You Must Be (Mumble Mumble)

Like many people, I'm apologetically not that great with names. Odds are, if I'm introduced to someone in some sort of social situation, I'll have forgotten their name by the next time I see them.

And I kind of just figure, well, I'm not that great with names, sorry!

But then I was thinking about it and I realized that in fact, I'm not that great with names because I don't really pay attention to them. Odds are, if I'm introduced to someone, I'm automatically assuming I'm not going to need to know their name anytime in the immediate future, so I'm not even really making an attempt to remember it.

Then when I meet people again, usually I have to be reminded of their names, but after that I remember, because I paid attention the second time.

It's sort of as if I unconsciously decided, somewhere along the line, that unless I see you more than once, your name is irrelevant to me.

I'm not even going to listen to it the first time: you could say "Hi, I'm Morgethern Hanretty the Bold Destroyer of Marmite" and I'd just smile and say "Hi, I'm A'Llyn," and if someone asked me two minutes later "who was that?" I'd have to shrug. Not that great with names, sorry!

But next time I meet you, then I'll listen. Honest.

I must hasten to assure you that it's not that I'm stuck up and think I'm too important to bother with your name. I'm assuming you don't really care about mine either, so we're even. I would never expect you to remember my name if we only met once.

And if you do, well, good for you I guess, but also, you wasted brain cells on that that could have been devoted to important blog posts or something, so I'm not sure about your priorities.

So let's just all agree that we don't care about anyone's name the first time we meet them, unless we're going to be sharing an office or hunting werewolves together or something.

Even then, I'll probably give you a mental nickname like Office Dude or Werewolf Hunting Lady at first. You know, just in case you're eaten by a file cabinet or a werewolf before I really have a chance to get to know you.

Braaaain!!!!!*

My slippery, unreliable brain is messing with me again. 

I had this little item that was lent to be by a friend, and I saw it several weeks ago and said to myself, said I, "since this is small and could be misplaced, I must be careful with it. I shall put it somewhere safe."

And then I put it...somewhere.

I guess it's safe.  Anyway, I have little chance of damaging it since I cannot for the life of me find it. My friend, who owns it, is also unlikely to accidentally destroy it since I can't send it back to her.

And I keep searching my mind, asking myself, "where would be a spot that I would have thought was safe?" But my sneaky, unhelpful brain, clearly trying to get me in trouble, just keeps suggesting the box where we keep postage stamps. I don't know why that's particularly safe, and anyway it's not there, so thanks for nothing, brain.

I may just have to buy her a new one. Fortunately, it only costs about $2, so it's not that big a deal, but it's kind of bugging the hell out of me.

*That's "Braaaain!!!!!" with a "curse you my old archnemesis" emphasis, not "Braaaains!!!!! with a zombie emphasis.

Latest Exciting Challenge

I'm thoroughly engrossed in the richly rewarding pastime of translating our library website's current Cold Fusion pages into PHP. (We have our own website, because we don't want to cede control of our pages to a centralized institutional Web Office, to which we'd have to submit requests to get anything done. As a result, any of the librarians can make important updates, and also could completely wreck the site at any moment, on a whim! That's power.)

It's a project that was begun some time ago by a departed web librarian whose shoes have not been filled (I tried, but my feet are bigger than hers!), so the code is basically all written, it's just a matter of plugging the right information in in the right places. Thankfully, since otherwise we would be pretty much be left looking at the current version of the site forever.

So there's a lot of copying and pasting and refreshing to make sure it looks right. And if I can't figure out how to replicate some effect, I go find a completed page that does the same thing, and copy the code from there.

There's no plagiarism in web development!

I have to remind myself that even though it takes a stupidly long time to get the simplest thing done, I shouldn't worry about it. Take the time, figure it out, and gradually it starts to take a less long time, and I'll remember how x problem was solved and can go right to the solution next time instead of spending an hour on it, and eventually I may even sort of know what I'm doing.

It's kind of fun, and keeps the ol' brain on its figurative toes.Which is good, since it wouldn't do to have that slippery deceptive organ getting all complacent and having time to make up false memories or anything.

On this topic, I recommend the much-recommended Code Year (I saw it all over Twitter, so I can't salute any one person), from Codecademy: sign up and get free lessons emailed to you every week in 2012!

So far they're doing JavaScript, which is not immediately relevant to my thoroughly engrossing task, but from what little I've observed, coding languages tend to work in similar ways, even if they use different terms or symbols to do things, so it's good background.

Farhad Manjoo on Slate makes a strong argument for why people should learn to code, and also recommends Code Year, so it's not just me and some people I can't name on Twitter. You should totally check it out.

Remember: If your brain isn't busy learning, it's probably busy plotting against you. Because brains cannot be trusted.

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Catalog, or Devour?

One of the things people tend to ask you when you're pregnant is whether you've had any unusual food cravings.

To which I say, not unusual, no. I mean, I pretty much always crave braaaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnss.

This is the photo that's going on all my forms of ID from now on.

Happy Halloween and stuff.

On This Quite Other Hand

Reports From a Resident Alien has a fascinating post on what neurotypical people (NTs) are like, from the point of view of a neuroatypical person.

It looks at the "natural social focus" and "big picture" vision of a person with more typical brain wiring, comparing it to the way the author, who is autistic, relates to others and perceives the world.

In the way that it's interesting to read a guidebook to your own city or country, to see what the place you know looks like to someone from outside it, it's interesting to me to read this perspective on a more "factory standard" neural setup, and how it looks to someone with a different one.

I suppose my finding this interesting kind of proves the author's point, that "For NTs, a lot of the value they get out of life has to do with what other people think of them."

Why yes, I do like to know what others think of me! Do go on telling me about myself.

It's kind of wonderful that there are such different ways to approach the basic work of being a human.

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Brain Games

Since I've recently taken to video games, I was interested in this piece on Rough Type about what evidence suggests about whether or not said games turn your brain to mush.

I'm rooting for yes, because I have long distrusted my brain, and if through clever distractions I can reduce its ability to formulate deceptive schemes that will mislead me about the state of reality, that's probably all to the good.

The article's conclusion is less conclusive. It suggests that playing video games makes you better at doing things that you do in video games,  but does not necessarily improve other types of skills. As you might expect, it appears that

using media that train your brain to be good at dividing your attention appears to make you less able to carry out the kinds of deep thinking that require a calm, focused mind. Optimizing for divided attention means suboptimizing for concentrated attention.

Since I'm not sure whether my scheming subconscious relies more on multi-tasking or on calm, focused attention, I don't know if this is good or not. Still, the piece was pretty interesting.

Well, I'd better go fly my spaceship around.

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Here's Your Answer!

You know how you can notice things without really noticing them?

I've had this kind of rough spot on my left index finger for a while now. Every so often I nibble absentmindedly at it, and I vaguely knew it had been that way for a while, but I didn't really think about it or notice that I'd noticed it.

Then, there I was pinning my shoe this afternoon, and I poked my finger with the pin, and in a flash it came upon me, the realization that I've done that before, and that that's exactly the location of that rough spot that I found I had been previously been aware of, yet thought nothing of, and therefore, that this is an ongoing issue and maybe I should use a thimble in future when I work with pins.

In one moment, I both became aware of my own previous knowledge of a tiny mystery, and solved it. The mind is an interesting thing.

And why was I pinning my shoe, you might ask?

Because the velcro is worn out, of course. I fasten my sneakers with safety pins, just like a normal person whose velcro is worn out. Right?

It's certainly easier than finding a new pair that fits.

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Think Big Bad Thoughts

New evidence of human irrationality, reported on Bad Science: apparently, people tend to look less kindly on those who injure a few, than on those who injure many.

60 students were given a vignette to read about a case of fraud, where either 3 people or 30 people were defrauded by a financial advisor, but all the other information in the story was kept the same.

...

Participants were asked to evaluate the severity of the crime, and recommend a punishment: even though fewer people were affected, participants who read the story with only 3 victims rated the crime as more serious than those who read the exact same story, but with 30 victims.

Further research examined a number of actual cases in which similar crimes injured more or fewer people, and found that this phenomenon is not confined to the lab setting:

[The cases] were all from 2000 to 2009, they were all jury trials, and the researchers’ hypothesis was correct: people who harm larger numbers of people get significantly lower punitive damages than people who harm smaller number of people. Juries punish people less harshly when they harm more people.

The theory here is that it's easier for us to identify with a small number of people than a large number, so harm done to a few feels more real than harm done to many, and therefore more serious.

This actually makes perfect sense when I think about it. I can easily imagine three individual, harmed people, I could put a face to them if they were introduced to me, I can sympathize with them. But 30 people? That's way more people than I could carry on a conversation with at one time. I'm certainly acquainted with that many people, but I wouldn't really want to try interacting with them all at once, I'd lose track of them.

Anything that happens to 30 people is hard to really get a grip on.

I do wonder, if there's a point where empathy fails and gives way to impersonalization, there's also a point where impersonalization fails and gives way to horror at the scale of a crime.

Say, if hurting three people is bad, and hurting 30 people is less bad, is hurting 300 people bad again? Or less bad still because, hey, how much can I really feel bad for 300 strangers?

What about 3,000 people? Or 30,000?

And then, where does horror at the vast scale of a crime become despair at its implacable hugeness, and a disinclination to do anything because there's no way we could make a dent in that? Let's not even bother to try to punish this wrongdoer, what's the use?

I guess from the evidence presented so far, the lesson is if you're going to do wrong, do it big.

I will adjust the scale of my evil plans accordingly.

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Logic Loses Again

GruntDoc relates the story of a "Humbling Life Moment": narrowly avoiding a panic attack inside an MRI tunnel.

It's interesting to follow the process--GruntDoc has ordered MRIs, seen them, is familiar with them, is rationally completely comfortable with the idea, and yet can't avoid that instinctive "get me out of here right now" reaction to being stuck headfirst in a small, tight space.

Ugh. I'm feeling a little shivery myself just thinking about it. And I'm not even especially claustrophobic.

I've had an MRI, and it was totally fine (relaxing, even), but my head was outside the machine, and I'm sure it feels different if your head is in.

Anyway, I just thought this was a nice reminder of how sometimes being well educated and well prepared doesn't help when you run up against the fidgety parts of your own brain.

Plan ahead all you want, smarty-pants. Your secretive, untrustworthy brain does its own thing.

In a wily move to hinder the brain's tricks, GruntDoc reveals his plan for the next attempt: sedatives.

Your secretive, untrustworthy brain can only do so much if you drug it halfway to insensibility. It's a good plan, and I like the sound of it.

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Free Thinking

Jerry Coyne on Why Evolution is True has been pondering the question of free will lately. It's a good question. An excellent question!

Is everything we do predetermined by the way things come together in our brains based on what's going on while we're still developing?

By the way things came together in our parents' brains before us? By the environment around them? Around us? Experiences that shuffle our mental chemistry?

If you could account for everything that might have an effect on how the dice fall, you know how they'll land, right? It's just the not being able to account for everything that makes it worth betting on the outcome.

It's a question extremely worthy of pondering, and I'm enjoying the posts on it, but I suppose in the end it's not something that makes a whole lot of practical difference in day to day life.

I mean, we presently have no way of accounting for every possible variable, for dice let alone for peoples' brains, so we may not have free will, but we can still make unpredictable decisions.

Whether or not we're technically responsible for those decisions, well, that's the real question. I vote for continued investigation.

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Speaking of Lying Brains...

Slate has a whole series up about the work of Elizabeth Loftus, who has done a lot of research and experimentation into false memories and how to create them.

There's information on how people were convinced that they'd experienced things that couldn't have happened (like meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland), and speculation about the future of implanted memories and whether they might be used for good (if you remember that you always loved vegetables, will you be more likely to eat more of them now?).

It's interesting stuff. Basically, don't believe anything at any time.

But then, the justifiably suspicious among us never do, right? We know our brains better than that.

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Lying Brains Strike Again

Sociological Images has a post on the question of why outlet malls tend to be so inconveniently far from places where people live and work. Surely they'd get more business if they were easier to reach?

The post discusses a book called Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (I haven't read it, but it sounds interesting), which suggests that actually, the fact that the stores are hard to get to makes it seem more likely that they offer excellent bargains.

It's our deceptive brains again. We figure "hey, it's in the middle of nowhere, there's no way they could be charging city prices!"

Which, when you think about it, doesn't necessarily make sense. I mean, they're in the middle of nowhere so there's no comparison shopping, so once they've got you there, why wouldn't they charge as much as they could get away with? It's like airports. Captive audience, baby.

And in fact outlet prices may not actually be significantly lower than those you can find elsewhere, but your brain, in blatant collusion with big business, may try to convince you that they are:

If you’ve driven an hour or more one-way to get great deals at the outlet mall, you are primed to believe you’re getting bargains because otherwise you just wasted a lot of time, effort, and gas for nothing. Once you get there, you’re psychologically motivated to believe your effort was worth it, and you do that by buying stuff and thinking the price is a steal.

Here we could argue that rather than trying to boost the economy, your brain is just trying to make you feel better, which I suppose would be a laudable impulse, if it weren't that I suspect that when my brain tries to make me feel better it's just trying to get me to stop bothering it.

"There there--now leave me alone won't you, I'm busy stirring up false memories and justifying illogical beliefs."

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Brain Trickery Revealed?

It's been some time since I found a chance to publicly fret about my conviction that my brain is trying to deceive me for some nefarious purpose that is as yet undetermined, but I hope to get more fuel for that theory this evening.

There's a magic show here at the school where I work, followed by a presentation on the neurobiology that allows us to perceive/be fooled by professional magic! Doesn't that sound awesome?

I can't wait to learn some of the underhanded tricks my brain is playing on me.

It's specifically for the neurobio folks at the med school, including a reception for students who just finished the CNS track, but they said it was open to all, so I'm there.

As far as I'm concerned, "open to all" + food = "hey you, with the fabulous red hair genes, you've got to get in on this!"

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Not That We Need It--

But Bad Science has more on the unreliability of brains. I'm surprised anyone ever gets anything done, what with the enormity of our misperceptions about things.

The piece makes the point that this is part of why it's useful to do research: because our initial understanding of things is so often flawed.

Here's to research, then.

Ah, Brain...My Old Arch-Nemesis

Healthbolt posts this "brain teaser":

Count every ‘F’ in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…

Take a moment to review, if you like, before I give away the answer. I'm not sure if it has to be in all-caps for this to work, so I'll leave it that way, although it rather grates on the eyeballs.

Ahem. [Twiddling thumbs, humming to self.]

OK: it's six.

Apparently a lot of people count fewer, because they overlook the ones in the word 'of.' (I counted all six myself, but did have to make a point to be sure I wasn't missing any, so I could see myself skipping 'of' if I hadn't been paying attention).

Yet another instance of the brain leading us astray. I tell you, those things can't be trusted!

My other point here was that I read the explanation and immediately thought "well of course, 'of' is a stopword."

I do spend a fair amount of time with databases, yes.