Colin Ellard - You Are Here

The Macintosh of maps?

It was a happy coincidence that on a long flight from Hong Kong I stumbled upon an article in the International Herald Tribune  about location tracking that was so much up my alley that a slightly more sleep-deprived and jet-lagged traveler might have suspected he was being set up by some shadowy Matrix manipulator.  The first part of the article argued that there is an avalanche of new location-based applications for smart phones -- which is true.  And there's a suggestion that Google's new Latitude service will be a powerful force in the commercialization of location information.  Too soon to tell.  My fumbling efforts with Latitude left me less than thrilled, but conditions were not ideal -- I was struggling with a GPS logger bluetoothed to my smartphone -- according to my tech advisor on all things GPS this is a recipe for bewildering hocus pocus that may or may not work and either way you'll never really know why.

It's fairly obvious why a comprehensive database describing where people go and what they do there (=what they buy there) could be of interest to those in the business of doing business, though given that only 10% of people use phone maps, there's a bit of market penetration that has to happen first.

But for me the most interesting and perplexing part of this somewhat scattered article had to do with the argument that map-based applications like this are so powerful because the human brain has some kind of natural affinity for map-based information.  Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO is quoted as suggesting that "Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective" which given my own bias that humans are pretty middling navigators took me a bit by surprise.  I've always believed that an important contributor to the geo-everything fascination is the fact that most of us spend much of our lives not really knowing where the heck we are.  There's just something deeply fascinating about being able to use a little chunk of electronics linked up to space satellites to follow one's own movements through large scale space with the same precision that a desert ant calls on to find its way home across a wide span of desert.  Sure, we have maps in our heads, but they're not much like Google Maps.  They're more like squishy sheets of rubber with a quirky labelling system that sometimes works well and at other times causes us to make the most astonishing errors.

So yes I think there's something deeply interesting about our love affair with mapping, location-based services, GPS, geotagged photographs and all the rest of it, but I don't think that what's happening is that all of this technology is awakening some slumbering set of powerful navigational abilities in us.  On the contrary, I think it is all so interesting because it is giving us access to a precise toolkit for locating ourselves that's very much akin to what some other animals possess but nothing like what we use to limp around in space.

Paul Mercer, another source for the article suggests, intriguingly, that the great mapping interface, the Macintosh of Maps, akin to the Windows breakthrough for personal computing, has yet to be made.  The idea that there may be some powerful, intuitive map based interface that will revolutionize our use of handheld devices to connect with the physical world kept me awake for the first few hours of my flight.  Imagine if substantial numbers of us lived in a kind of perpetual state of spatial attunement to one another and to the world in which, without a second thought, we always knew which way to turn and how far to walk or drive to connect with someone we knew (or didn't) or with some kind of resource.  I imagined spending my waking hours wired into some kind of ambient computing device that placed me on a map with everything I cared about.  If substantial numbers of us had that kind of connection to place, how much would change?

The Internet ate my brain

Unlike some of the people I know who share my intense concern about the future of our planet, I'm not particularly opposed to technology.  In fact, I've been known to raise the ire of an ecologist or two with my suggestion that we can actually use technology to understand why it is that contact with nature is so important to our health, well-being, and sanity.  I think we can.  In fact, I will be so bold as to say that in my laboratory, I think we have all the tools and brainpower we need to arrive at some preliminary answers to that question in the next few years.

In spite of my being soft on screens, microprocessors, and nice wide bandwidths of bits being pumped into my house and office at screaming speeds, I can't help sometimes thinking about the impact on my life, especially my working life, of having a big hose filled with information that is, literally, never out of my hand's reach at any time of the day or night.  Most of the time, I think this is a positive impact.  Because I know that any lapse in memory can be quickly patched up by a Google search, I can relax about what's in the knowledge bank and worry more about making the connections between things that I think constitute the real power of intelligence (on the other hand, I sometimes worry, especially late at night, that my mind is now IN the Internet or at least exists in some kind of bio-silicon hybrid form).

