When Isolation and Disconnection are Desirable

In his article on Scuttlebutt, Bogost asks, “What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?” He says this in the context of describing how Dominic Tarr, the creator of Scuttlebutt, lives largely offline in a sailboat in New Zealand, but it makes me think of the not-yet-wireless phone in my house growing up. Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You t...

 Compatible Connectivity

Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information. Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bo...

 Sex Makes Life and Should Not Be Shunned

If there is a perverse man who could take offense at the praise that I give to the most noble and universal of passions, I would evoke Nature before him, I would make it speak, and Nature would say to him: why do you blush to hear the word pleasure pronounced, when you do not blush to indulge in its temptations under the cover of night? Are you ignorant of its purpose and of what you owe it? Do you believe that your mother would have imperiled her life to give you yours if I had not attached ...

 The Perception of a Rose

When I smell a rose, there is in this operation both sensation and perception. The agreeable odor I feel, considered by itself without relation to any external object, is merely a sensation. It affects the mind in a certain way; and this affection of the mind may be conceived without a thought of the rose, or any other object. This sensation can be nothing else than it is felt to be. Its very essence consists in being felt, and, when it is not felt, it is not. There is no difference between t...

 Understanding Cause and Effect is Based on Experience

Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigor of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause, which make us infer the effect. Such an inference, were it possible, would amount to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the comparison of ideas. But no inference from cause to effect amounts to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the compar...

 The Mind as a Blank Slate

1. Idea is the object of thinking.—Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, “whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness,” and others. It is in the first place then to be enquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received doctrine, that men ha...

 Chess as Recursive Evaluative Hunting

In chess, concentration usually unfolds in quick succession through perceiving, desiring and searching. But it’s recursive, so I often find something I didn’t expect in a way that leads me to see my position differently and want something else from it. My perception is pre-patterned through years of experience, so I don’t see one square or piece at a time. Instead, I see the whole position as a situation featuring relationships between pieces in familiar strategic contexts; a castled ki...

 Five Elements of Game Experience

Visual scanning: visual perception, especially scanning the entire screen at once. Auditory discriminations: listening for game events and signals. Motor responses: physical actions a player takes with the game controls. Concentration: intense focus on play. Perceptual patterns of learning: coming to know the structure of the game itself.

 It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read

What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive. You can think of mental models as psychological lenses that color and shape what we see. Some of this is genetic or cultural (Americans focus on very different parts of a picture than the Japanese do), but much of our perception is also shaped by experience — and experience includes the book...

 Role of Mirror Neurons in Learning to Read

In terms of early diagnosis, one study of thousands of babies “gaze-following” found that the skill appears first at about 10 to 11 months, and that babies who weren’t proficient at gaze-following by the time they were 1 year old had much less advanced language skills at age 2 (Brooks & Meltzoff , 2005). Another possibility with regard to mirror neuron research is that early and systematic priming (stimulating) of mirror neurons engaged in speech could be a strategy for building th...