Incognito, the secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman

A very readable book outlining the advances in understanding mind and brains.  The essence is that the conscious part (the part we call me) is actually a very thin layer on top of our existence.  Almost all of what we do is unconscious, our conscious sense of self just rationalises what we have just done to make sense of it for future occasions.  The only time we really use our conscious self is when setting goal sor long-term plans, but even then we are driven by our unconscious experience and desires.

The fact that what we think we preceive, is actually a construction of our brains and is quite often not so strongly connected with pyhsical external reality.  The book does have some philosophical implications for freewill, mentions them but doesn't really answer the problems it raises.

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.Read more at location 84 •
Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.Read more at location 87 •
Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.Read more at location 113 •  You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary.Read more at location 117 •
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck.Read more at location 132 •
One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.Read more at location 169 •
try this demonstration: have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you’re able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won’t be able to accurately determine their order.Read more at location 391 •
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.Read more at location 457 •
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Read more at location 522 •
From the natural laboratory of evolution comes a related phenomenon in humans. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor—and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.36 Two color swatches that look identical to the majority of people would be clearly distinguishable to these ladies. (No one has yet determined what percentage of fashion arguments is caused by this mutation.)Read more at location 692 •
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.” Here’s a way to prove to yourself that something strange is going on with time: look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you’re looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move from one position to the other, but—here’s the mystery—you never see them move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn’t your brain care about the small absences of visual input?Read more at location 829 •
consciousness tends to interfere with most tasks (remember the unhappy centipede in the ditch)—but it can be helpful when setting goals and training the robot. Evolutionary selection has presumably tuned the exact amount of access the conscious mind has: too little, and the company has no direction; too much, and the system gets bogged down solving problems in a slow, clunky, energy-inefficient manner.Read more at location 1175 •
Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.Read more at location 1420 •
We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.Read more at location 1433 •
The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.Read more at location 2166 •
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.Read more at location 2248 •
Human programmers approach a problem by assuming there’s a best way to solve it, or that there’s a way it should be solved by the robot. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.Read more at location 2394 •
“Evolution is smarter than you are.” If I had a law of biology, it would be: “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”Read more at location 2401 •
Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?Read more at location 2702 •
The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?” The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.Read more at location 2842 •
main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.Read more at location 2958 •
you choose neither your nature nor your nurture, much less their entangled interaction. You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not choices; these are the dealt hands of cards.Read more at location 3478 •
As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.Read more at location 3620 •

Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-It-On by Adam Penenberg

A book that covers the social media explosion, being used by companies to generate demand for thier products.  It looks at measurement techniques to track how 'viral' your website is, and how you can make it more attractive (basically content, content, content and connections - provided by the users themselves since you can never scale as fast as they can).

It also looks at how becoming part of such communities is actaully good for you as well, thos ewith more social connections actually living longer.

Somewhere in the world a party occurred just in the time it took you to read this sentence. Almost 120 million people in one hundred countries will attend a product demonstration this year.Read more at location 661 •

Andreessen had uncorked a “network effect,” a term first used to describe the spread of the telephone in the early years of the twentieth century. Simply put, the more people who own a telephone, the more valuable an added line is to each person already on the network. The potential number of connections grows exponentially in relation to the number of people on the network.Read more at location 764 •
In 1992, 4.5 million people were plugged into the Internet and there were perhaps fifty websites. By the end of 1993, 1 million people had downloaded Mosaic, there were 6 million total users, and 623 websites. Within a year the online population jumped to 13 million with 10,000 websites. Web traffic shot up more than 300 percent, with users creating their own home pages, uploading photos, and setting up chat rooms. Today’s Web, with more than 1.5 billion users worldwide and almost 200 million websites, owes its existence to three men: Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, who conceived the Internet; Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; and Marc Andreessen, who figured out how to navigate it.Read more at location 787 •