A bigger concern for me, though, is what's happening right now as I write these words.  I'm also, from time to time, peering over at another screen which displays my email.  Occasionally, I feel a small buzz at my hip which is a vibrating alert on my phone indicating that one or more of my children is reporting in on their whereabouts.  When I'm working on something dull, or something difficult, or one of those tasks for which I seem to have a daily threshold (I can only grade five papers per day -- after that my judgement wanders), I take frequent breaks to look around at other items on my screens.  My email program is set to harvest new messages at 20 minute intervals.  I can sometimes tell whether I'm utterly absorbed in a task when the full 20 minutes elapses and is not co-opted by a manual send/receive command shooting out of my finger.

In a way that never used to be true, my attention is distributed.  Though I can remember being so absorbed in a problem, a piece of computer programming, or a book to such an extent that I would look up and notice that it was 4 am and I hadn't eaten supper, I can now no longer remember the last time this happened.  Now there are just too many different inputs vying for my attention and it has become my normal mode of existence to shuffle my mind around from one thing to another on a fairly regular and frequent basis.  Some might say that I've evolved, but I'm pretty sure I've lost something as well.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be an examiner on a dissertation that included a clever set of studies on something called the "attentional bottleneck."  It can be very complicated, but the basic idea is that human attention is narrowly focused in a way that allows us to only actually attend to a small amount of information at one time.  The attentional bottleneck is why it is not a good idea to talk on a cellphone while driving, for example.  I remember commenting to the student that what I found most remarkable about this processing bottleneck was that everything we know about how brains work suggest that they're massive parallel processors -- they can do lots of things at the same time.  Given this, it seems strange that there is this fundamental limit on how much of these wondrous goings-on we can pay attention to -- very little it seems. 

Why does that bottleneck exist and what does it mean to us that we live in a rich informational environment that provides us with constant encouragement to try to widen it?  I think that without the bottleneck, we'd have an entirely different way of experiencing the world.  For one thing, it would be more difficult for us to figure out the temporal order in which things happened to us, so hard to put together the story of our lives. 

I wonder -- is our understanding of time worse now than before we allowed ourselves to be immersed in data soup?

In the land of the stereoblind, the one-eyed man is, well, stereoblind

I have to confess that I greet the news of a possible expansion of 3-d experiences in cinemas with a bit of chagrine.  The reason is -- deep personal confession here -- that like about 10% of the population, I'm stereoblind.  This isn't the same thing at all as not having vision in one eye.  Both eyes work, but they don't work well together.  Like Rembrandt, I can't fuse images from the two eyes together to get that pop-out of the third dimension.  I'll never "get" a Magic Eye picture.  I'll never really be able to enjoy these 3-d movies and in fact having to wear those glasses may even detract from my experiences. 

What's interesting about this, though, is that I  had no idea of my deficit until I had some vision testing at the age of 18 as part of an interview for a summer job at a glass factory (!!).  The company nurse, fearing that I wouldn't be able to detect huge slabs of sharp-edged window panes coming at me, wouldn't recommend me for a job.  When I tell people that I'm stereoblind, they often ask me why I don't bump into things or how I cope with a world that must look just like a picture.   But the truth is that we have lots of other sources of 3d information, especially different kinds of visual motion, so that I don't at all feel as though I'm trapped in Flatland (though I can have no idea of how the world might look different to me if I did have stereovision).

I have to tell you, though, that for a guy who works in a lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed to generate painstakingly realistic stereoscopic simulations of the world, there are days when I have to laugh a little at my own predicament.  Perhaps it even has something to do with my own penchant for getting lost.  But if so, the prevalence of stereoblindness must be much higher than we think because most of us spend some part of every day not really knowing where we are.

Are men wired for space?

There's an interesting study of gender differences in computer game play that is about to hit print and has already been summarized in the press.  The study, by a group of researchers at Stanford led by Allan Reiss, shows differences in behaviour between men and women on a game in which the objective was to capture territory by pointing and clicking on balls on a computer screen.  The more balls were clicked, and the closer the clicked balls were to a wall, the harder the player could push back the wall to capture more space.  Both men and women learned how to play the game, but men outperformed women on the task.  Not only this, but the pattern of brain activation was different in men and women, with some of the same areas that are involved in other kinds of reward (such as drug reward) lighting up more strongly in men than in women.

