Greg Detre
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
why do
people like music? why�s it such a big industry?
sleep
Stickold study � people who sleep less than 8
hours get a lot done but they don�t remember it
Hobson � might not initially have had any
function � started in vertebrates around fish-time � if you could suspend
animation for half the time, then you�d minimise half the accidents (the ones
you�re less used/adapted to)
Shakespeare � �knits up the raveled sleeve of
care�
allows you to reconcile and integrate your new
experiences without interference from external experience � REM for untangling
mis-structures that have got cross-linked in bad ways � stimulate one then the
other, and if there�s too much crossover you clean one of them up
perhaps that�s why dolphins don�t need to sleep
with both half-brains at once � because their environment doesn�t have
day/night-times
Minsky: well, they�d drown otherwise. same with seagulls and albatrosses
would a dolphin have two personalities?
sleep�s a suitcase mechanism � once you�ve got
something like it, a dozen reasons grow up to take advantage of it
that�s why he doesn�t like Descartes� Error �
he uses ordinary words as though they mean something � whereas the neurology
people should expect to have to find new concepts for what the brain is doing �
in other sciences, they don�t use ordinary words very much
stickold � got people to practice tetris, and to daydream about it � they reported they dreamed about it � then next day, they had improved, and continued to improve for three more days
difference between goals and objectives (as used in business or school)
goals are abstract, objectives are things you need to do to get the goals
objectives are sub-goals
but sometimes goals are concrete, but objectives are abstract
this is dumb � because goal structures are hierarchical � they don�t have a word for sub-sub-goal
perhaps you restrict it to two levels because it forces you then to delegate on your objectives to your subordinate
apparently lucid dreaming is actually teachable
do you still improve at tetris if you lucid dream? can you direct your learning?
Jose: is it true that the left hemisphere isn�t active during dreaming?
he reckons that when you dream, you rearrange the sequence/events afterwards
Steve: you could play people a bunch of noises that don�t wake them up, and then ask them about the narrative sequence afterwards
Hally + Eden (sp???) � played people two headphones, one saying a sentence, the other with a click, and people reported afterwards that the click occurred on a phrase boundary
perhaps this is because different parts of the brain are processing speech sounds, and when this gets summarised at the high level�
I often wonder whether minsky�s theories, based on experiences with his children, must be heavily skewed, given that his kids must be prodigiously bright and kind of funny
refce Hollander � poems �Rhymes reason�
he tries to make some of the bits he wants to convince people of more metered
the whole of the first few pages of Emotion Machine are in meter
some writers give different characters different meters
refce Sturgeon � did this without realising, until his creative writing students pointed it out
some writers have a backstory, i.e. they know 10 times more than the readers about the novel
Huxley�s characters always seem stereotyped and predictable, perhaps because he only uses 3 or 4 features � Tolstoy�s always seem unpredictable, perhaps because they have 7 or 8
why is visualisation more vivid than dreaming?
no external experience to distract
the smarter you are, the smarter your neighbours are � evolutionary arms race
refce: current Nature, reviewing the differences between humans, apes etc.
there may only be 30,000 genes, but there are more than 100,000 differences between us and the chimp
a gene is a big thing
chimpanzees have the same size skull, but it�s much much thicker
maybe constrained by the need for birth
Bell Labs � worked on projects that would come to fruition in 40 years� time
oil as a curse for a country :) � you get corrupt governments, and the oil industry pays more than any other and dominates the entire country�s economy
1960s: �while you�re up, get me a grant�
Congress put constraints on the max length in years of a grant
declining proportion of faculty to assistants � allowed the professors to handle a relatively greater teaching load
he thinks it�s getting pretty good now, because he can see most of the bugs in his ideas in his friends
I said that common sense reasoning�s time has not yet come � you need to get the architecture right first
Push: that I�m confusing the common sense architecture and knowledge problems
noone could have written the 12 dimensions of context space except someone who had tried to build an encyclopaedic system
parasites don�t damage tissue
me: NSA fund brain-eating worms that you could attach a thread to :)
Nancy: thinks it�s wrong to use the data from the Siberia experiments on people
me: it would make their sacrifices meaningless
reality tv with accompanying brain data � put it on the web and hackers can try and decode it :)
me: suicide�s a cry for attention � they should have a clinic for people to volunteer to be zapped � after all, what could get more attention than having your name in the most-cited paper of the year? :)
psychologist prof: Purdue class � better to read the Turing Option before the SoM
storing OMCS assertions as NL allows you to choose your level of precision/ambiguity afterwards