A long thank you note!

Almost an year & a half back, I met an interesting family at the Bangalore airport. They were a middle aged couple with 2 kids. A boy named Akash, who was in Class 7 and a girl named Nidhi who was in Class 6. I think the dad was somewhere in his early 40s. I remember them today, because a simple little conversation I had with them has turned out into a really powerful idea in the education space.

I was talking to them & telling them about how I run a company called Vita Beans. They were naturally surprised that a guy who looks like a high school kid had started a company & they wanted to know more. And since I anyway love talking about my startup, I started telling them about how we started as a research project almost 2 years before & how we built our first simulation engine that simulates human behaviour in a variety of environments. We had used a myriad of research frameworks from neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence & fuzzy logic. They didn't seem to understand much except that we were tremendously successful in getting high accuracies & quality results from our work.

Somewhere down the conversation, the mother said something very interesting. She said "There is something I always wanted to know. You know when I take Nidhi with me to a grocery store or a shopping market, the shopkeeper tells me the price of all the items I have purchased before billing me.... Item1 - 30Rs, Item2 - 217Rs, Item3 - 125Rs & so on. And within seconds of him completing the list, my daughter looks at me & says - Mom, it's 1231 rupees. Now... I know she's right because she has developed a habit of doing that every time and she is always right. But the shopkeeper does not know that and so he takes out a calculator, punches in the numbers... Voila! 1231 rupees it is. He then gives me a smile & a complicated look that says - Wow, you have a genius for a daughter there!. And I'm all smiles & proud of her" she was already beaming at her daughter when saying this.

She continued "But then we come home & an hour later, she shows me her marks card & it reads - mathematics... 42/100. I don't know why but I suddenly loose my cool & start yelling at her - You're so dumb at maths. You need to work hard, I'm sending you to tuition starting tomorrow. I know she is good at maths, but I don't know why she scores less. I don't know what to do"

She then looks at me & says "You said you do all those stuff about human behaviour simulation. Do you understand why she scores less in exams when she really is intelligent?"

Frankly, I did not know! When we were in school, my younger brother too was something similar. He could remember the batting averages of every damn cricketer from 1983 to the present day. But his super memory didn't work as well when he had to remember his lessons. And I had no clue why! Neither did my parents.

I just shrugged, looked at the mother & said "I don't know why! But I'm very sure it has nothing to do with mathematics as such" But that got me thinking. When I came back, we discussed it in my team, we spoke to some of the professors working in the field of learning & cognitive sciences. We took time, but we tried to understand why Nidhi was scoring less at maths.

After a while, we found that we were not alone. A few other research groups have also been excited about the connection between learning & cognitive functions. We looked more into such results & came up with frameworks of our own to translate many of the research findings that we learnt into something that kids can understand & use. It seemed like we were finally able to answer - why is it that kids fare differently in situations which demand the use of same skills, but in different ways.

But before we converted our frameworks into some sort of a product, there was another challenge that caught our attention. This has been a problem which grown ups (read parents, teachers, adults) would most of the time not even acknowledge as something that is a problem. And that is - we, as kids, are inherently lazy. We are lazy to get up in the morning, we are lazy to iron our clothes & if there is an exam on that day, we are lazy to even have breakfast. We wait for our Mothers to spoon feed our breakfast as we feverously glance through our textbooks. In spite of knowing about our laziness, our entire system of education & learning tries to pull us out of this laziness before it can teach us something that can change our lives. A tough job, ain't it!

On the other hand, we are also super-active & enthusiastic about certain other things. Things which we enjoy doing, things which make us happy. Grown ups often cannot even understand our excitement in many cases. So we looked at these two contrasting tendencies in children & thought - why not build a tool that puts the kids in a fun & addictive gaming environment & weave the learnings into the environment so that they automatically pick it up as a side effect?

And so we started working on the design for a tool, called MindMaps. It is a cognitive tool that lets you profile & train your brain functions in an addictive & enjoyable way. The brain functions can be the ones like Memory, Attention, Problem Solving, Learning & Flexibility or they can even be skills like Speech, Maths & Vocabulary.

We have been working non-stop to convert our designs into a tool that focuses as much on user experience (if not more) as on the utility and usefulness of the product. The learning has been great so far & the first opinions from folks in the industry has also been exceptionally good. And somewhere in between the excitement - I feel like thanking the couple & their kids, Akash & Nidhi, who got us into this space an year and a half ago.

I don't know what the names of Akash & Nidhi's parents are! I never asked, they never told. But here's me saying Thank You! with all my heart.