The authors speculate about a link with the known male territorial imperative.  In many (but far from all) animals, males explore, occupy, and defend larger amounts of space than females do.  The main reason for this has to do with patterns of mating.  For lots of animals, control of territory converts to control of resources needed to attract mates.  It's interesting to speculate about a mechanism that drives men to command space that is so deeply rooted that it can turn on the same ancient brain circuits that drive us to seek out crack cocaine, but it's too soon to know how critical the territorial component of the video game was to the outcome.  One would need to test people using other kinds of games--experiments that it sounds as though this group intends to pursue.

Nevertheless, the study sent my mind to some interesting places.  Modern warfare, as perhaps most clearly laid out by the French philosopher Paul Virilio, is as much about occupying by looking as it is about occupying by being on the ground.  If I have a satellite that can look down on a piece of the ground from a position high above the planet and trigger a cruise missile attack when it sees something it doesn't like, then the surveillance itself, the potential for action, works just as well as columns of soldiers marching on the ground.  It's more than interesting -- damned scary in fact -- to imagine men sitting at screens, watching displays of coloured pixels that represent buildings, villages, and lives, limbic systems pumping away as surely as if they were doing lines of coke on their dashboards filled with shiny buttons.  These are video games at the highest and most deadly level.

Moral instincts and the environment

I've just finished reading Stephen Pinker's feature article in the New York Times Magazine on the evolution and cognitive science of morality.  As is often the case, I find myself reading with a mixture of admiration and envy.  Pinker's science writing is clear, persuasive, and interesting and he exercises his usual knack for connecting his ideas to important current events. 

I hate to quibble with what is generally a great piece if not for the grenade that he lobs at us in the penultimate paragraph:

"The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness."

In a way, he's right that any real solution to the problem of climate change must take into account the actions of people in both East and South Asia, but to suggest that these people are incapable of reining in their production of carbon or unwilling to do so is to ignore the basic fact that on a per capita basis, North Americans are at the top of the carbon consumption pyramid.  Though the gap is closing, the US and Canada together consume more energy than East Asia in spite of having about one-sixth the population.  So the problem with the Asias is not the consumption of energy by individuals (individual consumption in India is miniscule compared to that in North America) but the number of individuals.  Admittedly still a big problem, but one of numbers in this case rather than behaviour.

But back to behaviour.  After all, Pinker and I are both psychologists.  I've heard this argument before that our own changes in attitude and behaviour won't amount to a hill of beans until things change overseas, but there's another basic fact that gets ignored in this argument, and that is that a good deal of the production of carbon overseas is taking place at our own behest.  China, for example, has a massive export number (1.2 trillion US dollars) and one of the largest trade surpluses of any country.  Much of the overseas industrial production that is responsible for emission of carbon is taking place because of demand from North American consumers.  If we didn't want the stuff that's being made in China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, then there would be less carbon in the air.  I'm not pretending that if that demand suddenly evaporated, that it wouldn't spell some disastrous times for those who are ekeing out a living making our computers, cellphones, big screen televisions and Barbie dolls, but if we're trying to imagine that we're not complicit in the loop whereby the production of such things causes massive carbon outputs then we're not being completely honest with ourselves.  In more ways than we might like to admit, the levers that control how much carbon China, India, and the rest of Asia put into the air are firmly within our own grasp every time we go to the store to buy something we might not need.

There are no easy answers to any of this.  In the short term, it's becoming abundantly clear that we will need some draconian measures both to curb carbon outputs and to deal with the carbon that is already in the air.  In the longer term, though, what's needed is a set of changes in our behaviour that perhaps begin with the recognition that we're connected to remote regions of the planet.  If we're going to eat up lots of energy to expand our geographic footprint, spread economic tentacles across the globe in order to prop up a certain standard of living, then we need to find ways to clear the veil from our eyes that prevents us from seeing all of the consequences of such a lifestyle. 

The unique nature of our own minds makes it altogether too easy for us to forget the real size and shape of the planet and how each of us is connected to it.  Our predominantly visual minds deal with our lives one vista at a time.  "Out of sight, out of mind" is the mantra by which we live.  I doubt we can change this in any substantial way no matter how much clever psychology we might try to use, but understanding such matters might help us to think of ways to harness the strange and clever shape of our own mentation to help us find a way out of the mess we've made for ourselves.

It isn't too late, but we'll need all shoulders to the wheel, especially those belonging to clever public intellectuals like Pinker.

