontal cortex, along with 23 age- and education-matched healthy subjects, on a series of similar "matchstick arithmetic" problems, with 3 minutes to complete each problem. Whereas only 43% of healthy subjects completed the second problem, more than 80% of the patients with lateral prefrontal damage were able to do so!

Why should this be? The authors argued that prefrontal cortex allows for "sculpting of the response space" - in other words, prefrontal cortex is used to guide and control the mental search for a solution. Normally such "cognitive guidance" is a good thing ... but it can be bad for solutions which require thinking outside the box - outside the normal, real-world constraints we place on workable solutions.

So healthy adults might search for solutions that respect the rules of normal arithmetic, and assume that this constraint is implied. One might never even consider the mathematically ill-formed solution to the second problem: IV=IV=IV. On the other hand, patients with brain damage may not use these common-sense constraints, and thus be more likely to stumble upon the rather unorthodox mathematical statement which is correct in this case.

So while the frontal cortex may enable "higher" cognitive functions like planning, judgment, and goal setting, it may also constrain us. The prefrontal cortex allows us to remember our current context and our expectations of what it might entail, and project towards other contexts, both in the past and the future. Those with under-functioning frontal lobes - such as brain trauma patients, and children - may somehow live in a less-specified world, where something as simple as making coffee could be a hopelessly complex or under-determined task. Yet they may also enjoy a "cognitive drift" into mental spaces which the tight, goal-directed reins of our prefrontal cortex steer us away from.

But there's an interesting methodological flaw in the study which allows for a less fanciful explanation (and might also explain why this paper is published in Brain instead of Nature!)

3/4 of the subjects encountered a type of matchstick problem with 10 legal moves prior to the IV=IV=IV problem - more than twice as many moves as are possible in either of the examples above. Healthy subjects might have implicitly recognized the number of potential moves, and thus avoided a time-consuming trial-and-error strategy. Lateral PFC subjects, on the other hand, might not have picked up on this rather subtle issue, and continued obliviously with a trial and error search strategy. It's not clear to me why the authors didn't fully balance the design to rule out such order effects (it would have been easy to do). Still, their results are interesting, regardless of why they got them.

Anyhow, the solutions are IV VI = III + III and IV = IV = IV, respectively.( agree, wasn't that difficult infact)

Also, Would you want to know how brain damage helps in...well, Gambling ?!

A Delusion or you did Distort Time ?

noreply@blogger.com (Nakul) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:28:00 +0000

Demystifying Delusions -

Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which they are held. Such beliefs reflect an abnormality of thought processes; they are often bizarre and completely unrelated to conventional cultural or religious belief systems, or to the level of intelligence of the person suffering from them.

The delusions experienced by psychiatric patients are sometimes categorized according to their theme. For example, schizophrenics often suffer from delusions of control (the belief that an external force is controlling their thoughts or actions), delusions of grandeur (the belief that they are a famous rock star or historical figure) or delusions of persecution (the belief that they are being followed, attacked or conspired against).

Although often associated with psychiatric disorders, delusions can also occur as a symptom of neurodegenerative disorders, and improved diagnostic methods have led to an increase in the identification of brain damage in patients who suffer from them. To date, however, there has not been an all-encompassing theory of how the brain generates delusions. Now though, Orrin Devinsky, a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry at New York University, proposes that delusions are generated by a combination of right hemisphere damage and left hemisphere hyperactivity.

In a review published in the journal Neurology, Devinsky examines the neuropathologies underlying two delusional syndromes with the aim of identifying anatomical abnormalities that are common to all four. Specifically, he looks at Capgras syndrome, the delusional belief that close friends or relations are imposters or have identical body doubles with different identities and reduplicative paramnesia (or Capgras for places), in which one believes that a familiar place exists in two locations simultaneously.

These syndromes are related to, and often co-exist with, confabulation (the pathological production of false memories) and anosognosia, a condition in which one fails to recognize, or is unaware of, a neurological deficit such as blindness or paralysis. They also share common mechanisms and pathologies. However, whereas confabulating patients can be convinced that their memories are false, deluded patients hold on to their beliefs firmly.

