"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton

Saturday, February 25, 2017

APP IDEAS. App idea #1: musical piece search based on crude "singing" input.

I'll start a new series of posts, where I describe various app ideas. This should be a fun exercise and it's probably a good idea to publish---the hope being that it may inspire someone. I'll begin enumerating with #1 as an indicator when I started posting those ideas---this is not meant to interpreted that #1 indicates the first app idea I've had.

App idea #1: musical piece search based on crude "singing" input.



Consider an app whereby the software recognizes the music piece from a crude rendition---sung or hummed---of one of it's fragments. I have noticed this to be most useful in the case of classical music---we often recognize the melody, but are at a loss of who composed it or what the title is. It should be useful when we want to share the piece with someone but don't know what to type into the search app. So how about just having a search app that takes crude renditions as input? There's some promising speech-recognition software out there, so perhaps implementing this idea could make us of it. 

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Ad hoc theory of one of the reasons why time appears to flow faster in dreams.

A perplexing yet strangely familiar experience to anyone who has ever dreamed, would undoubtedly have been making the occasional observation that much more seems to occur in our dreams than the duration of our sleep alone can account for. After a night of intense dreaming we often remember the equivalent of much a longer time period then we had actually spent sleeping (which is generally much longer than the time spent dreaming). Or when we take a short nap during the day, we're often surprised to learn upon waking that only a few minutes have past after what had seemed like an epic adventure. 
So apparently there's a clear subjective disconnect between dream state and waking state with regard how we perceive the flow of time. I make the assumption that time doesn't actually undergo some substantial warping in our heads in a way that would account for this phenomenon.

Since we're under the impression that more has happened during our dream than the time being asleep can account for, there seem to be a few possibilities as to why that may be. I should mention that I'm writing this blog post without having consulted any particular, specialist literature on the matter, hence the post title. 

One possibility is that our brain processes inner-conjured dream-films with a higher temporal resolution. That is, the dream-films are presented to us with increased speed, but we perceive them as normal, since within our dream state there's no other reference frame other than the dream itself. This hypothesis appears to be amiable to empirical exploration.

The other possibility, which occurred to me recently, is closely related with how our memory works. So the following explanation requires both some assumptions about the mechanics of our memory, but also some assumptions about the actual content of dream-films. The vast majority of us, whenever recollecting some series of events---say our last birthday party, or the recent trip to the countryside---tends to recall vivid snapshots of the more intense impressions, which are more or less arranged in chronological order. The point is that most of us don't remember the entire experiencial continuum, but rater a collection of short vivid fragments. Now, if we think about it, this is how dreams often seem to manifest---in a bunch of , more or less, disconnected situations combined into one weird stream.

Of course when I talk about this, I have only my memory to rely on, so if our memory indeed works as I just have outlined, then I cannot justifiably rely on it to speak of the character of the dream-films. But the point is that it is possible that dreams may be arranged and have the actual content analogous to the way our memory works. That is, dreams may consist of vivid fragments connected haphazardly with a vague chronological cause-effect narrative sense, like a movie trailer. But because our memory also works, as assumed earlier, such that we tend to only recall movie-trailer-like imagery, and only infer all the in-between events that must have occurred, when presented with the dream-film trailer, we inflate its content by inferring that there must have been intervals in-between.

For example, in real life, when recalling our plane journey from one city to another, we may only vividly recall say, the departure and arrival, plus a few more interesting cloud formations viewed through the window on the way, but that doesn't mean that the journey only consisted of those few intervals (the sum of which may consist of less than a minute of vivid mnemonic imagery), because as a matter of fact the journey is much longer (say, a few hours) than the sum of our recollected and vivid fragments---we infer that there must have been in-between intervals, other than those that we can vividly access.




But it's possible that my dream of a similar flight would be a kind of film trailer actually consisting of only the vivid fragments of the departure, a view of the more interesting cloud formations, and the arrival, arranged in a sequence of one vivid fragment occurring immediately after the previous one, without any intervals in-between at all. However upon recalling this 3-scene act when we wake up, it seems much longer because our memory mechanism inflates this vividly dreamed sequence by filling it with inferential content, i.e. a journey like that must have lasted a few hours (there must have been many more scenes in this act).


So the ad hoc explanation of why time appears to flow faster in dreams is that dreams are much like film trailers, but because of how our memory works, we tend to have the impression that we've watched the entire film.

I've also written about about how our memory works in a recent post, and a short story written years ago.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Group memory quality as a function of group size and interaction---an explanation.

I read somewhere, years ago, that species of birds that live in flocks tend to display better group-memory. I don't remember (pun intended) how that was measured, but have observed this to be also true of human interactions. Aside from mere cognitive stimulation---in a group we also tend to interact more, so there's a greater chance of certain facts being continually refreshed---I believe that there's more to what enhances group memory. That is, I think that there's another factor that influences group-memory, not by virtue of cognitive stimulation alone, but the kind of stimulation that has greater likelihood of occurring as the group size increases.



It has to do with both the abilities and limitations of each individual, and the fact (conjecture) that those abilities/limitations vary significantly among individuals. The hypothesis underlining this idea is simple---it's very plausible that given that we've been a social species for most of our evolutionary history, it would appear to be an adaptive trait to distribute cognitive abilities related to memory and recollection over the entire group. In particular, there may be a significant variation of the temporal ranges that individuals are capable of recollecting proficiently. That is some people would be better are remembering recent events, with high fidelity, whereas other's mid-term or long-term memory may be much better. After all it's the sum of all memories, fed into the social collective that counts, so it needn't be preserved by each individual---that would be an unnecessary over investment of neural-power.



From careful observation of my family and friends I have noticed that some of us display great proficiency in recollecting great amount of detailed information of current affairs, i.e. information gathered in the recent days or weeks, but may struggle holding that detail for a long period of time, and their memory of current affairs progressively fades over time. Others, on the other hand, display much better long term memory than others.

Perhaps such traits can be shown to be more generally diversified with respect to temporal ranges of optimal recollection. Moreover, there may be variance regarding the kind of of information that is remembered---some people may be better at remembering how to perform certain actions, others at phenomena that occurs in the surrounding environment, and others still may be really good at keeping a moral tally of group members, i.e. those displaying altruistic actions and those that exploit the benefits offered by the group. Combining those individual abilities in a social group would obviously enhance the group memory, simply by virtue of mutual compensation of individual limitations. So, such a social mnemonic mechanism would result in the group super-organism as a whole displaying much better memory than each of its members alone, on the condition that information flow is unhindered.

Those ruminations on the nature of memory are an unintended interest of mine. I just can't help but make conjectures about it. I've explored this subject matter before, via a short story---in particular how perception influences our memory and recollection.