Ideology and the human brain

We're on the eve of an election in the province of Ontario.  My fingers have hovered over the keyboard for a few days now, wondering whether this was an appropriate venue for my political opinions and ultimately deciding, wisely I think, that it isn't. 

But I can't help making at least a passing reference to an interesting recent investigation of the differences between liberal and conservative brains.  In a study published in October in Nature Neuroscience, it was reported that those people who describe themselves as 'liberal' do better than those who describe themselves as 'conservative' on a simple kind of response inhibition task called a "Go -NoGo task".  In this task, participants are presented with a simple display (in this case it was a letter on a computer monitor) and they are required to press a button very quickly whenever they see the letter (GO!).  The catch is that on a few trials, a fairly small proportion of trials, they are presented with a different letter and the instruction to not respond (NO-GO!).  Though this sounds like a simple task, 500 trials of it, especially when being needled to go as quickly as possible, is enough to cause anyone to make some errors.  What's interesting is that self-identified conservatives are not quite as good at reining in their responses on the NO-GO trials, and they don't show the same patterns of brain activity that are seen in self-identified liberals (an area of the brain called the 'anterior cingulate cortex' appears to play a special role in generating inhibitory responses in this task).  Interestingly, some older research suggests that these kinds of differences may even be heritable.

So what does all of this mean?  I suppose one interpretation would be to say that conservative minds work well when we expect what has always worked to continue to work.  Liberal minds, in contrast, might shine when our habitual responses are no longer working and something new is needed.  So where are we right now in Ontario?  Canada?  The world?  That's for each of us to answer for ourselves -- and not just on our election days, but every day. 

The space was singing

David Rokeby, Toronto new media artist, talked about his work here in Kitchener last night, in conjunction with the CAFKA-Haptic contemporary art festival.  The installation that he brought with him, a project that obsessed him for over a decade, is called the "Very Nervous System."   In the words of Marcel Duchamp, he now classifies this project as 'definitively unfinished.'  It has much yet to offer, but not in Rokeby's hands.

This incarnation of the installation sits just outside of the front doors of Kitchener City Hall and is almost entirely invisible.  In fact, an unobservant visitor could walk right through it without noticing that it was there at all.  The Very Nervous System consists of a small hidden camera, a few speakers, and some clever computing.  The camera and computer divide a zone of space into a number of small segments, and Rokeby programs a palette of sounds that are produced by movements through the zones.  In keeping with the haptic theme of this year's festival, the sounds are locally produced recordings of hands moving over tools, materials, and hardware.  Though this is not a very difficult thing to do with current technology, Rokeby's first version of the work, in the early 1980's, required him to build his own cameras and to program the entire effort in something that only the bravest go near these days -- 'assembly language programming' - Rokeby's apt analogy was that writing in assembly was a bit like sculpting using atoms. 

There was much to interest me in Rokeby's talk, but one idea captured my mind completely.  Rokeby explained that at some point in the development of the project, he came to feel that the computer was beginning to anticipate his movements.  He tried various kinds of 'gunslinger' games to try to initiate a movement before the speakers announced his movement with a sound, but he found that he could never do so.  The sound of his movement always seemed to precede his decision to make a movement by a fraction of a second.  Rokeby delved into the neuroscience literature and discovered the work of Benjamin Libet, who has shown, astonishingly, that we somehow become conscious of a decision to act some time after the decision has actually been made.  The experiments are clever.  They involve asking a participant to watch a sweeping clock hand while making random and unpredictable decisions to carry out a simple movement.  When they report the location of the clock hand at the time they felt they made the decision, brain and muscle traces always report that the bodily activity accompanying the movement has already begun when the conscious 'decision' is being made.  This finding, fascinating all by itself, has rippling implications.  A friend of mine (in fact the person who introduced me to Rokeby's work about a year ago) advised me to spend a lot of quality time in the Very Nervous System.  "The longer you spend in the space, the better the experience becomes because the computer learns about you," he said.   As it turns out, this is not true at all, but it resonates with Rokeby's experiences with this and other installations that the more closely peoples' actions are monitored, the more detailed and fine-grained the surveillance, the more they feel they are having a truly interactive experience.  Our mental confusion about when things happen, the smearing of event time, can invert our commonplace constructions of causality.