Andreessen saw it as a simple equation: market share today equals revenue later; without market share, you don’t generate revenue, but whoever achieves and hangs on to it wins.Read more at location 873 •
These viral loop companies provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, relying on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content; the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines, the more value the company has.Read more at location 1069 •
Why do we do it? What explains our BlackBerry-bearing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook friend with the need for constant connectivity? As facile as it sounds, we do it because we are hard-wired to socialize. It’s in our best interests. One reason we gravitate toward communities is because they multiply the impact of each individual to bring greater prosperity, security, and fulfillment to all.Read more at location 1250 •
Research indicates that engaging with friends helps us live longer and better lives, with those with strong friendship bonds having lower incidents of heart disease. They even get fewer colds and flu. A decade-long Australian study found that for the duration of the study subjects with a sizable network of friends were 22 percent less likely to pass away than those with a small circle of friends—and the distance separating two friends and the amount of contact made no difference. It didn’t matter if the friends stayed in contact via phone, letter, or email. Just the fact that they had a social network of friends acted as a protective barrier.Read more at location 1258 •
“When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors,”Read more at location 1351 •
“The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”Read more at location 2152 •
Thiel subscribed to a theory of human behavior known as “mimetic desire,” propounded by French historian and philosopher René Girard, who believed that people were essentially sheep who, without much reflection, borrowed their desires from others. This theory has been applied to describe financial bubbles and panics,Read more at location 2773 •
Where would she stash a photo of, say, her best friend on vacation at the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia at sunrise with a monkey nicknamed “Filch” running off with a tourist’s backpack? In a folder labeled Vacation? Angkor Wat? Melinda? Monkey? Tagging allowed the photo to be easily found in all of these contexts. And since anyone could add a tag and a comment, it became a democratic mode of organizationRead more at location 3070 •
This led to MySpace being discovered by a powerfully viral segment of the population: teenaged girls, who joyfully shared coding tips with one another. Because it drained bandwidth and slowed down the site, MySpace engineers proposed putting a stop to this, but DeWolfe overruled them. He realized that fighting users was a useless exercise that would only limit their growth. Let Friendster alienate its user base. MySpace would out-friendly Friendster.Read more at location 3127 •
“People are going to go and socialize where their friends are, and once you have a person’s friends list in a social community locked in, viral growth really happens,”Read more at location 3136 •
Simplifying the instructions also helped. In fact, the rule seemed to be, the simpler he made things, the more viral the site became. People, it seemed, were turned off by anything that required them to think.Read more at location 3244 •
TravBuddy and Travellers-point connect inveterate travelers.Read more at location 3396 •
when the landscape was particularly barren and there was little utility for early adopters. “The value that people get is tied to how much information everyone is sharing,” Zuckerberg says. He and his roommates encouraged the first wave of registrants in the ramping-up period to share information through pictures. The second wave would see the information and attract the first wave back,Read more at location 3459 •
They thought of their target audience and realized that they—and the engineers they were hiring—were out of touch. Most people at Stanford didn’t use MySpace. They thought it was a joke. So before they would release an application, one of them would say, “Let’s hear what Sandi says,” and she would offer her impressions.Read more at location 3614 •
If there is one constant through time, it’s that conventional wisdom often misses the mark, especially in the early days of technological transformation. In 1876, the president of Western Union brushed off Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone as little more than an “electric toy,” and the company called Bell’s proposal to put one in every home “utterly out of the question.”Read more at location 3677 •
Advertisers advance the science of advertising, discovering all manner of ways of reaching us, then consumers become expert at shedding messages they don’t want to hear. In essence, it’s a media version of an arms race.Read more at location 3726 •
If you are in your forties or older, your parents didn’t talk about their feelings; today you can barely stop people from telling you their life stories. And today’s youth, congregating on social networks, share the most intimate aspects of their lives, hewing to an ethos of karmic bulimia. If they don’t announce something on Facebook it’s, like, it never happened. And they are shaping the privacy debate as profoundly as the corporations that mine our data, the banks that sell it, the credit agencies that profit from it, and the government that vacuums it up.Read more at location 3817 •
there is a phenomenon in peoples’ interaction. “The message you get, in a lot of ways, is actually less important than who you get it from,” he says. “If you get it from someone that you trust, you’ll listen to it. Whereas if you get it from someone you don’t trust, you might actually believe the opposite of what they said because you don’t trust them.Read more at location 3885 •
That is the premise of the viral loop application that you will find on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks, or at www.viralloop.com. Download it and it will tell you what your viral coefficient is and your value—in dollars—to Facebook et al., based on the company’s current valuation, your level of activity, and the activity of your friends.Read more at location 3912 •

Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal)

An intriguing book written by an ex-computer games designer / psychologist.  The premise is that modern computer games encourage cooperation amongst groups of people to succeed at the highest levels.  In addition it explains the underlying psychology of why such games can be so compelling (clear goals, clear feedback, difficulty constantly adjusted to be just stretching enough and most important of all - voluntary participation).
The most interesting part for me was looking at how these concepts could be applied to reality - which as the author says is (or should be) the most interesting game of all.
There were many references through the later chapters to novel group games (not played on computers) that encourage more social interaction - I'm sure some of them could be developed for team building activities.




