Michael Gazzaniga | The Casual Blog

January 7, 2013

New resolutions and my latest green smoothie

I have a soft spot for New Year’s resolutions. It’s generally a good thing from time to time to think about where we are versus where we want to go. Few, if any, of us that are fully optimized. At the same time, there’s never any shortage of small feasible steps we could take to make our lives better.

But personal self-improvement resolutions usually don’t get the job done. A prime example is our most visible, common, and serious public health problem: obesity. There’s no great mystery what needs to be done (eat less and exercise more), and most of us who aren’t naturally optimized for body mass know that much perfectly well. Nevertheless, each year the incidence of obesity is about the same or worse, and the over all trend in the last thirty years is worse and worse.

Plainly this is not a simple problem with an easy solution, or we would have solved it. But part of the reason we can’t successfully address obesity and other serious behavioral problems is our poor understanding about how our own minds work — that is, our own impulses and motivations. As regular readers know, I’ve been learning more about this in the last couple of years from reading Daniel Kahneman, Michael Gazziniga, Jonathan Haidt, John Brooks, and Edward O. Wilson, and I’m currently reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. In addition to being inherently fascinating, these books have provided insights into life’s persistent problems, like over eating.

One of my main takeaways from these psychologists, biologists, and critics is that our reasoning processes, which seem at times so powerful and impressive, will get us only so far, and if we want to change behavior and minimize bad decisions we need other tools and tricks. Charles Duhigg’s book on habits and how to change them, which I wrote about recently, is a good signpost on this. If we understand our behavior in terms of the interaction of our emotional needs and our environment, we can experiment with changes.

But we may as well admit that eating is especially complicated. I’ve long been convinced that what we eat is a major component of how healthy we are and can expect in future to be. I try to keep up with current thinking about nutrition. Over the course of several years, I’ve developed a repertoire of habits that help me avoid most unhealthy foods and consume mostly things that have nutritional value.

But even so, I managed to pick up five pounds over the holidays. How did this happen? It was little things. Christmas parties and more restaurant meals, colleagues bringing to work delicious cookies that had to be sampled, and old friends sending gift baskets of treats. The combination of sweet things and childhood Christmas memories overwhelms all the circuits, and extra food is inserted in mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Of course, it was momentarily delightful, but it is so much harder to take the lbs off than to put them on.

Each year around January 2 we leave the land of the sweets and other excesses and things return to normal. New resolutions are made. Regarding eating, I’m trying some new ingredients in my breakfast green smoothies (pictured here and previously described here), including in various blendings, along with greens and fruit, hemp protein powder, marine phytoplankton, cacao nibs, and goji berries. It’s fun to mix a superdrink (as in superhero), and rewarding to be able to do something fabulously good for the body. I try to make it a point each day to be grateful for such good fortune.

August 26, 2012

Upfitting my new Android phone and thinking more about accelerating technological change

This week I got my new Android smartphone upfitted with my email accounts and a variety of apps. I’d been reluctant to give up my old smartphone partly because of the investment, both in money and effort, of apps, but on reflection I realized that a good many of the apps I’d previously downloaded were seldom or never used. The move to the Galaxy was sort of like moving to a new apartment — a good opportunity for some app house cleaning.

I easily and with little expense replaced those things that were useful, like internet searching, weather reports, navigation, travel support, news, and music. I got my most used apps organized in folders that I could quickly get to. I installed personalized wallpaper (our dog Stuart). Everything seems to work fine, with the exception of the voice activated search feature, which is not ready for prime time.

Through clumsiness, I dropped the device a couple of times in the first few days, fortunately without causing damage. This provided some proof of its durability and toughness, but also served as a reminder that devices are not immortal. I ordered a Seido case for protection, which fits well and looks good. It has a neat little kickstand on the back.

I’ve been reading The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, by Martin Ford. Like Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Ford starts with the premise that technology is developing at an ever-accelerating rate, and examines the economic implications of that development. As our machines get smarter and smarter, they will replace people in more and more jobs. At some point, the kinds of jobs that most people do will be taken over by the machines. Those people who’ve become redundant will not be able to earn an income, and so will not be able to buy goods and services, and their numbers will continue to grow. Producers of goods and services will eventually have no markets. Then the economy collapses. Q.E.D.

Ford thinks there is a possibility of avoiding economic meltdown, but he thinks that will require dramatic shifts in the economic order. To continue production, we’ll have to find a way to sustain consumption. Ford’s solution involves taxation of producers to redistribute wealth to consumers. He suggests that we think about a system where supplemental incomes is distributed to sustain the cycle of production and consumption. In this vision, the individual’s primary contribution is as a consumer, rather than a producer. Production is done by the machines.

I came upon a lengthy essay by Marshall Brain on this same subject titled Robotic Nation, which is well worth reading. Like Ford, Brain accepts the premise that Moore’s law and its corollaries are leading inexorably towards computers so powerful that they will render a great many human workers redundant. To address the problem of economic meltdown, Brain has proposed a concrete solution: the government pays $25,000 to every citizen. He sets out a variety of ways this could be financed, from selling advertising to a smorgasbord of taxes.

Assuming Brain and Ford are correct and we manage to avoid economic collapse, the question I keep coming back to is what are humans going to do once they’re obsolete as economic producers? How are they going to find meaning and joy?

I’d like to think that when robots have taken over most of the world’s work, people who get Brain’s $25,000 payments would devote themselves to communities and caring for others, exploring the mysteries of the physical universe with science, creating aesthetic wonder with the fine arts, expressing their physical energy in competition and travel, appreciating the delights of the world of the senses, and otherwise expanding and expressing their creative powers. But I have some concern that they might just watch more TV and eat more junk food. Think of WALL-E, the touching and intelligent animated Pixar movie about the eponymous robot, and the degenerate blobby humans in his world.

