Amazon link This wasn’t at all the book I was expecting when I ordered it, but ended up being much more satisfying. I thought it was going to be some tract on how and why the brain feels happiness, and what we can do to make ourselves happier. Instead Gilbert, a professor of psychology at […]
Category: cognition
Telling the story of our lives
This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes […]
Mastery
Following up on the previous post about discipline, I think another reason for discipline is that it’s necessary to achieve mastery. I was reminded of this while reading Artful Making, by Robert Austin and Lee Devin. They relate the process of management to the making of collaborative art, such as putting a play together. I’ll […]
Patterns and truth
But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every […]
Persistent Patterns
It’s been way too long since my last pretentious philosophical post. I’ve got about three half-written, but none of them have really come together yet. But tonight, I’m posting something, dammit! I actually want to revisit my completely uninformed picture of what goes on in our brain. Long-time readers may remember my series of cognitive […]
Repetitive Blindness of Meaning
Jofish recently pointed me at a recording of Cry If You Want To, a song performed by the Holly Cole Trio. I really liked it, and started listening to it regularly. Interestingly, the more I listened to it, the less I appreciated it. It became a song I listened to as a whole, without listening […]
Filling in the blanks part 2
I was thinking more about the topic of how our mind fills in the blanks last week during the Messiah concerts, particularly in the “He was despised” aria. I meant to write this up on Sunday or Monday evening, but didn’t get around to it. So, of course, I’m writing it up after a two […]
Filling in the blanks
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been reading a book called Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita, which examines the ways in which a pervasive media has altered the way in which we perceive the world. He has lots of interesting examples, but today’s topic will be his discussion of the demise of heroes in […]
On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins
Amazon link I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, and I added it to my last Amazon order, but didn’t get around to reading it until a few weeks ago. Jeff Hawkins was one of the driving forces behind Palm and Handspring, and now that he’s set for life, he’s indulging his childhood […]
Localized generalities
One thing that I noticed in the comments on my “designing for the collective” post was that I have been using Latour’s term “collective” in an extremely fuzzy way, where I change what I mean by it depending on the point I’m trying to make. This got me thinking as to whether this was an […]
