April 08, 2008

Bringing the right hemisphere of the brain center stage

An article that looks into the emerging popular interest in the right side of the brain; and in the differences between the left and right hemispheres.

The left side, home of the human language center, is the outspoken logical, linear half of the equation. The right side, home to spatial perception and nonverbal concepts, is the nonlinear, high-concept source of the imagination and of pleasure.


Let Computers Compute. It's the Age of the Right Braint

Posted by lara at 03:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 21, 2008

Shakespeare was messing with your brain

So I got bitten by the Shakespeare bug during high school, thanks to a rather brilliant english teacher. I never had enough scholarly insight to pursue this interest to any serious degree, but I was continually fascinated by some of my own reactions to the complexities of his writing that have fascinated untold numbers... A while ago I stumbled on this article - Reading Shakespeare has dramatic effect on your brain - and a whole host of new levels of fascination entered my consciousness. Did Shakespeare have any idea that he was using a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb? I doubt it. But, perhaps he found that doing so tended to captivate or engage his audience, and so stuck with it. We can certainly conclude that he wasn't close to realizing that This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say., nor that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers..

Regardless really of how he came by this technique, it's pretty cool!

Posted by lara at 10:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 15, 2008

through artificial natural selection, robots evolve traits such as self-sacrifice for the greater good, and lying

So, I'm not really sure what conclusions, if any, to draw from this article... "Lying is an emergent property of intelligent behavior" just seems a little ridiculous. And obviously, the truth isn't that simple. However, it is strangely fascinating that an experiment that involved programming robots with "genes" and then placing them in a "world" where they had to find food and avoid traps, Floreano observed the following:

The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

On the upside,

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots.

Robots evolve and learn how to lie

Posted by lara at 03:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack