alexhinerman

[alexhinerman]

Super Metroid is hailed as one of the best games of the 16-bit era and for good reason. On this episode of DNSQ, Ronnie reveals Super Metroid's best kept sec...

In class (and the reading), we talked about learning within games and how that differentiates from learning in class.  I brought up Super Metroid, and for good reason.

  Not only is it one of my all-time favourite games, it does many of the things we’ve discussed very well.  In the game, you play as Samus.  A bounty hunter out to save the galaxy (like you do).  After Samus returned the last metroid (an alien critter that takes your energy) to a lab, a distress signal is sent and Samus returns.  Said lab is raided by the space pirate Ridley (a pterodactyl thing) and kills everyone.

  During this sequence, the player navigates the empty lab.  This open area allows the player to learn movement and jump mechanics.  As the player finally reaches the end of the lab, they are met wih aboss battle.  The player cannot win, but they can’t lose.  It gives them a chance to practice shooting, dodging, and strategizing.

  Samus is a silent protagonist, meaning the character gives no dialog throughout the game.  In fact, without the exposition at the beginning, there is no dialog between characters.  When you get missiles, the game tells you how to equip them.  When you get a new powerup, the game tells you what it is and what it does, and that’s it.  You can check the map and it tells you the areas, but now we are stretching what “in game dialog/text” is. 

  The game leaves you to your own devices, calling for visual cues and learning by doing.  Enemies placed in front of items that can be shot so the player knows what different looking blocks/items do.  It plays on the player’s natural curiosity and instincts to allow for tutorials without using verbal cues.

  The game also ends with a percentage count of how much the player completed.  It tallies up all the different powerups (health boost, more rockets, etc) and lets the player know at the END of the game it was keeping track.  This encourages a second and more thorough play-through.  This is aided by using the things you’ve learn to perfect throughout the game.  For example, in the game, the more you learn to wall-jump, the more upgrades you can get earlier in the game.  Super missiles, power bombs, and even the 2nd most powerful beam.  Sequence breaking allows the play to interact with the game in different ways.  And you can sequence break with the game’s most famous power-up (Screw Attack!) with some glitch exploiting.

  As well as the secret ending where… Samus was a girl?!  The game breaks the culture of action heroes by making the main protagonist a female (which was a last minute joke by creators but is now an infamous distinction in the Nintendo/video game universe).  God damn, it covers everything.

  Need a shiny example on a game that teaches players as it goes? Look no further than Super Metroid.

[alexhinerman]

Polybius is the biggest video game urban legend. An arcade game that brainwashes its players with subliminal messages. Most write it off as a glitchy version...

ALRIGHT, before you jump on me for being a crazy conspiracy nut... I'm not.  I promise.

Now, with that out of the way, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the power of learning in games.  In a previous post, I discussed a bit about learning with games as a kid.  However, in the reading it relates more to learning in the game itself, not a learning game (for example, learning what people in a given town want in trades with visual/metaphor clues rather than being told what they want vs learning maths with a maths game).  But can games teach us more even without our knowing?

Well, yes.  And this link is not questioning the validity of brainwashing with games, but moreso the ability for us to be brainwashed.  Here, I define brainwash as creating a drive or motive without conscious knowing.

Brainwashing is much like hypnosis. Now, I hate drawing fuzzy lines, but the ideas of hypnosis and brainwashing are fuzzily linked.  The big difference is brainwashing happens without our knowing.   And anyone who has seen someone play games can say they are in a trance state.  Check out this cool video on some faces of kids gaming.  --> http://www.nytimes.com/video/magazine/1194833565213/immersion.html

Those kids are in a total trance.  Hyperfocused and in the zone.  The interaction we have with games is real, even if one argues the experience is not.  The girl at the beginning shares the same face as any golfer making a put or a model maker applying that just perfect dab of paint.  We project ourselves in the game, which makes us think like the player.  Or rather, we make the player think like us. 

Put it this way

Remember playing Mario as a kid?  Yeah you do.  Punchin' blocks, kickin' turtles, and gettin' the babe (unless you were Luigi.  Enjoy Toad, bitch).  When running through the level, were you thinking "Man, would Mario crush that goomba?"  No!  You were thinking "fuck this goomba, he's dead."  Mario is simply the sprite in which we place ourselves. 

How does this tie into the original point?

Total immersion can lead to some real-world implications.  We can begin to make connections in the real world that relate to those in a video game.  It can be as basic as dreaming of the game.  Think back to being a kid and seeing a scary movie (or last week, if you're me).  Remember having nightmares about it?  Games work like that, too.  And if you're not playing Doom 3, your dreams might be rather fun.