Devinksy looked at numerous case studies of individuals with these syndromes and, when possible, pinpointed the site of brain damage in each. His analysis showed that the four conditions do indeed share common pathological features. In 69 patients with replicative paramnesia, for example, 52% had incurred damage to the right frontal lobe (as a result of stroke or Alzheimer's Disease), 41% had damage to both, and 7% had damage to the left. Likewise, the case studies of patients with Capgras syndrome showed that they had damage primarily to the right frontal lobe.

The ubiquity of frontal lobe damage in the cases studies supports the hypothesis that these delusions involve impairments in executive function, working memory, decision-making and the abilities to make accurate predictions and to estimate and sequence time. One consequence of damage to the right frontal lobe would therefore be an impairment in the patients' ability to monitor the accuracy of their own cognitive processes.

According to Devinsky's hypothesis, this leads to increased left hemisphere activity - the left hemisphere compensates for the lack of inappropriate inputs from the right, "filling in" the gaps and conjuring a creative and extravagant narrative which leads to false explanations of the patient's experiences. Damage to the right hemisphere may prevent the patient from recognizing his or her cognitive errors, and therefore from changing their false beliefs.

From a different perspective, you could have distorted time to quantify the experience you had, isn't it?

"Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming." - William James, 1890

Extremely dangerous, traumatic, or surprising moments are often accompanied by reports that time seemed to "slow down" or "fly by." The perceptual basis of these subjective temporal distortions is unclear, but not for lack of trying: one recent experiment went so far as to drop subjects off a 400 foot tower while testing their ability to decipher a rapidly flashing string of numbers - a test of perceptual processing speed. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Subjects were no better at deciphering these numbers than they were under more mundane circumstances.

Ironically, temporal distortion may be more noticeable in such mundane experiences. A 2004 study by Tse and colleagues reviews evidence that durations are estimated as somewhat longer as more complex stimuli are being presented - as though time is subjectively expanding. In contrast, when subjects must actively attend to those stimuli or perform a secondary task while estimating durations, they tend to estimate those elapsed durations as slightly shorter - as though time is subjectively contracting.

Tse et al. suggested that these effects might emerge in the same way distraction might impair your ability to count the "ticks" from a clock's second hand. According to this "missed temporal cues" hypothesis, duration judgments are accomplished by attending to "temporal units." When attention is fully directed towards these temporal judgments, fewer "temporal units" are missed and duration estimates increase; however, when attention is divided, more of those "temporal units" are missed and so the estimates decrease.

Tse et al also suggest an alternative hypothesis: "attentional boost." According to the "attentional boost" theory, the processing of relatively low probability stimuli may somehow speed information processing of that stimulus, causing more "temporal units" to be counted.

To distinguish between these hypotheses, Tse et al. combined several methods of temporal estimation with the oddball paradigm, in which relatively low-probability stimuli are embedded inside series of more high-frequency stimuli. (For example, in auditory oddball, subjects might hear a string of sounds like "ROOF ROOF ROOF WOOF ROOF." Bizarre, I know.)

In a first experiment, subjects reliably estimated that an oddball visual stimulus was similar in duration to a much more frequent visual stimulus when, in fact, its duration was around half as long (675 msec vs. 1050 msec)!

A second experiment demonstrated that this temporal expansion of "oddballs" occurs only when the more frequent standard stimuli are longer than ~150 msec in duration. In fact, there's a subjective temporal contraction when standard stimuli are around 75 msec in duration - as though attention cannot be allocated to the oddball quickly enough, and the subsequent blank interval or standard stimulus itself undergoes the subjective temporal expansion, instead of the oddball.

An interesting feature of the data is a peculiar "dip" in the degree of temporal distortion measured by these methods when the more frequent standard stimuli last only around 375 msec. Shorter or longer standards cause more temporal distortions. Furthermore, this dip occurs at different times between individuals, and Tse et al. argue that it could reflect what many consider to be the dual mechanisms of attentional reorienting: a transient component and a sustained component.

