Making up the mind - Chris Frith

A delightful book that gently constructs a theory of mind of consciousness even  though it sets out not to do so.
Intriguingly it shows how much of our existence is unconscious, far more than we believe.
We construct mental models of the world in order to make predictions about it and then compare the input from our senses (or just from running our internal model in thought experiments) to improve the model.


Loc. 290 Our brain consumes about 20% of our body’s energy even though the brain is only 2% of our body in terms of its weight.
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Loc. 492 But this long-term change in the brain had no effect on his conscious mind. He could not remember anything that happened yesterday. Such people show that our brain can know things about the world that our mind does not know.
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 Loc. 502-4DF’s brain “knows” about the angle of the rod and can use this information to control the movements of her hand. But DF can’t use this information to see the orientation of the rod. Her brain knows something about the physical world, while her conscious mind does not.
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Loc. 708-12 Not only do we seem to perceive the world instantly and without effort, we also seem to perceive the whole visual scene in vivid detail. This too is an illusion. Only the middle of the visual scene that strikes the center of our eye can be seen in detail and in color. This is because only the middle of our retina (the fovea) has closely packed, color-sensitive neurons (cones). Beyond about 10 degrees from the middle the neurons are further apart and detect only light and shade (rods). The edge of our view of the world is blurred and has no color.
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Loc. 1059-62 The urge to lift the finger occurred about 200 msec before the finger was actually lifted. But the key observation that caused so much fuss was that the change in brain activity occurred about 500 msec before the finger was lifted. So brain activity indicating that the volunteer was about to lift a finger occurred about 300 msec before that volunteer reported having the urge to lift his or her finger.
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Loc. 1370-73 Pavlov reports that even after 374 combinations of a loud buzzer and food, no learning took place. This was because the sound of the buzzer always occurred 5 to 10 seconds after the food was put into the mouth. An arbitrary stimulus is only interesting if it predicts that something nice or nasty is going to happen in the future. If the stimulus comes after the important event, it is of no interest at all.
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Loc. 1468-73 The activity in these cells does not signal reward. It does not even signal that reward will be coming soon. The activity in these cells tells us that there is an error in our prediction about reward. If the juice arrives when we expect it to arrive, then there is no error in our prediction and the dopamine nerve cells do not send out a signal. If the juice arrives unexpectedly, then the reward is better then we expected and the nerve cells send out a positive signal. If the juice fails to arrive when it should, then the reward is worse than we expected and the nerve cells send out a negative signal. These signals about the errors of our predictions enable us to learn about the world without needing a teacher. If our prediction about the world is wrong, then this is a sign to us that we need to do something in order to make our prediction better.
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Loc. 1561-63 The volunteer’s brain now responded to this angry face as if it was a loud noise. But the volunteer himself was not aware of having seen the angry face, because it had been masked with another face. The volunteer was learning a conditioned response even though he was not aware of seeing the stimulus that elicited this conditioned response.91
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Loc. 2037-39 What I perceive are not the crude and ambiguous cues that impinge from the outside world onto my eyes and my ears and my fingers. I perceive something much richer - a picture that combines all these crude signals with a wealth of past experience.114 My perception is a prediction of what ought to be out there in the world. And this prediction is constantly tested by action.
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Loc. 2078-81 Our brains build models of the world and continuously modify these models on the basis of the signals that reach our senses. So, what we actually perceive are our brain’s models of the world. They are not the world itself, but, for us, they are as good as. You could say that our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality. Furthermore, if no sensory signals are available, then our brain fills in the missing information.
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Loc. 2129-31 The imagination is utterly uncreative. It has no predictions to make and no errors to resolve. We don’t create in our heads. We create by externalizing our thoughts with sketches and doodles and rough drafts so that we can benefit from the unexpectedness of reality. It is this continual unexpectedness that makes interacting with the real world such a joy.
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Loc. 2170-72 Even stick figures have a gender For a moving version try http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLgender.html from Prof Nikolaus Troje’s Biomotion lab.
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Loc. 2275-77 To imitate someone, we watch their movements closely, but we don’t copy these movements. We use the movements to discover something in the mind of the person we are watching: the goal of their movement. Then we imitate them by making a movement that achieves the same goal.
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Loc. 2362-64 These mental times and physical times are not the same. In your mind the button press occurs slightly later and the bell starts to ring slightly earlier. For you the cause and effect of your action seem closer together. In mental time the components of your actions are bound together.
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Loc. 2461-65 I think that I have direct contact with the physical world, but this is an illusion created by my brain. My brain creates models of the physical world by combining signals from my senses and prior expectations, and it is these models that I am aware of. I acquire my knowledge of the mental world - the minds of others - in the same way. However it may seem to me, my contact with the mental world is neither more nor less direct than my contact with the physical world. Using cues acquired from my senses and prior knowledge acquired from my experience, my brain creates models of the minds of others.
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Loc. 2719-20  We understand that people’s behavior is controlled by beliefs even if these beliefs are false. And we soon learn that we can control people’s behavior by giving them false beliefs. This is the dark side of communication.
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 Loc. 2923-26 But when we punish free riders, we are not deliberately trying to increase cooperation or thinking about how the group will benefit in the long term. We get immediate satisfaction from punishing people who have behaved unfairly. We do not feel any empathy for the suffering of these undesirable people. We have learned to dislike them. Our brain even gives us pleasure from the punishment of free riders.