In short:  our conscious selves don't exactly have the kind of access to our decision-making processes that we might think.  Decisions seem not to originate in conscious acts of will, but somewhere else.  Consciousness somehow skiffs along the surface of our actions, noting them, constructing interesting and entertaining accounts of what we do, but not really providing the motive force.  As Rokeby points out, there are some ominous overtones.  Lacking a firm grasp on when we do things, we won't necessarily know why we act. 

Rokeby and Stelarc make a fine pair at this festival.  Stelarc robbed me of my 'where' and now Rokeby questions my 'when'.  This has been a dazzling and slightly disorienting week of ideas for me.

Third ears, teleportation, and the end of bodies

I had an utterly mind-stretching hour last night listening to Stelarc's tour through the history of his performances, beginning with his astonishing and eye-catching "suspensions" series that had him hovering naked over city and sea, impaled by huge meat hooks attached to wires, and ending with his presentation of a "prosthetic head" -- a five metre high projected image of Stelarc-head, complete with animated facial expressions and eye movements, and ready with witty, ironic, deep, or sometimes just plain silly replies to questions from the audience.  It's not hard to get the impression after a quick scan through his website that the main objective of much of Stelarc's performance art has been to draw attention to himself through a series of actions that almost seem to revile living flesh, provoking visceral, head-averting reactions from the audience.  At times, it was hard enough to look at the pictures, let alone experience the real thing.  But listening to Stelarc's words, ruminating on the thematic threads that run through all of his work, it is hard not to stand in awe of his approach to the delivery of his message.  Stelarc's artistic argument is that "the body is obsolete."  Technology that delivers instant messages from one place to another has had an enormous impact on how we see and use physical space.  In a sense, space as Newton understood it has disappeared.  But what Stelarc has done is to find ways to use this effect of modern technology to make clear what he sees as a deep truth about the illusory nature of self-hood.  The everyday notion that we human beings are embodied causative agents, he says, is nothing more than a mirage.  Things happen.  Our bodies, or perhaps just parts of them, participate in these events, but don't cause them.  And whatever the nature of this participation might be, it is a mistake, he says, to locate it in our bodies. 

To demonstrate the argument, Stelarc finds ways to blur, distort, or reverse the connections between human bodies and the dynamic events taking place in vast, disconnected spaces.  By means of muscle stimulators embedded in his arm, he surrenders control of his own body to a foreign operator, either human or computer.  By growing a third ear in his forearm using cutting edge cell culture biotechnology, Stelarc turns a part of his body into an auditory portal tuned using Bluetooth to the Internet.  Eventually, we will be able to dial up Stelarc's brachial ear on the Internet and listen to what his arm is hearing.  Perhaps he will even think of re-inserting the muscle stimulators so that we can tune and direct the ear.  If so, then whose body, whose causes, and whose acts?

I wasn't the only audience member to notice Stelarc's peculiar references to himself as "the body", and it reminded me of a year spent sitting in a group with a remarkable Buddhist teacher, who encouraged us to work towards a state of detachment or 'equanimity' from our own minds, the point being, I think, that each of us participated in a vastly complicated nexus of cause and effect that transcended the individual.  Just as Stelarc argued last night, personal agency was an illusion.

The sense of self fascinates me.  Converging evidence from neuroscience suggests that there are specialized circuits in our brains whose function is to put a sense of self, or personal agency together.  Certain pathologies, produced by strokes or other diseases, can fracture self-hood.  Even some pathologies of sleep, most likely connected to the same brain areas, can produce peculiar shifts of self-hood, such as the out-of-body experience.  Imaging studies are suggesting that experienced meditators may have found ways to 'quiet' or alter this part of their brains.

In our laboratory, and following the leads of some others, we have begun to experiment with virtual reality methods to encourage the breakdown of the sense of self.  This can be done by having someone wear virtual reality goggles which are connected to cameras showing a remote view of themselves.  People see themselves move and act from a remote perspective, and we stand by, ready to mix and remix the connections between the actions they see and the effects they expect.  We're doing this to try to understand more about where selves come from and how they locate themselves, but Stelarc's talk last night reminded me of the bigger picture, that such questions lie at the root of much human philosophy, religion, and art. 

The years immediately ahead of us, where the interests of scientists, artists, and other thinkers converge to produce striking new views of the connections between minds and spaces, may well produce some of the defining moments of our evolution as a self-reflecting species.