Special ain't so special?

In 1920, a few villagers caught 2 girls in remote countryside west of Calcutta. They had been spotted previously with adult wolves and were found in a wolf den with two wolf cubs. The den was dug up, the mother wolf killed and the girls taken away. J A L Singh, an Anglican missionary, who ran an orphanage, took them in and gave them their names - Kamala & Amala.

Kamala was thought to be five or six years of age and Amala around two years old. They were dishevelled, ate raw meat in the manner of dogs, and howled but could not talk. The were indifferent to temperature - a characteristic of people leading rugged lives - had sharp hearing, good vision in the dark and a strange gleaming look in their eyes.

Kamala and Amala stood and walked on all fours. Kamala was so adept as a quadruped that she could outstrip on four legs anyone on two legs and climb and jump easily. But like many other children of her feral background she never seriously mastered walking upright and resorted to hands and knees when needing to. Amala died the year after she was found. Kamala survived into her teens and managed to learn only some three dozen words.

It is interesting to note that Kamala & many other feral children successfully managed to blend very well into the lifestyles of animals they were raised by. If Kamala continued to live with the wolves, she would never realize that she had the ability to speak & master a language, or the ability to walk upright. To Kamala, these ordinary human abilities might have appeared as superpowers!

It makes me wonder if there are many such superpowers hidden inside all of us. Take the example of Kim Peek (The Rain Man). Kim remembers everything, literally everything. Ofcourse it comes with a price - social & developmental disabilities (especially motor skills). While the origin of Kim's abilities have been traced to congenital abnormalities in the brain, it becomes exciting once we remember that the human brain is extremely malleable in our early years. In other words, it is highly possible that a child can grow these abnormalities during it's early development purely because of the way it is raised. Kamala & other feral children have more than proved this to be true.

But why then is it so rare to find guys like Kim with extraordinary abilities? My bet is that the answer lies in the human tendency to outcast everything that is 'not like them'. Kim himself is still considered a disabled person - someone who needs to cured. No wonder that most people who display special abilities today are either raised by non-humans or picked up these abilities even before they were born amidst us. The rules & guidelines based on which our society is built, only promotes those behaviors & abilities that make it easy for new kids to blend with the adults - be like everyone else.

Maybe it is possible to develop abilities like that of Kim & many more like him, without having to compromise social skills or any other essential abilities of the human mind. If only we were more open to explore lifestyles that appear alien, in comparison with the majority that form our social order.

Unconnected Dots

Leslie Brothers attached electrodes to the brain of a monkey which was watching videotapes of the face of another monkey. She found neurons selectively responsive to the other monkey’s facial expression of emotions. An identical behavior is found in human infants where the selectively repond to expressions on adult faces.

A child invariably stares longer at an object that you drop out of your hand, but does not fall down. Somehow, it knows that all objects are supposed to fall to the ground - gravity. We all are prejudiced even before birth, that the light (sunlight) always comes from the top, which is why the same shaded-circle appears bulged when seen at an angle & depressed when seen upside-down.

All these support Darwin's view that emotional & cognitive behaviors are remnants of actions that were functional in evolutionary history. Since the feeling of self-awareness & consciousness is invariably linked with emotions, this suggests that the notion of Self itself might be an evolutionary functionality.

On the other hand, William James held that emotions are internal perceptions of physiological processes in our own bodies — tense facial muscles, sweaty palms, and especially the effects of the autonomic nervous system, such as a pounding heart, faster breathing, and higher blood pressure. Recent works on Somatic Theory by Antonio Damascio also strongly uphold this view. This seems to suggest a bodily (somatic) source for Self.

In a very different plane, Donald Griffin has studied the mental abilities of insects and animals. He associates consciousness with complex and novel behavior in changing or unfamiliar circumstances. For instance, Bees can communicate the direction and distance of food sources and can distinguish between water, nectar, and a possible hive site; they do their waggle dance only when other bees are around, but they have limited ability to modify their behavior in new circumstances. African Grey Parrots can talk excellently but they fail to comprehend the meaning of Self. They often refer to themseves in third person saying - "Polly needs water" instead of saying "I need water". Some apes can recognize parts of their body in a mirror & even communicate to some extent symbolically & even with the use of sounds. But their communicative abilities are greatly dwarfed in front of that found in humans to reveal anything more than evolutionary impressions of Self.

But works of Griffin & others bring out a curious observation - the notion of Self began to emerge only after organisms started to indulge in a social life. Greater the complexity of social interactions & social needs, the more expressed the recognition of self & our feelings towards it.

