So, I ended up in the Phillipines. I don’t much like travelling, but Nokia is footing the bill to promote their NSeries Convergence phones (which I freaking want now), so why not. The phones are like high end blogger-geek chic, which is just my thing. The NSeries is all Flickr integration and GPS navigation and WiFi connectivity on the run and the corporate guys are cool to talk to. However, the main content is food, wine and dancing girls. A big corporate wedding to help you cooperate. Today one of the other Sri Lankan journos got profoundly sauced and ended up demanding rice and attempting to eat a steak in one chew, directly off the plate. I took him upstairs and made sure he got to sleep. Sin men, as the gf says. Anyways, I love the smartphones, but we’ll get to that in the next post. This is about the Phillipines and press conference type things in general, like the cool stuff you find in hotel rooms.

Barely touched a computer for days. She told me bout an aunt that has no sense of smell and consequently can’t taste anything. I remember learning that apples and onions taste pretty much the same without your sense of smell. This made me think about sex. To quote a recent NYTimes article on gaydar – ‘Using a brain imaging technique, researchers have shown that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to two odors that may be involved in sexual arousal, and that the gay men respond in the same way as women.’ This study, like every study on pheromones, is qualified with the usual ‘but smell isn’t important to humans’. Which would seem true. However, if you if you consider taste to be part of smell, then it makes a lot more sense. Foreplay – from kissing to Condoleezza – is all about taste. If you taste a person then you’re mainlining pheromones.

By JOHN TIERNEY Published: April 20, 2004 (New York Times) LOS ANGELES, April 16 — The political consultants discreetly observed from the next room as their subject watched the campaign commercials. But in this political experiment, unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by turning a dial or discussing his reactions with a [...]

I’ve been researching Phantom Limb Pain. I’ve been using this image of Beowulf ripping off Grendle’s arm to represent it. For more info, this Ramachandran article is an excellent discussion. Most (80-90%) people feel a phantom of an amputated limb after it is gone. Lord Nelson thought this was evidence of an immaterial soul. It is more likely your neural representation of the limb continuing to exist even after the limb does not.

1. Conciousness is more a process than a product. Jaynes, de Chardin, Tipler, Bucke and KurzweiI have argued that consciousness is evolving, i.e. I have a different conciousness than Skhul 5 (A human fossil from 90,000 years ago). Furthermore, my children’s idea of conciousness will be almost unrecognizable to me. In that sense consciousness in [...]

by Sandra Blakeslee (New York Times) Neuroscientists have given up looking for the seat of the soul, but they are still seeking what may be special about human brains, what it is that provides the basis for a level of self-awareness and complex emotions unlike those of other animals. Most recently they have been investigating [...]

This is the Map of the Internet taken from the perspective of a single computer. It’s done by the Opte.org project. I read about it in the New Scientist. “Each colour on this Opte map represents a region; North America, blue; Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa, green; Latin America, yellow; Asia Pacific, red; Unknown, white. (Image: Opte.org)” [...]

This is the reading for my Cognitive Science class. I’m going to post my notes here and print them in the morning. S. Smith, Kanwisher, Uttal 1. What does the acronym fMRI refer to? Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging 2. What does fMRI measure? Increased blood flow to activated areas of the brain. Holy Shit, it’s [...]

This is from the University of Wales, Bangor. It’s a bunch of perceptual illusions. The Buddha said that all Experience was Illusion. It’s called Maya in Indian Vedic thought.

This is an Atlas of MRI/PET brain scans. The outer cortex (grey) is neurons. It shows up dark in these scans The inner white part is axons connecting neurons to other neurons. The neurons are each like computers, linked to thousands of other computers through the Internet. (Direct Link to Harvard) We watched a video [...]