To avoid massive blobbiness, we’ll need to revise and expand our value systems. Fortunately, that’s something that we can get started on without a major political reform or expenditure of funds. Even if the robot-driven future never arrives, it would be a worthwhile project, since there’s a certain amount of blobbiness already.

The place where I’d begin is with a deeper understanding of how our brains function, how human communities function, and how our systems of values and morality currently work. There’s a lot of exciting cross-disciplinary work being done, and I’ve written about some of it in the last few months (including on books by Jonathan Haidt,Michael Gazzaniga, Daniel Kahneman and E.O Wilson). I’m on the lookout for more.

July 7, 2012

Science news — the Higgs boson, global warming, the nature of consciousness

I’ve been trying to follow the story of the search for the Higgs boson for a long time, and so I felt excited by reports this week that scientists at CERN have discovered a new particle that could be it. Quantum mechanics is not something I would ever aspire to have a deep grasp of, but even skimming the surface is mind bending. The subatomic world has different rules from ours.

I also really like the purity of the enterprise. It’s primarily driven by curiosity, rather than motives of profit or power. These scientists aren’t much interested in practical applications; they want the truth. (Of course, they also may want tenure, grants, Nobel Prizes, dates, etc.) It’s cheering that there is still, in some places, political and financial support that makes their (very expensive) experiments possible.

Another thing that’s particularly cool about the Higgs search is that it is a massive collaboration. Thousands and thousands of scientists are involved. According to the Times account, there were two teams of 3,000 physicists each analyzing the data from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in the latest round of the CERN effort. They’ve found ways, which I’m sure involve the Internet and massive computing power, to share their knowledge and coordinate their efforts. This is very different from the model of scientific discovery I was taught as a kid, where individuals worked by themselves in their laboratories until their eureka moment. It’s encouraging that scientists are learning to collaborate better just as they take on ever larger problems.

The practicality of the Higgs work may be to the researchers’ advantage in making them a low-value political target. This contrasts sharply with global warming research. In my home state of North Carolina, a majority of our legislators (mostly Republicans) embarrassed themselves again this week by enacting legislation designed to suppress, or at least defer, scientific reports of rising sea levels caused by global warming.

The coastal development lobby seems to have been involved. As my friend and House representative Deborah Ross cleverly observed, putting our heads in the sand is not really doing property owners any favors — they need real information. I’d also note that the sea is not going to read the study anyway. It is both funny and scary that a significant portion of our political leaders (for now a majority in NC) are either willfully ignorant or cynically determined to oppose science where it conflicts with their self-interest.

Yet science hasn’t thrown in the towel yet, and I’ve got to think that the truth will out. Speaking a little more of science, I’ve been reading a new book by Michael Gazzaniga titled Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. It’s about recent discoveries and theories in neuroscience, and parts of it are mind boggling. Gazzaniga is a distinguished professor (University of California) and researcher in cognitive neuroscience who made ground-breaking discoveries in the area of split-brain research.

Gazzaniga covers a lot of territory, and I will not attempt to summarize (indeed, I’m not certain I completely grasp) his view of free will. For me, the most stimulating sections had to do with his his model of conscious thought. At least since the time of the Periclean Athens, we’ve thought of our conscious experience as objective — that is, what you see is what there is to see, what you hear is objectively present in nature, and so on as to other senses and perceptions. In everyday life, we experience all these sensations predictable and reliable, and have difficulty imagining them as error prone and misleading.

I’ve read several interesting books recently discussing research on this, including Jonathan Haidt’s, Daniel Kahneman’s, and Jonah Lehrer’s, but Gazzinaga seems to have the clearest theoretical model and best supported theory for why we can’t accept that our conscious perceptions are at best an incomplete and fallible approximation of physical reality. His model of the mind involves hundreds or thousands of modules working on, say, vision, and forwarding their data to a module in the left brain which he calls The Interpreter.

The Interpreter takes in what it can (not everything), makes some quick guesstimates as to what data is reliable and what should be tossed out, fills in any gaps in the data with best guesses, and presents the result to consciousness as reality. Despite all the guesswork and potential for errors, the result feels to us instantaneous, smooth, continuous, and objective. If there are glaring problems or inconsistencies, The Interpreter comes up with a narrative or story that “explains” them. We are, in a really fundamental sense, story-telling animals.

Another aspect of Gazzaniga’s model struck me as particularly thought-provoking was his discussion of emergence theory. While giving respect and consideration to the researchers working at the scale of neurons and brain structures, Gazzinaga deems it unlikely that that approach will never explain conscious experience. The brain is just too complex.

Emergence theory addresses itself to phenomena are matters that arise out of inputs so numerous as to be incalculable. Examples include snowflakes, traffic jams and weather, which are in the aggregate clearly products of much simpler phenomena (hydrogen atoms, carburetors and other auto parts, breezes etc.), but which contain too many variables to be predictable. The brain’s 100 billion neurons and vastly larger number of synapses far exceeds the complexity of our analytical tools.

Finally, I was intrigued that Gazzaniga suggests the possibility that the basic unit of analysis for the study of human consciousness should not be an individual brain, but rather, groups of brains. That is, intelligence may be best understood as emerging from humans interacting with each other. The individual brain in isolation knows nothing that we would call intelligence, but needs other brains to develop. Prisoners in prolonged isolation quite literally lose their minds. We’ve barely begun to consider consciousness in terms of systems of brains, rather than individual brains. It could change the way we approach education, law, and most everything else.