Subsequent experiments replicated the effect with a variety of stimuli and temporal estimation methods. These temporal distortions (and to some extent the pecular "dip") were apparent when using auditory stimuli and were present with visual stimuli regardless of whether subjects were asked to rate the magnitude of the oddball's duration, to reproduce the duration of the oddball, or to rate whether the oddball lasted longer or shorter than the average of all previous stimuli (all of these are established psychophysics techniques for duration perception).

Tse et al note their results could be an example of the "time order error" (TOE) in which the second of two sequentially judged stimuli is altered along the dimension of judgment. For example, when two weights of large mass are lifted in succession, subjects tend to say the second is heavier. In contrast, when two weights of small mass are lifted one after the other, subjects tend to rate the second as lighter. So, in the case of temporal distortion, subjective duration lengthens if the oddball is presented for longer than 150 msec, but shortens if the oddball is presented for less than 150 msec. They discuss several reasons to doubt this possibility, including that TOE theory seems to contradict several findings in the duration psychophysics literature, as though it might not apply to duration judgments.

There are clear evolutionary advantages to subjective temporal distortion - as Tse et al note, increasing temporal resolution could allow for greater depth of processing and thus more adaptive responding when an organism is endangered or surprised. Although intuitively far-fetched, visual psychophysics has demonstrated that spatial attention can alter the spatial resolution of vision. Thus it seems at least plausible that "temporal attention" could alter the temporal resolution of duration judgments, causing them to contract or expand.

Finally, an interesting question for future research is how these phenomena might interact, given the time-frequency tradeoffs that are inherent to signal processing. For example, increased spatial attention could cause decreased resolution in temporal judgments, and vice versa.

Related:

Anatomy of a false memory
Neurobiology of a hallucination
Reversing Time: Temporal Illusions (this post covers work by Eagleman and colleagues that reveals a perceptual form of latency or "delay compensation)
Reichardt Detectors and Illusory Motion Reversal (This post covers yet another work by Eagleman et al., in which they demonstrate that illusory motion reversal may occur because of "temporally tuned" motion detectors in the visual system)
Tuned and Pruned: Syneasthesia

Mentoring works?!

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:16:00 +0000

Often friends ask me about the difficulties we face trying to startup immediately after graduation. One of the common answer they get to hear is that we have always found the right people to speak openly about our challenges and get their views and insights about it. But I thought it would be appropriate to share something about how such advices have worked for me at least. Because it was very, very different from what I myself expected or how most sources of learning would present it as.

Firstly, I believe no amount of mentoring can substitute experience. And for a non-conformist like me, most advices and insights are not a very natural way to base your decisions on. In spite of that, it has been extremely helpful in a very different way. Normally, we learn the right choices based on our previous cases, when we had to make a similar choice. After a few right/wrong choices you make, most people can pretty much figure out what works for them. Now, having a mentor greatly accelerates two steps involved in the process I stated above:

It makes you realize the right choices much sooner than you would otherwise.
It helps you understand not just what the right choices are, but why they are the right choices. This makes future learning so much more easy.

Of course, you may argue that there are both merits as well as demerits to this. I agree. But in our case it's been something that has mainly brought out positives for us and I believe it would be so in many other cases where the founders do not have direct corporate experience before. Having said that, things are working great for us only because we enjoy one huge luxury - being able to speak our hearts out with our advisors and get candid opinions not just about encouraging aspects of our business but also about challenges and things that can go terribly wrong. If you cannot speak without any veils with your advisors/mentors, it's no good for either sides irrespective of how much short-term credibility it may bring to your venture.

Like most opinions that I'll be expressing in this blog, some of them have been tested, some of them might just be air. Opinions, beliefs, schedules, roles - everything change so fast in a startup that it makes me wonder if this is the right time to be blogging about it! But then, here I am...