Real world situations also fall victim to this.  Ever imagine yourself racing down a Mario Kart track in your car?  Pretend to be in NBA Jam by yelling "He's on fire!" in a basketball game?  Ever jump on a turtle at the zoo?  Probably not that last one, but games can leave a lasting impression, and can present themselves in real-world situations. Depending on the game, one could imply the methods to playing the game in the real-world.

Why?  We're not conscious of it.  The majority of call-back from hypnotic/trance/brainwash states comes from the reptilian brain: the part we have no control over.  We can control them once they come to fruition, but the connections we make from them are not ours to control.

So keep playing games, keep learning, and never use your knowledge to punch green dinosaurs in the back of the head: they'll turn on you.

[alexhinerman]

They got a Kickstater IT'S ENDING JANUARY 31st THAT'S REAL SOON! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1117277659/default-dan Your conductors are: Ross: http:...

Today in class we discussed what genres we follow for making presumptions.  Using the example of a kitchen, we talked about what we expect to be in that room and what we don't.

Seeing as we are making a game, I tied two-and-two together and this was the first thing I thought of.  We have expectations and know what to do when they are not met, but what happens when it falls in the middle?  This video game play-through is of a game that looks like any Mario rip-off but with one difference: everything is opposite.  Coins and cakes are bad, but pits and spikes are good?  It's very disorienting but yet looks very fun.  If I had a link to the game, I'd link it up, but the point is more about expectations.  In the link, you can see the struggle that the player (Danny) goes through and the joy in his friend's previous experience (Ross).

Without knowing it, we fall into these expectations of genre.  I think of the film No Country for Old Men. Many people didn't understand the ending of the movie.  However, the ending is straight forwards: The bad guy wins.  The film violated our expectation of the Cat-and-Mouse Chase movie where we often see the bad guy losing in the end.

You could also tie optical illusions into the mix.  We see something and expect something from it due to the set-up.  Then, our mind is melted when everything turns out to be the exact opposite.  In this optical illusion, we see 12 people.  http://www.moillusions.com/wp-content/uploads/vurdlak.googlepages.com//count_them.gif After the image is cut in half and moved, it becomes... 13 people?  Huh?!  How is that?  Our expectations are not met, and we become confused. I know how this illusion works and it still gets me every time.

[alexhinerman]

Patient undergoes surgery for epilepsy

You know I'm never gonna miss a chance to drop the science on this Tumblr,  so I wanted to talk about the book of faces from class on Tuesday.  Someone had mentioned this clip of a man with a sever Corpus Callosum looking at paintings (the corpus callosum is the giant mess of fibers that connects the left and right side of our brains).  When he looks at these paintings, he recognizes them as either the items (fruits, veggies, different pokemon, etc) or as faces, depending on what side of the brain they go to (things seen on the left go to the right and things seen on the right go to the left brain.  The brain is weird, man...).

The Fusiform Face Gyrus (FFG) is exclusive to the right side of our brains (gets info from the left of the visual field), which means it falls victim to what is known as The Left Brain Interpreter.  There is a part of our brain that makes sense of the world, and it hangs out exclusively in the left side of the brain.  This means that in class when we saw those pictures of the items that look like faces, our right brain was saying "OH SHIT A FACE!" and the left side is saying, "Hold on, broseph.  It's buttons."  I cannot find anything saying that you can only do one at a time (see the face AND see the buttons (multitasking, which can only be done by 2.5% of the population, so that'd be my guess) vs seeing one at a time (task switching, commonly mistaken as multitasking, can occur VERY rapidly)).

Exposure to things we love can have an effect on the FFG.  This caused many to drop its common name of Fusiform Face Area.  In 2005, Yoada Xu found high levels of FFG activation in expert bird watchers when seeing visuals that resembled birds.  In another study by Boggan and Huang in 2011, they found more activation in the FFG from master chess players when they were looking at a strange or novel set-up vs seeing a familiar grouping of pieces.  This means we can train our brains to not only become experts at finding a certain pattern, but we can train them to point out which ones we find new and strange.

So remember, we may come with a factory norm, but what we surround ourselves with can literally change how we view the world.  

[alexhinerman]

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/david-mccandless-the-beauty-of-data-visualization David McCandless turns complex data sets, like worldwide milita...

There was one other thing I wanted to take issue with in The Medium is the Massage.  It seems that McLuhan and Fiore take issue with processing visuals and living in a visual world.  However, they fail to take into account how much of our brain is wired to take in visuals.  The link above goes to a TED talk from David McCandless where he presents a chart.  You can see the big blue area in the box there represents vision (the purple is touch, the yellow is smell and hearing, the red is taste, and the tiny box you can't see is what we're aware of) and he discusses the speed of which we process them (with sight being the fastest, processing at the speed of a computer network).  Is it any wonder we didn't adapt to a visual world?