Though there are many such alternate views to view the source of emotions, self & consciousness, they don't seem to be in contradiction with each other. They just seem to be talking about the same source, seen from different angles. Will all the views converge? Can there be a unified theory for defining everything that is human?

I was - I am

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.

- Kurt Lewin (American Psychologist)

I'm often tempted to believe - I means everything that is unique to my existence. Just to see if such a definition has any relevance in the chain of evolution, let's take a blue-green algae with a boring lifestyle. Broadly speaking, it does 3 things over the course of it's life -

• Interact with the environment.
• Reproduce.
• Die. (Woah! Isn't it remarkably similar to our lives)

So all that can be unique to an algae's existence is - the way it interacts with the environment. Within the lifetime of an algae, this way is completely determined by its genes. Crude as it may seem, millions of years of evolution has added just 1 more category of activity in the lives of humans -

• Store our interactions & learn from them.

While an algae can learn only from it's genes, humans can learn in innumerable ways. But this small change is sufficient to completely alter the meaning of I. While the way an algae interacts with it's environment evolves over thousands of generations, the way we interact with our environment evolves with every interaction. So apart from the way we interact, the interactions themselves become a part of us, part of I. No prizes for guessing what takes care of this - the human brain.

Looking through the glass, this essentially means -

• I = genes (in algae) = genes + brain (in humans)
• Understanding an algae = understanding it's genes + it's environment ; Understanding humans = understanding our genes + brain + environment
• While I evolves over generations in an algae, it evolves continually in humans

While most of the things I've mentioned above might appear common sensical, they give a direction to delve deeper. On a different note, returning to common sense is also essential to discard some of the long held prejudices & start afresh.

Amidst all this, am I suggesting that - it is I or the notion of Self which has been driving evolution all along?

Weird Connections

"Truth is but a feeling, which is just chemical & electrical signals in the human brain. So what then do we mean by a quest for truth? Where then, do we hope to reach in pursuit of truth?"

Often, explorations in the areas of Cosmology, Human Mind/Brain and similar fields tend to blurr the difference between science & religion. Because they are all lands of uncertainty. And like every other uncertain world (any world for that matter), they are founded & built on beliefs, not established facts.

The root cause of this uncertainty, is multiplicity of interactions - too many wires in the circuitry. What brings life to the whole design is not the wires, but the way the wires are connected. It is the connections that make the design - alive!

Ironically, these very connections that keep us alive, also make it extremely difficult for us to comprehend everything that is connected with being alive. Here's why - Can an organism alone, without it's environment be called alive? Can there be a mind to think, if there is no world to cause thoughts? Philosophical as they may sound, I feel it's very necessary to understand this relation between our mind & our environment, the society & all the other minds around us.

#1. In a particularly interesting case, a lady by name Diane Fletcher was being treated by David Milner, a neuropsychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife. She had been blinded in the traditional sense of the world because of a gas tragedy. At one point, Dr. Milner held up a pencil. "What's this?" he asked. As usual, Diane looked puzzled. Then she did something unexpected. "Here, let me see it," she said, reaching out and deftly taking the pencil from his hand. Dr. Milner was stunned, not by her ability to identify the object by feeling it but by her dexterity in taking it from his hand. As Diane reached for the pencil, her fingers moved swiftly and accurately toward it, grasped it and carried it back to her lap in one fluid motion. You'd never have guessed that she was blind. It was as if some other person—an unconscious zombie inside her—had guided her actions.

(from Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran)

Cases like the above revealed that even the simplest of human abilities like vision (you may say it's not so simple after all), is not something that is realized in a specific region of the brain. Even if the pathway to give you the sensation of vision is damaged, the pathways to help you process the information your eyes receive & act accordingly may be intact, like in the above case - multiplicity.

So in the above example, can we say that Diane knew what the world around looked like even though she did not feel the knowledge? Doesn't it mean that our existence has much more to it than the feeling of existence? What then does it mean when we say - "I pursue ..." , if there is another (or many) I within us that pursues something else that we might be completely unaware of?

It's precisely such a multiplicity of existence (of particles) that drove classical physics into the quantum arena. Can there similarly be a new way to define/redefine the way we understand - I ?

Certainly Uncertain

"Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."