Learning to fly

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:14:00 +0000

I remember seeing a comic strip where a young eaglet asks its Mom: "When can I fly, Mama?." Mama looks back at its repaired wooden wings and replies: "Once you finish reading that," pointing at a big fat manual on flying.

Sometimes I cant help but wonder: are there really too many prerequisites to fly on your own?

Wanna startup? put down your ideas on paper first, write a business plan, write a whitepaper, speak to experts, speak to distant clients, speak to every other person in the world you can make up a relation with, seek advice, seek mentoring, seek money, work out the numbers, build up confidence, participate in competitions... the list suddenly seems endless. And even after you've done everything, you still won't have the one real thing which you need to fly high, fly long - a passion for flying!

How could you trust your passion in something you've never done before? That does take a lot of time, lot of work and a lot of learning. Personally, I feel if there is no doubt, no fear, then learning becomes a burden, a tough thing to do. It becomes difficult to put in the efforts required. [Probably that's why all of us wait till the day before the examinations, to put in our efforts and learn something :)]

It took quite a lot of time for us to work time and again on our model, accept its shortcomings and improve it, convince ourselves that we need to write a business plan atleast for ourselves and convince ourselves to accept that things will never go as good as they seem to work within a beautiful cocoon of ours at BITS Pilani.

I'll cut short the story and wind up in a line: We did do all the things I've mentioned above and we're now glad for every bit of it.

[We still do all the above things everyday & we've actually started to love it now!!!]

Staying alive...

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:39:00 +0000

In my last post, I spoke of how we graduated from Stealth Mode and started developing the product we had in mind - a framework to create virtual personalities and simulate their behavior in different situations which mimic the real world. It was tough, but we had successfully worked on tough things before.

What we had never done before was to create a world for ourselves, where we could afford to work on crazy little ideas of our own without being at the end of a pointing finger. I wonder why our education system has never bothered to teach us the traits required to hold on to our dreams, no matter how different they are from those of the ones around us. If I come to think of it, personally, my stay at Election Commission and CEL at BITS Pilani might be the main reason why I never felt alienated by this difference as long as I was in BITS Pilani.

I did have my share of gloomy days when it suddenly seemed meaningless to defy everybody around, defy the world and the system that has brought us so far. Though most times, the pain had little to do with Vita Peracta. And there were days when I wanted to quit, drop all grand plans and take refuge in a safe and certain life. The only reason those moments did not stick on, was an infinite source of encouragement and hope, called Nakul Jamadagni. Me & Nakul have had numerous chats at all corners of our campus, at all times of the day. I cherish every single one of them for making me forget that anything at all was different, in what we were doing.

A common feature in all those conversations was long arguments. We used to put out all possible reasons and emotions we had, for or against anything which was the cause of worry. I think, to find someone who will argue against you with all his/her heart is really a huge advantage no matter what you are doing in life. Even to this day, the thing I miss the most about people & places I'm far from is the time I've spent arguing. 'Coz some of the most important things I've learnt in life, are from people who've told me I'm wrong.

Breaking out of Stealth

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 05:29:00 +0000

To tell or not to tell - is a dilemma which haunts most individuals when a new idea hits them. I won't pretend to have an answer. I'll just take you through how we went about breaking out of our stealth mode.

But first, let me clarify my stand on this issue. Even I am an advocate of the new age culture of democratizing innovation. But I do believe a stealth mode is necessary for an idea, at least in a non-ideal world like ours where most ideas end up being born into their graves. Stealth protects you from losing motivation about your idea even before you get a feel for its true potential. Stealth helps you shape your idea to reflect your own self, before letting it grow freely and rapidly in an open environment. Having said that, I do understand that a prolonged stealth mode is as likely to kill an idea, as letting it out before a wrong crowd.

Fortunately, in our case the idea was born within a team and hence reduced the risk of reaching a stale mate under stealth. The real break-out moment came during the winter holidays. With a 11page white paper, me & Sindhu knocked the doors of every neuro-psychologist, social psychologist, evolutionary biologist and psychology doctors we knew. At the same time, Nakul was speaking to HR directors and business heads of several companies in Mumbai. We even found ways to get introduced to experts in the field of computational and cognitive neuroscience from a few major research groups around the globe. In 10 days, I had 100+ conversations labeled "Vita" in my gmail account and we had personally interacted with 15+ individuals from relevant groups.