It seems that it would be practical with evolutionary biology.  40% of nerve fibers are connected to the retina.  With each eye containing over 13 million cells that retrieve information (20 million in the periphery, 6 million in the fovea (where we perceive colour)). 2/3 of the electrical activity in our brain comes from vision.  

Should this become our primary mode of taking information in?  Well, no.  That would seem to go against the argument here if you took it to the extreme (or straw manned it).  We take in a hell of a lot from the visual system (including balance.  Try standing on one foot with your eyes closed, my beautifuls), but too much visual intake doomed Neanderthals --> http://www.livescience.com/27850-social-brain-beat-neanderthal-vision.html .  Extremely important?  Yes!  But not over-powering.  But it is clearly the most finely tuned instrument we have in taking in our world

So where does the brain come down in all of this? Depending on the source, the brain is roughly 20-25% dedicated to vision.  40% in combining vision with other tasks (usually motor).  When these two authors make you feel like a sap for putting more faith in visuals than any other method, don't fall for it. Mother Nature is a powerful bitch who always wins. Go Team Venture

[alexhinerman]

Much of postmodern writing is deliberately obscure and nonsensical, indistinguishable from parody. It’s easy to mistake obscurity for profundity. What is so enticing about a scholarly approach that results in texts that can scarcely be understood? Why would a whole scholarly subculture prefer to write and read unclear prose? What are they getting out of it? In this week’s eSkeptic, Jim Davies shares his ideas on the psychological attraction of postmodern nonsense. This article appeared in Skeptic magazine issue 17.4 (2009).

I already did a Tumblr Post for this week.  However, this is how I feel about the reading today.  and also, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5TsMMN-s2Y (Vulva's play from the television show Spaced).

[alexhinerman]

Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there's much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, a...

In this section of Better Pencil, technological advancements are discussed, beginning with two discussions questions related to technology killing language followed by ways to make it effective.

In the clip attached, John McWhorter discusses the advancement of language and writing and puts them in a contextual timeline.  For those of us too exhilarated to click links, here's a bit of a breakdown.

First, spoken language can be reflective of how we write.  This is seen regularly during speeches, presentations, and television: the language is rehearsed from a script and practiced until a flow is given.  In otherwords, the writing dictates the verbal. Texting/IMing are the opposite.  The words are dictated by speech.  Dwight Eisenhower said "Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."  This is not how people talk in casual conversation, and texting and IMing reflect the notion of casual speech.  

Complaining about the direction of language is not new, but it seems to be that way.  People complaining that instant messaging is killing the way we use our language.  McWhorter dates this idea back to 63 A.D. where a philosopher was complaining about the use of Latin (the usage that eventually became French).  Language in such shorthand writing creates new words and new dialects.  Ideas don't change, but expression does.  In the case of mediums like Twitter, language takes on a new importance as every letter counts.

The second question is related to using communication in such a way effectively and discretely.  I found it interesting that there was a Tumblr post from Tumblr on being contacted about the information provided by users and their privacy.  This is where it gets fuzzy.  Each social media medium has a differing privacy policy that they dictate.  What one puts on there is subject to their terms (you know, the stuff you don't read and hit "I accept"?), and thus, one becomes at the mercy of the company.

Here is an entire article about the legal ramifications of social media and how its use can get you in trouble -->http://scoop.jdsupra.com/2010/11/articles/media-coverage/social-media-in-the-workplace-legal-issues-business-policies

However, it can be used for good.  In a study by Purhoit et al showed that it's about the use of language that encourages action (2013). In the article, over 4,000 tweets were looked at from 72 sources and responses.  Using simple words such as "listen," "call," and "speak" often had the most positive responses to the action desired.  Using heuristics (rules of thumb) and assumptions are also important for creating said action.  These create more discussion and buzz, creating more availability to the information desired.  The study can be read here --> http://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&context=knoesis

[alexhinerman]

noam chomsky's linguistic theory for language acquisition

In the PDF reading posted online, the opening section points that reading to children helps them acquire language.  Does it?  In a sense, yes.  It can teach the particular rules of their given region and help them develop phonemes (the individual sounds that make up words.  These vary from language-to-language, dialect-to-dialect).  But to say they have strong pull on language is false.

The ability to form sentences in their most basic structures is something we are born with.  While things such as verb phrasing might be wrong ("the dog eated the food" vs "the dog ate the food"), the ability to structure words is something we all have.