Locn. 144-55 Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time. In the United States alone, there are 183 million active gamers (individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video games “regularly”—on average, thirteen hours a week).3 Globally, the online gamer community—including console, PC, and mobile phone gaming—counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China.4 Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job.5 More than 10 million “hardcore” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing.6 And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
Locn. 167-70 The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
Locn. 212-14 Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
Locn. 447-50 When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
Locn. 462-66 Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
Locn. 477 Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Locn. 518-19 What makes Tetris so addictive, despite the impossibility of winning, is the intensity of the feedback it provides.
Locn. 529-33 In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow”.4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
Locn. 597-98 Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.
Locn. 601-2 Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
Locn. 799-802 games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including flow—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.
Locn. 819-20 Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Locn. 957-62 The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
Locn. 979-83 As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
Locn. 1010-12 from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems.
Locn. 1095-98 Playing World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing
Locn. 1304-6 Part of me felt like I was accomplishing more in the Kingdom of Azeroth than I was in my real life. And that’s exactly the IV drip of productivity that World of Warcraft is so good at providing. It delivers a stream of work and reward as reliably as a morphine drip line.
Locn. 1468-71 Learning to stay urgently optimistic in the face of failure is an important emotional strength that we can learn in games and apply in our real lives. When we’re energized by failure, we develop emotional stamina. And emotional stamina makes it possible for us to hang in longer, to do much harder work, and to tackle more complex challenges. We need this kind of optimism in order to thrive as human beings.
Locn. 1638-40 If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Lexulous—it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.1
Locn. 1666-69 Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.
Locn. 1680-83 You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”10
Locn. 1693-95 Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.
Locn. 1743-47 The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.
Locn. 1782-86 Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19
Locn. 1790-93 Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.
Locn. 2036-37 on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.
Locn. 2043-48 How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better. As Martin Seligman says, “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.”8
Locn. 2243-46 The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.
Locn. 2410-15 Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generation Me, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters.
Locn. 2513-14 We’re not alone. Chore Wars is one of the best reviewed and most beloved, if little known, secrets on the Internet.
Locn. 3503-6 Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces.
Locn. 3848-52 The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel.
Locn. 4028-33 Tombstone Hold ’Em is meant to make remembering death easier and more rewarding, by taking advantage of the largely underutilized social and recreational potential of cemeteries. The central activity of Tombstone Hold ’Em poker is learning how to “see” a playing card in any tombstone, based on its shape (the suit) and the names and date of death (the face value). Once you can read stones as cards, you can spot “hands” all around you. The game works in any cemetery, as long as there are clearly marked tombstones. Here’s how it plays out:
Locn. 4714-19 Free Rice; together, according to the game’s FAQ, their efforts add up to enough rice to feed an average of seven thousand people per day. Why is Free Rice able to capture so much engagement? It isn’t just that it is a force for good; it’s also classically good game design. It takes just seconds to complete a task, meaning you can get a lot of work done quickly. You get instant visual feedback: grains of rice stacking up in a bowl, with a constantly rising total of grains that you’ve earned. Because the game gets easier when you make mistakes and harder when you answer correctly, it’s easy to experience flow: you’re always playing at the limits of your ability.
Locn. 4914-22 these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community. The Player Investment Design Lead will design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character. • So players have long-term goals. • So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other. • So that content are rewards in and of themselves.
Locn. 5009-11 The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
Locn. 5365-71 Collaboration is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort: cooperating (acting purposefully toward a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and cocreating (producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally generative act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.
Locn. 6927-34 We can create any future we can imagine. That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world. Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.
Locn. 7182-83 visit the website for this book, www.realityisbroken.org.
Locn. 7186-87 world—join the social network Gameful, at www.gameful.org.