Single-track minds – centralised thinking and the evidence of bad models

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Another post related to Clark’s “Being there” (see previous post on this). The central thesis of Clark’s book is that we should look at people as reactive creatures acting in the environment, not as disembodied minds acting on it. I agree wholeheartedly with this non-dualist view of mind/body, but every so often Clark’s enthusiasm leads a little too far – but then this forces reflection on just what is too far.

In this case the issue is the distributed nature of cognition within the brain and the inadequacy of central executive models. In support of this, Clark (p.39) cites Mitchel Resnick at length and I’ll reproduce the quote:

“people tend to look for the cause, the reason, the driving force, the deciding factor. When people observe patterns and structures in the world (for example, the flocking patterns of birds or foraging patterns of ants), they often assume centralized causes where none exist. And when people try to create patterns or structure in the world (for example, new organizations or new machines), they often impose centralized control where none is needed.” (Resnick 1994, p.124)1

The take home message is that we tend to think in terms of centralised causes, but the world is not like that. Therefore:

(i) the way we normally think is wrong

(ii) in particular we should expect non-centralised understanding of cognition

However, if our normal ways of thinking are so bad, why is it that we have survived as a species so long? The very fact that we have this tendency to think and design in terms of centralised causes, even when it is a poor model of the world, suggests some advantage to this way of thinking.

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  1. Mitchel Resnik (1994). Turtles Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. MIT Press.[back]

visualising vocabulary

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Fiona just pointed me to Visuwords a lovely visualisation of word association using WordNet data. The image below is of the word ‘human’ and you can see two clusters one corresponding to the noun human and one to the adjective meaning humane/caring
Visuword visualisation of the word 'human'
[[full size image]]

Visuwords is Flash front-end and PHP backend. It appears to use some variant of spring and ball visualisation. You can download the source … so could use it as the basis of visualisation for other kinds of data such as web sites.

multiple representations – many chairs in the mind

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I have just started reading Andy Clark’s “Being There”1 (maybe more on that later), but early on he reflects on the MIT COG project, which is a human-like robot torso with decentralised computation – coherent action emerging through interactions not central control.

This reminded me of results of brain scans (sadly, I can’t recall the source), which showed that the areas in the brain where you store concepts like ‘chair’ are different from those where you store the sound of the word – and also I’m sure the spelling of it also.

This makes sense of the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, you know that there is a word for something, but can’t find the exact word. Even more remarkable is that of you know words in different languages you can know this separately for each language.

So, musing on this, there seem to be very good reasons why, even within our own mind, we hold multiple representations for the “same” thing, such as chair, which are connected, but loosely coupled.

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  1. Andy Clark. Being There. MIT Press. 1997. ISBN 0-262-53156-9. book@MIT[back]

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I was just sent a link to an article in The Psychologist “Sleep on a Problem… It works like a dream” by Josephine Ross

The article gathers loads of anecdotal evidence of creativity in dreams … including, inevitably, those benzine rings!

Personally … while I’m sure that some things happen unconsciously and during sleep, my guess is that 90% of these creativity stories have simpler reasons through selective memory or semi-random inspiration.

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tagging … I am not alone … or am I?

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I’ve noticed that I reuse very few tags … and thought I was just a poor tag-user. However, I read the other day a reference to a paper at the CSCW confernce last year; it reported that the average number of re-uses of a tag was just 1.311 . I thought this meant that most tags are never reused … I am not alone 🙂

Having downloaded and read the paper it turns out that this is the average number of users who use a tag – that is most tags are used by only one person, in fact individuals reuse their own tags a lot more … so I am no-good tagger after all 🙁

Incidentally, I use ultimate tag warrior plugin for wordpress and it seems OK. Only drawback is that if you want tags displayed with your post, they really get inserted into the post itself. This is not a problem for tags at the end, but would mess up an RSS feed if you like your tags above the post. I guess this is because wordpress does not have a handle for plugins to add things to display loops, so the only way to ensure the tags are displayed are to make them part of the post.

Also Nad sent me a link to a neat tag visualisation by Moritz Stefaner.