It's hard to believe or comprehend how that works.  But do the maths.  According to psycholinguist Steven Pinker, each word has, on average, about ten possible words that could follow it (rounding down).  The average sentence is about twenty worlds long.  Taking that into account, there are about one billion trillion possible sentences in the English language.  Wanna put that in numbers?

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

DAMN.  With that giant number in mind, it's easy to understand the idea that each sentence we speak or type might be the first time that strain of words was ever put together in the history of ever.

So take the passage from the reading with a grain of salt.  Language is complex, and reading will fine tune (practice always makes perfect).  However, we already got what we need to make language happen.

The video attached is about Chompsky's view of language acquisition by children.  I hope you like it.  If you don't, you should spend that time teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

[alexhinerman]

I must say that this chapter in Better Pencil was rather interesting, even beyond that of a required text for class.  The idea of technofear is not a new idea, but trying to find information about it online sure seems to make it seem so.  In my view, this is just a sexy way of implementing the Status Quo Bias.

The Status Quo bias is where one person accepts what is already there (considered the norm) because it’s there/has always been the given. In the case of the reading, Kaczynski thought new technology was scary/unneeded/ruining technology (depending on the version of Technofear you are referring to), but did not consider what he had on hand a form of technology itself. In his stand up entitled Glorious, Eddie Izzard discusses how even the scythe was a piece of advanced technology at one point.

“The scythe was a modern piece of equipment after the Iron Age. People saying, ‘You've got a scythe? What the hell is that? We've just got wooden scissors.  Get Mr Digital over here.’” – Eddie Izzard.

Around 1450, Guttenburg invented the printing press.  This changed the way books and reading was distributed forever.  A large change in the status quo by an advanced technology.  Today, with printers, copiers, and the internet, one can easily over-look just how amazing this piece of technology is.  This is exactly what Kaczynski was doing when he attacked various venues for their ideas.  Just because we are used to an idea doesn’t mean it is at the bottom of the technology chain, but it probably isn’t at the top either.

It’s interesting to think that technology grows at a rate of about ten-fold.  The rate of change from when Kaczynski was a child might be missed out by my younger generation: we’re used to it, and probably embrace it.  Flat screen LCD televisions, realistic high definition video games, high speed pornography at the click of a button… these things all would seem like witch craft to a person 50 years ago.  This is much like Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  If what we think is the norm now was magic fifty years ago, just imagine where we’ll be in 2040.

How does one get rid of the status quo bias (which is how I am interpreting the definition of technofear, as it is an overlook of previous technologies for what is the norm now as per the reading)?  Being put in difficult decision making scenarios is a great way.  This activates the interior frontal cortex (an area of the brain for difficult decision making) helps initiate activity in the subthalamic nucleus (active in immediate responses, part of the basal ganglia system (which controls motivation), and part of a reward system in the brain) (Fleming et al, 2010).  Putting on my non-nerd hat, this means that being forced to choose between new and old can help get rid of that bias.  Seems self explanatory, but science rules.

In closing, the one thing going through my head this entire chapter was Louis CK’s bit on Conan O’Brein’s show where he discussed how everything is awesome and no one is happy.  This seems to be on the opposite side of Techofear, but I saw a tie-in with being unappreciative of how far we’ve come in the world.  Instead of being dismissive and cynical like Kaczynski, one becomes more demanding.  I linked it, so enjoy the laughs.

[alexhinerman]

Broca's Area is pointed out with a cute little star.  This is the area suggested in the reading as it was discovered by a bloke named Broca.  The areas lighting up are related to meaning, symbolism, and interpretation of language/words/ideas, just as the reading suggests it doesn't ("The obvious implication is that beyond the functioning of the various organs there exists a more general faculty which governs signs and which would be the linguistic faculty proper").  Yes, it's not one section/area/organ, but that's how most things work in the brain.  False Dichotomy, paper!  FALSE!

[alexhinerman]

A patient manifesting classic symptoms of Wernicke's aphasia...

I am posting this today instead of waiting for the reading next time.  HashtagDealwithit.  This has to do with the section on page 10 that talks about the area of the brain that has to do with speech and makes a general pass-over on the areas associated with language and writing.  The writing is wrong, and as a cognitive neuroscientist I went into a nerdrage, and am making this post.