- Stuart Sutherland (British psychologist)

#1. More than fifty years ago a middle−aged woman walked into the clinic of Kurt Goldstein, a world−renowned neurologist with keen diagnostic skills. The woman appeared normal and conversed fluently; indeed, nothing was obviously wrong with her. But she had one extraordinary complaint — every now and then her left hand would fly up to her throat and try to strangle her. She often had to use her right hand to wrestle the left hand under control, pushing it down to her side — much like Peter Sellers portraying Dr. Strangelove. She sometimes even had to sit on the murderous hand, so intent was it on trying to end her life.

#2. Not long ago, at the Rivermead Rehabilitation Center in Oxford, England, I gripped a woman's lifeless left hand and, raising it, held it in front of her eyes. "Whose arm is this?" She looked me in the eye and huffed, "What's that arm doing in my bed?" "Well, whose arm is it?" "That's my brother's arm," she said flatly. But her brother was nowhere in the hospital. He lives somewhere in Texas.

(from Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran)

The above two cases are only a handful of clinical examples which have repeatedly questioned the nature of what we call as Self or Consciousness. A few cases have even ended up as interesting lawsuits that fell deep into moral, spiritual & psychological grounds.

During my college life at BITS Pilani, I've had a good share of conversations that revolved around selfishness, altruism, social definitions of good-bad & so on. And at all those times, it was very evident that most issues related to human values, behavior & evolution, inevitably lead us into uncertain grounds. The reason for uncertainty being - the lack of objective understanding of everything that is remotely human. But I've always believed it is possible, to understand ourselves in a much deeper & scientific way than we presently do.

This blog will be my attempt to put together everything that comes close to answering the mysteries surrounding our understanding of Self, Consciousness & Human Behavior. I'm not sure how well individual posts I write here connect later on, but here I am.... pondering on things that are certainly uncertain.

Vita Beans - The Story

An Intro

All that today's mind-reading tools can tell you is that you are intuitive-extrovert-thinking-etc.. type or something like that. With new breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology & Artificial Intelligence algorithms, we see an opportunity to add predictive advantage to the technology behind understanding how the human mind works.

Vita Beans gives you something which you always wanted - A tool to tell you how your mind works! Whether a specific experience makes you happy, sad & even better, what specific decisions you are likely to take in real-life situations.

The Science

"Psychology! It's just a play of words. Deliberately fuzzified theories to hide the fact that psychological models are no better than ordinary guess work in most cases..." - that reflects what many people feel about the apparent vagueness that is a part of traditional psychology. However, recent findings in Neuroscience and a great deal of work done at several major universities over the last few years have provided ways to make psychology more precise.

Not surprisingly, the study of how we make choices has revolved a lot around situations where we surrender ourselves to a choice - addiction. A few years ago, major findings in neuroscience explained how different regions of the brain influence addiction. Since 2005, a lot of new discoveries have succeeded in building models of how these regions & a few more, influence our everyday decision making and preferences that we exhibit.

The Connection

A lot of these theories are used to refine the way we understand and treat patients with psychological disorders. Hence many of the neuropsychological findings have been neglected outside the realm of clinical studies. At Vita Beans, we have integrated many of these models to build a closed system of perception, processing & decision making.

Before we can simulate a person's behavior, we would naturally need a lot of information about the person itself. Most of the methods that exist rely on inductive data representation techniques. However we use deductive data maps which get data from game based interactions with the person. This greatly reduces the amount of data that we need to profile & simulate a person. Our game based interactions also enrich user experience by making it enjoyable as opposed to traditional questionnaire based methods.

An Outro

The thing with non-incremental advancements in technology is that you easily get confused with the multitude of opportunities that it brings to life. It has been the same with us at Vita Beans. Though we are currently targeting areas of recruitment and employee management, we keep building things to quench our curiosity & some of them just for fun!

However, we hope that the dreams that lay ahead will shine much brighter than the ones that lit up the path that lies behind us. This pushes us everyday to nurture new ideas, build new things & get excited about new opportunities. We'd love to hear from you if you think the mysteries surrounding the human mind makes your heart beat faster too...

- Team Vita

Mentoring works?!

Often friends ask me about the difficulties we face trying to startup immediately after graduation. One of the common answer they get to hear is that we have always found the right people to speak openly about our challenges and get their views and insights about it. But I thought it would be appropriate to share something about how such advices have worked for me at least. Because it was very, very different from what I myself expected or how most sources of learning would present it as.