  1. Sen, S., Lam, S. K., Rashid, A., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Osterhouse, J., Harper, F. M., and Riedl, J. 2006. tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work {Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 – 08, 2006}. CSCW ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 181-190. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180875.1180904[back]

digital culture

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I was at futuresonic last Friday doing a panel keynote at the Social Technologies Summit. I talked about various things connected to imagination: bad ideas, regret modelling and firefly/fairylights technology. On the same panel was a guy from Satchi and Satchi who created television adds for T-mobile and a lady from Goldsmiths who described a project for Intel where they studied a London bus route. The chair Eric introduced the session with a little about blogging and other web-based technologies and in general we were immersed in the ways in which digital culture pervades the day to day world.
In my way home on the train I sat opposite a father and son who were playing hangman. The boy was about 6 or 7 and the father had to help him and sometimes correct him. Every so often I noticed the words they chose, but just before I got off the train there was obviously the father’s hardest challenge yet. I gradually noticed the hightened excitement in the voices … it was a word with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ in it.

As I stood to get up, the boy eventually got the last letters and completed the word …

F O X Y B I N G O . C O M

omnignorance, the future of the web

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The dream of the web seems a form of omniscience, unlmited and universal knowledge available at the vlick ofof a button or least at the click of a Google ‘Seach’ button. However, last night I was on a site that empitomised the problems of the web.

I was pointed to a blog entry about a presentation that the blog said was “Simply the best presentation I’VE EVER SEEN!“. I was intrigued and and followed this to the Identity2.0 site and in particular a page about a keynote at OSCON 2005.

The entry about the talk mentioned ‘Identity2.0’ and ‘digital identity’ so guessed this was something to do with single logins (like MS passport) or open authentication, which has long been an open issue (with many ‘solutions’ but so far little success). However, was this person and this site talking about one of these such as plain open authentication, or something deeper.

Well it is fine for the page about the talk not to say clearly, it is written within the context of the Indetity2.0 site, so I looked for an ‘about’ link or something like that … nothing I stripped the url back to plain identity2.0.com and of course simply got to a stabdard blog front page (I guess rather like this one), with the latest news, but nothing to gove over context or background.

In fact by chasing yet more links to other sites, by half guessing from various abstracts, blog entries, etc. I managed to pick out half a story about what this was about … but why so hard?

This reminds me of the problem I recorded a month or so back when trying to find last week’s (as opposed to yesterday’s) news. Really easy to find the latest item or even the hotest item, but really bad at getting to the background that gives context and turns buzz words into meaning.

At the risk of sounding like a codger at a cafe table, the same is true of much software documentation. If you have seen the software grow and develop over the years it makes sense, but to students trying to make sense of Java packages, AJAX, Mac/Windows APIs, it is like fumbling in the dark. Good signpoosting at every street corner, but no roadmaps.

In all these cases there are real questions we want to ask, this is not like meandering around Flickr or YouTube, travelling just for the journey. However definitive statements (I’ll not say answers) give way to half-overheard conversations in a coffee shop.

It is often said that experts know more and more about less and less untul eventually they know everything about nothing. It seems we are turning into a generation who know less and less about more and more until we know nothing about everthing – omingnorance rules.

one aim, one business, one desire

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My Macintosh has a list of recently accessed files, but when I want to re-visit a file I have used earlier in the day it is never there. I have many folder windows open, but again the folder I was earlier working on is never one of them. This seems a sad measure of not multi-tasking but over-tasking, too many interruptions upon interupptions, too many disparate things and a singular lack of single purpose.

When I was in school we studied the Scholar Gypsy by Matthew Arnold. It is a tale of an Oxford scholar who foresakes his studies and joins the gypsies. As I always admired and desired the gypsy life this combination of the intellectual and nomadic appealed immediately. When Arnold writes it is 200 years since the scholar started his wanderings, but there are still occasional reports of sightings and Arnold concludes that his longevity is the result of his singleness of purpose, he has “one aim, one business, one desire”.

The stanza I still recall almost word perfect comes near the end as Arnold expresses his wish for this simpler life … and remember he is writing in 1850, not the days of email and IM:

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife