Author Archives: Wil

About Wil

A groovy guy thinking deep thoughts.

Hmm, that’s an understatement

You have to find some humorin this Washington Post report on a political rally turned violent.

The video makes it hard to see what sparked individual violent incidents. At one point, two men began punching each other. A woman was hit in the face in the scuffle, further angering people. As that was going on, someone released a mist of pepper spray, and people in the dense crowd started coughing and rubbing their eyes.

Then, the mood of the rally soured, according to the video.

Yes, only then did the mood sour. Until then it was going swimmingly.

Connecting the dots between Scott Adams and “The Game”

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I spent a lot of time during the election season commenting favorably on cartoonist Scott Adams’ analysis of Trump’s campaign. I even wrote a few articles over at acid logic on the subject, including this one where I compared Trump’s persuasion abilities to similar skills I had seen described in a book about the world of pickup artists called “The Game.”

As such I shouldn’t be too surprised when I read this profile on Adams and come across this passage.

[Adams] has an airy office upstairs, where the books on display include Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade and a signed copy of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, a book of strategies for seducing women. (Adams said he hadn’t read it.)

I would argue that “The Game” isn’t a strategy book, it about the people who use the strategies.

Another interesting tidbit about Adams in the profile.

Around the same time, Adams said, he was making up to $1 million annually from public speaking, charging up to $100,000 per speech, until in 2005 he suddenly lost the ability to talk with other people. The mysterious condition is known as voice dystonia. While Adams could still speak normally to himself and to his cat, and he could even sing and recite memorized poems, he could no longer have conversations. “I think that’s what led to the end of my marriage,” he told me. “Losing the ability to speak made me feel like a ghost. It was incredibly lonely.” The inexplicable condition, which doctors attributed to a possible mental condition, persisted for three years. Then Adams underwent an experimental surgery that involved cutting nerves that lead from the brain to the vocal cords and building a new path using nerves from elsewhere in the neck. A few months later, his voice returned.

Really, if you can still talk to your cat then nothing has been lost.

Donald the unprepared

There are many reasons one could find Donald Trump grating. You can find people airing their grievances all over the web. But I’m starting to sense that a lot of it gets down to this: Trump’s way of dong things flies in the face of how we are “supposed” to do things.

What do I mean by this? The conventional view of how one tackles a project is that you do research, develop your processes and then apply a lot of elbow grease and get it done. You develop a plan and then follow through with the plan.

I suspect this goes back to the Protestant work ethic that was later codified in business manuals. It’s certainly how I tend to do things and it’s how the previous President, Barack Obama, (remember him?) did things.

Trump clearly doesn’t apply this method. Rather he throws a bunch of “stuff” up in the air and sees what sticks. Very little of what he throws up has much forethought applied; it just seems to be what strikes him at the moment.

During the long election season, I frequently commented on Scott Adams’ assertions about Trump. One of them was that Trump often “A/B tested” his messages. For instance, here, Adams alleged that Trump A/B tested his insulting nicknames for his opponents (e.g. “Crooked Hillary,” “Low Energy Jeb.”)

At other times Adams alleged that Trump kept his policy proposals deliberately vague to allow people to overlay their preferred policy in the details.

In essence Adams argues that Trump is intentionally not a planner or a “details guy.” I think Adams is right, and it’s this lack of interest on Trump’s part in planning, in structure, that bugs people (including me.) It goes against everything we’ve been told. The message of modern life is “develop a plan, work hard at it and you might succeed.” Then this Trump guy comes along, makes it all up on the spot and ends up being President.

Now one has to ask: Is there something to this “make it up as you go” approach? There is the obvious advantage that, in a fast moving, ever-changing world, it’s much easier to change your strategy on the fly if you aren’t wedded to a particular implementation. This is the idea in business books like “Teaching The Elephant to Dance.” And we have seen Trump change his implementation on many things. He was for criminalizing abortion until he wasn’t. He was for a Muslim ban until it was a partial ban. He was for deporting illegals but now he’s for… well, I’m not really sure. As many have commented, he has no firm ideology.

But it also seem that not applying the proper thought and planning can only blow up in your face eventually. And I think that many people’s concern (and mine.)

The vindication of John Sarno

A while back, I spent a lot of time on this blog discussing the theories of Dr. John Sarno. Sarno argues that a lot of pain, specifically back pain, is psychologically induced. This argument is obviously contentious and goes against the conventional wisdom of back doctors. Being a fan of Sarno’s ideas, I was intrigued when I saw the following headline on Vox.com

Doctors finally admit drugs can’t fix most cases of back pain

In the article, we learn that the American College of Physicians has come around to the conclusion that drugs don’t really help lower back pain, even though this type of pain is very prevalent. That, in and of itself, doesn’t really give any credence to Sarno’s claims. But check out these two paragraphs.

Obesity, being overweight, smoking, depression, and anxiety have all been linked with lower back pain. But the cause is usually more complicated. “Our best understanding of low back pain is that it is a complex, biopsychosocial condition — meaning that biological aspects like structural or anatomical causes play some role, but psychological and social factors also play a big role,” said Chou, who wrote a big evidence review that helped inform the new ACP guideline.

For example, in patients who have nearly identical results from an imaging test like an MRI, those who are depressed or unsatisfied with their jobs tend to have worse back pain than people who aren’t, Chou said. Partly for this reason, doctors don’t generally recommend doing MRIs for acute episodes of low back pain, since they can lead to overtreatment — like surgery — that also won’t improve health outcomes.

I imagine Sarno is feeling pretty vindicated right now.

(BTW, I wrote about other observations that MRIs often lead to unnecessary surgery here.)

Are kids wired to be negative nellies?

I continue to read “The Organized Mind” and come across an interesting passage about how age affects how we react to negative and positive information.

Older adults show a special preference for emotionally positive memories over emotionally negative memories, while younger adults show the opposite. This makes sense because it has long been known that younger people find negative information more compelling and more memorable than the positive. Cognitive scientists have suggested that we tend to learn more from negative information then from positive – one obvious case is that positive information often simply confirms what we already know, where is negative information reveals to us areas of ignorance. In this sense, the drive for negative information in youth parallels the thirst for knowledge that wanes as we age.

My first thought about this is related to music. It’s certainly true that youth prefer what we might call “negative” forms of music. Music styles like goth, heavy metal, punk and whatnot certainly advocate against the mainstream ethos of society. And interest in these music styles tends to wane with age. You don’t see a lot of 75-year-old punk rockers out there.

There’s also the stereotype of the wholesome kid who goes off to college, takes a couple of Noam Chomsky courses, and suddenly hates America. This is, of course, an oversimplification of what goes on there, but in essence, the kid is embracing a point of view that goes against the mainstream.

The point of all this being that this pursuit of negativity may be in some sense “wired” into our genes and brains. Younger minds are more receptive to negative ideas, and older minds more resistant to them. (Certainly, we think of older people as being more “traditional” than younger people e.g. they are more prone to celebrate mainstream beliefs and symbols.)

Trump’s can-do attitude

I’ve raved in the past about Daniel Levitin’s book “This Is Your Brain On Music.” Just now I am reading his book “The Organized Mind” which is essentially about how to train your brain to be more efficient. In a section on dealing with failure he has an interesting passage. (Note: the book was written in 2014.)

Billionaire Donald Trump has had as many high-profile failures as successes: deadend business ventures like Trump Vodka, Trump magazine, Trump Airlines, and Trump Mortgage, four bankruptcies, and a failed presidential bid. He is a controversial figure, but he has demonstrated resilience and has never let business failures reduce his self-confidence.

It did strike me somewhere around Trump’s victory that he epitomizes adages like “believe in yourself,” and “never let what others think of you stand in your way.” Trump seems quite comfortable just pounding his way to victory. (And pounding the people who stand in his way, be they political opponents of any stripe, beauty queen contestants, judges or parents of fallen soldiers.)

Levitin doesn’t end his analysis there though. He continues….

Too much self-confidence of course is not a good thing, and there can be an inner tug-of-war between self-confidence and arrogance that can, in some cases, lead to full-scale psychological disorders.

Blood harvest

I thought I would get a little more informed about the state of life extension technology and dug up this Guardian article on various drugs and techniques being investigated. This section stands out.

One of the more unusual approaches being tested is using blood from the young to reinvigorate the old. The idea was borne out in experiments which showed blood plasma from young mice restored mental capabilities of old mice. A human trial under way is testing whether Alzhemier’s patients who receive blood transfusions from young people experience a similar effect. Tony Wyss-Coray, a researcher at Stanford leading the work, says that if it works he hopes to isolate factors in the blood that drive the effect and then try to make a drug that does a similar thing. (Since publishing his work in mice, many “healthy, very rich people” have contacted Wyss-Coray wondering if it might help them live longer.)

As I age, I often find myself looking at the supple bodies of young people and musing on how I would like to drink their blood. It’s good to see I’m not alone.

The last sentence in that quoted paragraph touches on what got me thinking about this. In some sense, death is the great equalizer. Are we about to enter an era where income inequality will correspond with lifespan inequality? Technically, I think we are already there though the disparity is minimal.

It seems a near certainty that in the future the aged wealthy will be kidnapping young people off the streets and harvesting their blood.

Neural Lace for dogs?

Elon Musk has been talking about the concept of a neural lace. This is basically a wire mesh inserted into the brain which enambles direct communication with populations of neurons. To quote this article

…the neural lace is a device that is intended to grow with your brain. Its primary purpose is to optimize mental output through a brain-computer interface, allowing the human brain to effortlessly access the internet and, thus, keep up with (and someday merge with) artificially intelligent systems.

Micheal Chorost described something similar in his book “World Wide Mind” which I discussed here.

Today I was musing on the following scenario. Could we insert neural laces into the brains of dogs and then connect those canine brains to various A.I. brain augmentation devices such that dogs would then become smart enough to communicate with us? Are talking dogs the first sign of the singularity?

Bark once if you agree!

Reactivating brains

So recently I’ve been interested in the topic of what a conscious, living creature really is. To quote myself

If I’m right, living people are sort of like a computer with the power on. Our brains have an architecture which is the arrangement of our neurons (the connectome.) When that architecture has “juice” running through it, you have a living, talking person. When that juice is taken away, you have—you got it—a dead person (similar to a computer with the power off.)

Today I stumbled onto this

In a paper published in Plos One in early December, scientists detailed how they were able to elicit a pattern similar to the living condition of the brain when exposing dead brain tissue to chemical and electrical probes. Authors Nicolas Rouleau, Nirosha J. Murugan, Lucas W. E. Tessaro, Justin N. Costa, and Michael A. Persinger (the same Persinger of the God-Helmet studies) wrote about this breakthrough,

This was inferred by a reliable modulation of frequency-dependent microvolt fluctuations. These weak microvolt fluctuations were enhanced by receptor-specific agonists and their precursors[…] Together, these results suggest that portions of the post-mortem human brain may retain latent capacities to respond with potential life-like and virtual properties.

That’s just a fancy way of saying it might be possible to bring dead brain tissue back to life, sort of.

This is a far cry away from reactivating a dead person and nothing here really implies that would ever be possible. But it does play into the theory I posted above. You could say they turned the juice back on.

It’s Alive! Alive!

Lately I’ve been exploring this idea that we don’t know what consciousness is. I considered the the possibility that consciousness could be some kind of “force.” My theory was that when this force travels through a complex network, like our human brain, it/we/something experiences what we call subjective consciousness.

I also asked: could this force simply be electricity (or the electromagnetic force?) It seems all too simple and rather Frankenstein-ian. I’ve done a bit of reading and the consensus seems to be “no” though I need to read more.

One of the articles I read had some juicy tidbits on past experiments of applying electricity to the dead.

WIRED: What Happens If You Apply Electricity to the Brain of a Corpse?

In 1802, Aldini zapped the brain of a decapitated criminal by placing a metal wire into each ear and then flicking the switch on the attached rudimentary battery. “I initially observed strong contractions in all the muscles of the face, which were contorted so irregularly that they imitated the most hideous grimaces,” he wrote in his notes. “The action of the eylids was particularly marked, though less striking in the human head than in that of the ox.”

In 1803, he performed a sensational public demonstration at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, using the dead body of Thomas Forster, a murderer recently executed by hanging at Newgate. Aldini inserted conducting rods into the deceased man’s mouth, ear, and anus.
One member of the large audience later observed: “On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.”