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

10 Tips to...or was it 299 guidlines for ... nah nah its Encyclopedia for ...

I know you would have gone through all such tips, guidelines, books, lectures, sessions, conferences, talks, clubs ... so on. Else you wouldn't have landed up on this ( I know because I tagged this post under entrepreneurship, startup, iPod, and all those keywords you have subscribed to.)

Encylopedia says : All the above you have done are of NO use^{(conditions apply)}.

(rude shock eh? guess ... if you were smart enough you would have seen it coming yet it feels as a pretty rude shock !)

Lets figure out ... what you encounter during the first 6 months of your startup ( your baby/dream project/ invention or patent cum ATM ... or so to that effect)

Let me walk you through ...

Usual Chores : Yes... you figure out your own means to get these chores done, like getting your company registered, PAN & TAN, Trademarking your logo, Bank account, filing returns et al.

Then while scrolling through your google reader you come across this -

"There's no doubt about it - being a startup in any economic condition is rough, and in the current tumult, mind-bending challenges aren't out of the ordinary. However, I, like most other entrepreneurs I've encountered, am a staunch optimist and thus, even in the face of hardship, seek the silver lining. Tonight, I'd like to share a few of the diamonds in the dung pile that are closest to my heart."

Well, reiterating ... its a lot of high-flying motivation talk n BS ! What happens ( or might ) is

# Living on No Income 

The first few months/years of startup life are often waged with salaries that would make college students cringe, but later on, this austerity can be a tremendous asset as you have massively talented engineers & execs that can live on a fraction of what larger firms would need. That extra income can be re-invested in the business for a significant competitive advantage.

# If You Can't Afford Talent, You Have to Learn It Yourself

Well, its the BEST case scenario. I tried it, but ...you can complete it. Instead you need to dabble all possible options and find(ASAP) the reason for your stickability. _{(word coined by M.Bricks of Hustle)}

# Surviving Tough Times Frequently Leads to Success:

Couldn't control but put in this TIP :)

# Guerrilla Marketing is Valuable No Matter How Big Your Marketing Budget Gets

As a startup, you don't have money for big advertising pushes to brand your company/product/service, so you have to rely on word-of-mouth and the viral spread of your business. what it takes to spread the idea virus will give your business a huge leg up on the competition.

Caution: You should learn where, when and to whom to market and to what extent. (learnt only by experience or watching someone do it)

# Chaos Breeds Creativity:

Very obvious from your google reads, refer there for more clarification.

# Loneliness is a Rite of Passage

Leading a company is the loneliest job you would ever have. But the startup community, particularly in the tech world, is forging more and more bonds and those connections are helping to make all of it stronger & smarter( I hope so). Starting up demands a lot of belief and self motivation towards you know what !

Someone says,

"Don't take your detachment as a cue to devolve into a hermit; consider it the hazing process for entry into an exclusive new club forged by shared experiences and then reach out to your fellow entrepreneurs."

Wihtout the mumbo-jumbo - " do not compare yourself with your other friends who are pursuing different career plans, instead ..."

My only guideline : Do not read books like this.

Brain - Mind

The 90s decade was dedicated to the Brain, as can be clearly seen from this. However, it seems that the scientists felt the need to study something that could have immediate application ... like the mind. The current decade has therefore been dedicated to Mind, (more here).

The Decade of the Mind initiative focuses on four broad areas:

Healing and protecting the mind: This is the notion of improving the public health by curing diseases of the brain that affect the mind. An example of such a disease is Alzheimer’s disease.

Understanding the mind: This aspect of the initiative seeks to understand how mind actually emerges from brain functional activity. Some of the key characteristics of the mind that are still not understood include consciousness, memory and dreams.

Enriching the mind: Improving learning outcomes in education is a key component of this part of the initiative.

Modeling the mind: A key approach to understanding the mind is to model it either analytically or using computation. Such models of mind may facilitate the creation of new hypotheses which can then be tested in the laboratory or clinic. Modeling the mind may also allow for the creation of new applications, technologies and inventions.

Which bring us to the question, Does activity in Brain result in Mind or is it the other way round? Though science likes to believe that its the former, the Hindu philosophy mentions that Mind controls not only the brain, but the whole body.

Tony Buzan a proponent of mind mapping and mind literacy has come up with various techniques to read mind. Yet, the most recent psychometric studies believe that they know nothing about how brain/mind works.

In James Randerson's "We know nothing about brain evolution" (Guardian UK, February 19, 2008) we learn that Harvard's Richrd Lewontin has pointed out the obvious:

"Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition". He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.

Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. "I don't have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means," Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?

Of course Lewontin is right! First, cranial capacity is not the best measure of intelligence, as brain absent humans show. While we are here, a number of studies show that some birds (notably crows) are smart - even though they do not have the brain parts we humans associate with smartness. At the time, I said,

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.

There is no "survival of the fittest" reason why humans should be conscious! None whatever. Bacteria are way more fit than humans, but do they have thoughts? And they are probably better off without them.

So we are stuck being human and having minds, and we really can't claim that our minds give us a survival advantage. Its more the opposite. We give our minds a survival advantage.

Wouldn't it be great to explore your MIND and know how it works ?!

Gossip - Good for you ! ... are u kidding ?

In today's Face Time, the gossip column that runs most days inside this section,

we learn that police believe last month's jewelry theft from Paris Hilton's mansion was an inside job, and the remaining Grateful Dead members are reuniting.