What the dog saw - Malcolm Gladwell

There were mixed reviews on this book on Amazon but mostly they complained that this was just recycled stories from newspaper articles he had written.  Not having read the newspaper I bought the book anyway and found it entertaining.

Loc184 “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish"

Loc310 great story about the founders of Ronco etc. They were, he says, waiting for him to fail: he had never worked that particular slicer before and, sure enough, he was massacring the vegetables. Still, in a single pitch he took in $200. “Their eyes popped out of their heads,” Arnold recalls. “They said, ‘We don’t understand it. You don’t even know how to work the damn machine.’ I said, ‘But I know how to do one thing better than you.’ They said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.”

Loc345 Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers — not once or twice but three or four times — and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.

Loc607 Moskowitz does not believe that consumers — even spaghetti lovers — know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. “The mind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying, “knows not what the tongue wants.”

Loc901 on power laws in economics: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”

Loc. 1828 Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”

Loc 1858 Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions

Loc2427 Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty percent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

Loc 2455 The homelessness problem is like the LAPD’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard.They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more healthcare dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

Loc. 2538-39 Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

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Loc2829Welch writes in his new book, Should I Be Tested for Cancer?, a brilliant account of the statistical and medical uncertainties surrounding cancer screening.

Loc4095 Frightening impact poor teahcers have out of all proportion to other effects in students outcomes

Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more — and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world — the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Loc 4098 Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

Loc4897 The correlation between the two, she found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher’s class for an entire semester.

Loc5081 tips on getting teh job you want 

the kinds of things that employers are looking for — what are they looking for in terms of personality. One of the most important things is that you have to come across as being confident in what you are doing and in who you are. How do you do that? Speak clearly and smile.”

The Leisure Economy - Linda Nazareth

This was a free Kindle ebook that I found held some useful statistics on how the technology of modern life is giving us more free time than we believe.  Lots of studies and data though mainly USA biased and pre 2007 (so the financial crisis hadn't hit at the time of publication)

Locn 1388, Interesting point on Work-life balance similar to my experience at Rencol:

Those companies that have initiated programs to provide work-life balance often find that they have a big carrot with which to attract Gen Y graduates. “It’s very competitive to get the right people, and the fact that we as a company embrace the work-life issue is a strong selling point for us,” says Houston Brown. “We have a program where every second week people take Fridays off by working nine hours a day Monday to Thursday. Managers do it too. That’s very popular with Generation Y.”

Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky

This is an earlier book to Clay's Cognitive Surplus and I think it's more interesting in terms of explaining the underlying changes that social tools are having (and are going to have) on the way society works.  The book is illustrated with stories that bring his points to life and demonstrate how the ideas affect all of us.

This was also the first ebook I read on a Kindle so I no longer have the page numbers to refer to but here are some quotes I found stimulating (I need to find some sort of way to refer to the document positions for others):

we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.

Writing in Science magazine in 1972, Anderson noted that aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts.

About tagging content

What Flickr did instead was to let the users label (or tag) their photos as a way of arranging them. When two or more users adopted the same tag, those photos were automatically linked. The users were linked as well; (he argues the underlying basis of using tags is to create connections not to find information) The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming “gather, then share” into “share, then gather.” People were able to connect after discovering one another through their photos.

The changes to news media

From now on news can break into public consciousness without the traditional press weighing in. Indeed, the news media can end up covering the story because something has broken into public consciousness via other means.

the loss of control of what is deemed newsworthy my traditional news channels , in some senses they now follow not lead the agenda.

In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.

Changes in society

Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.

The comparison with the printing press doesn’t suggest that we are entering a bright new future—for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s.

“The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.”

It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.

The transistor and the birth control pill are quite unlike each other, but they do have one thing in common: they are both human-scale inventions that were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. That is happening again today. A million times a day someone tries some new social tool; someone in Mozambique gets a mobile phone, someone in Shanghai checks out the Chinese version of Wikipedia, someone in Belarus hears about the flash mob protests, someone in Brazil joins a social networking service.

Our principal challenge is not to decide where we want to go but rather to stay upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has already happened.

He talks about email overload and how beyond a certain point (reached faster than you expect) 'fame' kicks in and you cannot possibly respond to all the emails or blog posts or messages coming in  - you then have to just reply in general terms.

He looks at cooperative creation; Linux and Wikipedia
Wikipedia, with none of those things, does not have to be efficient—it merely has to be effective.

On how social tools allows groups to form at the margins of society who would previously have been discouraged - though he notes we (society) may well not like such groups any more than we did before

The net effect is that it’s easier to like people who are odd in the same ways you are odd, but it’s harder to find them.

On how social networks actually function, a few highly connected people are the glue

It is the presence of these highly connected people that forms the backbone of the social networks.

People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.

Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos but also comment on other users’ photos, like a host circulating at a party. This let the early users feel what it would be like to have an appreciative public, even before such a public existed.

Then a section on innovation in organisations

the importance of encouraging failure to encourage innovation

So it is in many organizations: The systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.

Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, once put it, “No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else.”

This is not pure altruism; the person who teaches learns twice,