Firstly, I believe no amount of mentoring can substitute experience. And for a non-conformist like me, most advices and insights are not a very natural way to base your decisions on. In spite of that, it has been extremely helpful in a very different way. Normally, we learn the right choices based on our previous cases, when we had to make a similar choice. After a few right/wrong choices you make, most people can pretty much figure out what works for them. Now, having a mentor greatly accelerates two steps involved in the process I stated above:

1. It makes you realize the right choices much sooner than you would otherwise.
2. It helps you understand not just what the right choices are, but why they are the right choices. This makes future learning so much more easy.

Of course, you may argue that there are both merits as well as demerits to this. I agree. But in our case it's been something that has mainly brought out positives for us and I believe it would be so in many other cases where the founders do not have direct corporate experience before. Having said that, things are working great for us only because we enjoy one huge luxury - being able to speak our hearts out with our advisors and get candid opinions not just about encouraging aspects of our business but also about challenges and things that can go terribly wrong. If you cannot speak without any veils with your advisors/mentors, it's no good for either sides irrespective of how much short-term credibility it may bring to your venture.

Like most opinions that I'll be expressing in this blog, some of them have been tested, some of them might just be air. Opinions, beliefs, schedules, roles - everything change so fast in a startup that it makes me wonder if this is the right time to be blogging about it! But then, here I am...

Learning to fly

I remember seeing a comic strip where a young eaglet asks its Mom: "When can I fly, Mama?." Mama looks back at its repaired wooden wings and replies: "Once you finish reading that," pointing at a big fat manual on flying.

Sometimes I cant help but wonder: are there really too many prerequisites to fly on your own?

Wanna startup? put down your ideas on paper first, write a business plan, write a whitepaper, speak to experts, speak to distant clients, speak to every other person in the world you can make up a relation with, seek advice, seek mentoring, seek money, work out the numbers, build up confidence, participate in competitions... the list suddenly seems endless. And even after you've done everything, you still won't have the one real thing which you need to fly high, fly long - a passion for flying!

How could you trust your passion in something you've never done before? That does take a lot of time, lot of work and a lot of learning. Personally, I feel if there is no doubt, no fear, then learning becomes a burden, a tough thing to do. It becomes difficult to put in the efforts required. [Probably that's why all of us wait till the day before the examinations, to put in our efforts and learn something :)]

It took quite a lot of time for us to work time and again on our model, accept its shortcomings and improve it, convince ourselves that we need to write a business plan atleast for ourselves and convince ourselves to accept that things will never go as good as they seem to work within a beautiful cocoon of ours at BITS Pilani.

I'll cut short the story and wind up in a line: We did do all the things I've mentioned above and we're now glad for every bit of it.

[We still do all the above things everyday & we've actually started to love it now!!!]

Staying alive...

In my last post, I spoke of how we graduated from Stealth Mode and started developing the product we had in mind - a framework to create virtual personalities and simulate their behavior in different situations which mimic the real world. It was tough, but we had successfully worked on tough things before.

What we had never done before was to create a world for ourselves, where we could afford to work on crazy little ideas of our own without being at the end of a pointing finger. I wonder why our education system has never bothered to teach us the traits required to hold on to our dreams, no matter how different they are from those of the ones around us. If I come to think of it, personally, my stay at Election Commission and CEL at BITS Pilani might be the main reason why I never felt alienated by this difference as long as I was in BITS Pilani.

I did have my share of gloomy days when it suddenly seemed meaningless to defy everybody around, defy the world and the system that has brought us so far. Though most times, the pain had little to do with Vita Peracta. And there were days when I wanted to quit, drop all grand plans and take refuge in a safe and certain life. The only reason those moments did not stick on, was an infinite source of encouragement and hope, called Nakul Jamadagni. Me & Nakul have had numerous chats at all corners of our campus, at all times of the day. I cherish every single one of them for making me forget that anything at all was different, in what we were doing.

A common feature in all those conversations was long arguments. We used to put out all possible reasons and emotions we had, for or against anything which was the cause of worry. I think, to find someone who will argue against you with all his/her heart is really a huge advantage no matter what you are doing in life. Even to this day, the thing I miss the most about people & places I'm far from is the time I've spent arguing. 'Coz some of the most important things I've learnt in life, are from people who've told me I'm wrong.

Breaking out of Stealth

To tell or not to tell - is a dilemma which haunts most individuals when a new idea hits them. I won't pretend to have an answer. I'll just take you through how we went about breaking out of our stealth mode.