What did we get? Insights - loads of it & a very promising network of people who were convinced more because of our energy than the idea, which was still looked upon in disbelief like a magic trick that you could not break. To me, the theory was so beautiful, it had to be true. It probably worked in our favor that our framework was already able to predict a good number of behavioral traits which were only inductively asserted till then.

A few people truly liked our idea and got involved in developing it further, while most others liked us and that gave us the confidence to continue working on the idea. By this time, we were convinced that our idea is well ahead of our time and hence almost stopped working on the business aspect of it. The business was turning into a science project.

[Thank you list: Dr. Anders Sandberg, Dr. Ahalya Raghuram, Dr. Vidyanand Nanjundiah, Dr. Manjula, Dr. Keshav Kumar, Ms. Renu, Mr. Rituraj, Dr. Anita Ghai, Dr. Kusuma, Dr. Shobini Rao, Mr. Vijay Rao and Dr. Suman Kapur]

An idea...

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:17:00 +0000

Today's world needs a new religion, a new belief which can hold their life together - is what Nakul & me concluded after a funny discussion at VK radi (an eatery at BITS Pilani). We thought we were the right guys to go ahead and seed such a belief in people's minds. All we needed was an extremely sane guy who could connect easily to the masses and make them believe in whatever philosophy we plan to grow. We couldn't think of such a guy but I very much knew a girl who I thought would be a perfect fit for the role - Sindhu.

An hour later, the 3 of us were sitting at Sky Lawns and discussing about what we thought was a growing problem - lack of understanding about life. Yet another hour passed, before we realized we were just sitting and throwing around idiotic ideas that would never work. So we left. But only now do I see how many new and insane ideas that one hour of talk had seeded in all of us. Yet, we left the place without any prejudice for or against any idea.

After going back, I got hooked on to gmail as usual - a prized trait gifted by CEL (Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani), specifically by one lanky, energetic idea bank at CEL called Chinmay Kulkarni. I still don't know what made me dig out a saved chat that was a few days old, where me & Sindhu had tried to come up with a million reasons for why the world and its people are the way they are. What caught my attention was a phrase that could only mean one thing to me at that time - 'Captain Jack Sparrow', but it meant a lot more. It meant 'Life in its complete form' - Vita Peracta.

A week later, we were working on creating a game where the virtual world responds to the player's decisions in exactly the same way as the real world would. But the problem was that the virtual world would have virtual people and we had no clue about how virtual people behave. We did not even have a clue about how real people behave in a real world. A few days later, we found out, no one else has a clue either.

The world still rested its head on the shoulders of two tall figures in Psychology - Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It probably was too ahead of their time to think about going one step ahead of their psychological theories and start testing if they can accurately predict people's behavior using any of those theories. It sadly turns out that you can't. People are too unique to be boxed into standard categories and deduce their behavior. What we needed was a framework to accommodate millions of traits that make us what we are and yet keep the framework simple enough to be put to everyday use.

Sounded like it was still too ahead of our time as well, we now pardoned Freud & Jung. Seemed impossible. Yet, we felt we were holding in our hands, the ends of a few threads that would someday stitch themselves into a beautiful picture of the human mind. We started to help it stitch faster. The idea had taken hold, dreams of an infinite possibilities had found a way to creep into our minds and to me personally, it was a joyful way to keep myself distracted from everything I hated about our world - Boxes & Walls.

[This post is dedicated to Nakul & Sindhu. I'm beginning to realize that an idea is a bunch of ignited minds and not just a bunch of connected thoughts. The latter can never change the world and we're experimenting with the former.]

noreply@blogger.com (Amruth) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 05:58:00 +0000

Pre-Launch: Website Under Construction - Vita Beans