We'll pause here while you scurry away to read those tidbits, but only if you promise to come back rather than, say, poking around the Internet for more about Hilton's baubles.

There.

And now that you're back (thank you!), we promise not to censure you for your morbid curiosity, your prurient interest or your moral outrage.

It's only a matter of "doin' what comes natur'lly," as it was phrased in the show tune debuted by the four-times-married Broadway star Ethel Merman, whose 32-day hitch to actor Ernest Borgnine in 1964 presaged Britney Spears' brief betrothal to Jason Alexander in 2004.

It's easy to get caught up in today's riptide of gossip. The Internet has turned it into an ever-present force, like spam e-mail and gravity, and traditional media have responded to the competitive pressure by offering more of it.

Celebrity babies, divorces and dalliances are as inescapable as daybreak, and the result has been a rise in people bemoaning the form's ubiquity and what they see as concurrent cultural debasing. Even with names that aren't often written in bold, social networking tools, from Facebook to Twitter, allow us to keep up with "status changes" in the lives of both friends and "friends" to a degree that gives many of us pause.

But we should all relax, at least a little. As much as we may hold our noses while reading it, as much as we profess to skip right past it (or wish we could), having a taste for gossip, it turns out, is as fundamental as sleep.

Gossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn't care to find out what was going on, you were more likely to die and less likely to pass on your incurious genes.

"People who had no interest in the private affairs of other people just got left in the dust," says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, who has written about gossip.

To that end he wrote a cover article for October's Scientific American Mind magazine, "The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves."

For his purposes, McAndrew chose to ignore the negative effects as self-evident and often discussed. After a brief acknowledgment that gossip can, obviously, harm its targets, can separate those who indulge in it from real life and, McAndrew says, "can undermine the cohesiveness of the group when group members become careless or aggressive in the use of gossip among themselves," we'll set aside the negatives as well, condensing them to a common-sense reminder: You can gossip, but don't be a jerk about it, and don't become consumed by it. Even if Britney's life actually is more interesting than yours, you can't trust that what you read about her is anything more than well-placed spin from a highly paid press agent.

In his article, McAndrew summed up the voluminous research on gossip: In addition to providing vital intelligence—Why is the tribe leader behaving erratically? Where are the berries?—it teaches social norms, deters deviance from group values, reinforces bonds among group members and lets us rank ourselves in comparison to others. 

Among the topics: Who's in rehab? What's the latest about Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie and their mutual interest, Brad Pitt? Are the Pitt-Jolie babies showing superior style to the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes baby?

Eckert's use of gossip underscores two of the other functions it serves, says Gary Alan Fine, the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern.

"One is compensation," says Fine, co-author of the 1976 book "Rumor and Gossip." "People look at their own lives, which tend not to be so interesting, and celebrities provide this other side, this fantasy life. Some are leading lives we're envious of, and others are—I guess the term of art is 'train wrecks.' "

More compensation: In a time of "Bowling Alone," as Robert Putnam's book labeled the contemporary tendency to lead more isolated lives than our parents', we do less chatting in barbershops or over actual back fences. Celebrity gossip columns are a metaphorical back fence.

The second function, Fine said, "has to do with consumption. Rather than compensating for our own lives, it is entertainment in itself. You're going ... for the story. And there's an economics to it. It's a product. It's a form of consumption."

"Gossip is really a way that people show we're all part of the same sort of human community," says Grove, who now writes a much more detailed interview column for Portfolio's Web site. "The appeal is: We like reading about the high and mighty and knowing they're just like us"—members of the same tribe, hunting for the same necessities.

So the next time you think of gossiping ... do us a favour; tell your friends about Vita Beans !

...or would you be interested in this ?

Journey to the centre of your mind

Before approaching the core of your mind, let us get a glimpse of a few pointers that everyone must know about their mind !

The Hidden Workings of Our Minds

How great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you'll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: "The picture just formed in my mind." Writers tell us that: "I don't know where the words come from." Scientists say they: "Just had a hunch."

Read more here.

What We Don't Know About Shopping, Reading, Watching TV & Judging People

Psychology studies that rely on deceiving participants have shown we often have little clue what's going on in our own minds. But what about in everyday situations where trickery isn't involved?

Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what's really going on in our minds (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977)

Read more here.

At the Heart of Attraction Lies Confusion: Choice Blindness

Across a crowded room your eyes lock with an attractive stranger. You look away, you look back. The first hint of a smile plays across their lips. Suddenly you're nervous, your mind goes blank, you want to go over and you want to run away, both at the same time.

You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. 'Wow,' you think as you recover, 'Now, that's what I'm talking about!'.

Read more here.

Now, traveling further, into the brain we seek V Ramachandran's help. Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples.

Using three very cool examples -

• Capgras syndrome: where a man looks at his mother and says: "It looks like my mother but she's an imposter." How can a person recognise his mother's face yet feel it's not her?
• Phantom limbs: why would an amputated limb still hurt? Can this pain be relieved?
• Synaesthesia: Numbers are colours. Notes are colours. Cross-talk between the senses has a higher incidence in creative people: why?

Walk the Line

How about I shut up for today and pass you on this,( oh ya ...go on click on it) so that, I could be as said... Predictably Irrational and yet let you get a glimpse of what I want to tell you.

Psst: Once you are done, you could hop on to this, and get to know how you could apply that to waggle your web marketing strategy !