But first, let me clarify my stand on this issue. Even I am an advocate of the new age culture of democratizing innovation. But I do believe a stealth mode is necessary for an idea, at least in a non-ideal world like ours where most ideas end up being born into their graves. Stealth protects you from losing motivation about your idea even before you get a feel for its true potential. Stealth helps you shape your idea to reflect your own self, before letting it grow freely and rapidly in an open environment. Having said that, I do understand that a prolonged stealth mode is as likely to kill an idea, as letting it out before a wrong crowd.

Fortunately, in our case the idea was born within a team and hence reduced the risk of reaching a stale mate under stealth. The real break-out moment came during the winter holidays. With a 11page white paper, me & Sindhu knocked the doors of every neuro-psychologist, social psychologist, evolutionary biologist and psychology doctors we knew. At the same time, Nakul was speaking to HR directors and business heads of several companies in Mumbai. We even found ways to get introduced to experts in the field of computational and cognitive neuroscience from a few major research groups around the globe. In 10 days, I had 100+ conversations labeled "Vita" in my gmail account and we had personally interacted with 15+ individuals from relevant groups.

What did we get? Insights - loads of it & a very promising network of people who were convinced more because of our energy than the idea, which was still looked upon in disbelief like a magic trick that you could not break. To me, the theory was so beautiful, it had to be true. It probably worked in our favor that our framework was already able to predict a good number of behavioral traits which were only inductively asserted till then.

A few people truly liked our idea and got involved in developing it further, while most others liked us and that gave us the confidence to continue working on the idea. By this time, we were convinced that our idea is well ahead of our time and hence almost stopped working on the business aspect of it. The business was turning into a science project.

[Thank you list: Dr. Anders Sandberg, Dr. Ahalya Raghuram, Dr. Vidyanand Nanjundiah, Dr. Manjula, Dr. Keshav Kumar, Ms. Renu, Mr. Rituraj, Dr. Anita Ghai, Dr. Kusuma, Dr. Shobini Rao, Mr. Vijay Rao and Dr. Suman Kapur]

An idea...

Today's world needs a new religion, a new belief which can hold their life together - is what Nakul & me concluded after a funny discussion at VK radi (an eatery at BITS Pilani). We thought we were the right guys to go ahead and seed such a belief in people's minds. All we needed was an extremely sane guy who could connect easily to the masses and make them believe in whatever philosophy we plan to grow. We couldn't think of such a guy but I very much knew a girl who I thought would be a perfect fit for the role - Sindhu.

An hour later, the 3 of us were sitting at Sky Lawns and discussing about what we thought was a growing problem - lack of understanding about life. Yet another hour passed, before we realized we were just sitting and throwing around idiotic ideas that would never work. So we left. But only now do I see how many new and insane ideas that one hour of talk had seeded in all of us. Yet, we left the place without any prejudice for or against any idea.

After going back, I got hooked on to gmail as usual - a prized trait gifted by CEL (Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani), specifically by one lanky, energetic idea bank at CEL called Chinmay Kulkarni. I still don't know what made me dig out a saved chat that was a few days old, where me & Sindhu had tried to come up with a million reasons for why the world and its people are the way they are. What caught my attention was a phrase that could only mean one thing to me at that time - 'Captain Jack Sparrow', but it meant a lot more. It meant 'Life in its complete form' - Vita Peracta.

A week later, we were working on creating a game where the virtual world responds to the player's decisions in exactly the same way as the real world would. But the problem was that the virtual world would have virtual people and we had no clue about how virtual people behave. We did not even have a clue about how real people behave in a real world. A few days later, we found out, no one else has a clue either.

The world still rested its head on the shoulders of two tall figures in Psychology - Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It probably was too ahead of their time to think about going one step ahead of their psychological theories and start testing if they can accurately predict people's behavior using any of those theories. It sadly turns out that you can't. People are too unique to be boxed into standard categories and deduce their behavior. What we needed was a framework to accommodate millions of traits that make us what we are and yet keep the framework simple enough to be put to everyday use.

Sounded like it was still too ahead of our time as well, we now pardoned Freud & Jung. Seemed impossible. Yet, we felt we were holding in our hands, the ends of a few threads that would someday stitch themselves into a beautiful picture of the human mind. We started to help it stitch faster. The idea had taken hold, dreams of an infinite possibilities had found a way to creep into our minds and to me personally, it was a joyful way to keep myself distracted from everything I hated about our world - Boxes & Walls.

[This post is dedicated to Nakul & Sindhu. I'm beginning to realize that an idea is a bunch of ignited minds and not just a bunch of connected thoughts. The latter can never change the world and we're experimenting with the former.]

Pre-Launch: Website Under Construction - Vita Beans