To deduce that because it takes place in 1/3 of the brain on the left hemisphere is not only wrong, but a gross misunderstanding of how the brain works.  It is true that there is a specialized section of the brain called The Broca's area.  When patients afflicted with this type of aphasia try to generate speech it is slow and missing verb tense, among other important things.  This area is in the frontal cortex, which means it is part of our usable knowledge/understanding (things like goals are located in this area).  When you hear someone with Broca's Aphasia speak it is frustrating not only to the listener, but to the speaker.  They know the words are not coming out correctly and have an issue creating speech. Here is a cool youtube link to that --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnPM

NOW, here is where I take issue with the rest of the reading.  This is not the only part of speech localization in the brain.  Starting with the location: the entire frontal and prefrontal cortex is used in creating language for speech and understanding because it involves planning (think of it as writing vs mad libs or pulling words from a hat).  We have a direction and goal in mind when creating speech using language.

Secondly, this isn't the only section we used to generate speech.  In the temporal lobe (the lobe used for object recognition) there is a separate but equally important section known as the Wernicke's area.  This area regulates flow and helps eliminate garbage words.  The idea is shown in the video above: the woman is not only producing words that are out of context, but words that have no meanings.  We also call this "word salad."  Wernicke's also takes place in the unconscious mind, meaning this woman has no idea that she is making these nonsense words and phrases.  There is a stark contrast in the attitudes presented in both videos. Along with that, these paths are connected by what we call the Lateral Sulcus.  What makes this connection of pathways so important is that it runs through both the motor and the sematosensory cortex.  The motor cortex is use for mouth shaping and movements to form words (which help attribute to the sounds of speaking) has an effect on what we'd see in Wernikie's (word salad/wrong words/mumbling).  Strangely enough, this also takes place in those using sign language. The way we interpret language is also very widespread.  I'll try to include a photo I got from a study done from Fedorinko et al in 2011.  The Lexicon is a cognitive psych term that relates to the way words are represented in the mind.  The words that we associate with "Fish" might be similar to those we get with "shark" and "dolphin", even if they are two very different types of animals.  This suggests that the lexicon is internally driven and not innate.  Thus, the way we make these connections comes from all over the brain, include how we literally view them (visual pathways, like the occipital lobe) and memories tied to them (the hippocampus for long-term memory, amygdala for emotional ties to words).  Semantic memory is related to concept-based knowledge, and is found in many places mentioned above, but mostly in the anterior temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex, suggesting conscious effort in retrieval and understanding of the memories ties to words (the lexicon). Finally, interpretation of the word meanings can be found to take place in the right hemisphere.  This area is important for interpreting things like sarcasm and metaphors.  In an example from publishing company McGill, a hypothetical patient with right brain damage is shown a woman crying and another with a large heart on her shirt.  When asked "which shows a person with a heavy heart," patients have a larger tendency to pick the woman in the shirt with the large heart, as they do not understand the symbolic meaning/metaphor.

Language is a complex process that we are trying very hard to understand, but to say we are as in the dark as the paper suggests is false.  We are understanding more and more of its origins and development every day.  If you are interested in this, read Noam Chompsky's Language and Thought or The Language Instinct from Steven Pinker.  If not, then you just wasted your time with science.

[alexhinerman]

Introduction

My name is Alex Hinerman. I'm afraid of Octopus. I'm a Cognitive Neuroscience Student. I hope to study Cognitive Dissonance, Pattern Finding, and Conspiratorial Thinking. I enjoy sneezing. I swear a lot.  For no reason. I'm a senior. I hope to go to Grad School at the University of Oregon. I hate lists. I am taking writing classes for non-fiction book publishing. As well as better writing for studies. Ass. I have an abstract sense of humour. I have a bone disease and flat feet, but I still run daily. I hate when people don't talk in class because that means I have to play Know-it-all. Lobsters are over-rated in general. I have gotten in trouble for my tags. Polynigmion.

[alexhinerman]

Music video by Protest The Hero performing Spoils. (C) 2009 Underground Operations Under exclusive license to Universal Music Canada Inc.

I like this chapter as it discusses Socrates idea of false memory.  By writing things down we become less reliant on memorizing the idea and dependent upon remembering where we wrote it down.  I agree and disagree with this.  I tend to find using notes as an aid for understanding is extremely helpful.  At the same time, I'm sure we've all seen students try to memorize lecture notes for a test and miss the point: an understanding of the material.

I also like the idea presented of misinterpretation of what was written.Even in class we discussed the real meaning of one of the most classic poems of all time,  the irony of having what you said live forever but being lot in its true meaning,  That's why i chose this song, as one of the phrases describes the point rather well.

Protest the Hero - Spoils (2009)

"(1:07) word that's ever written will fall short of its intent.  Even sung or spoke or screamed, they will betray what they have meant

Language is the heart's lament A weak attempt to circumvent the loneliness inherent In the search for permanence Like all the future ghosts who scratch their names in wet cement Demeaning meaning as they shout out at the emptiness."