Category: Culture

Neuroscience of the Gist

If I hadn’t given up regular TV watching about 20 years ago, I’d probably still be channel-surfing into oblivion.  You’ve been there, right?  Whatever you’re watching can’t possibly be as good or important as whatever you’re missing.  With hundreds of available channels, this is just mathematically reasonable in a very frustrating way.  Maybe, but it’s also an example of how technological access to more can make a person so distracted that he winds up investing time in nothing.  Thankfully, on-demand options for home viewing of filmed media have obviated the need for me ever to channel-surf, but then the Internet and social media came along and brought a whole new ADD-like experience to our lives.

Enter the Facebook feed and Tweetdecks and all those stories of great interest shared by people you love, trust, admire, etc.  There’s no way any of us is reading all of those stories unless we have nothing else to do, so do we pick and choose among them? Or do we just gloss over nearly all of it?  And is all this glossing — my friend calls it “gisting” — better than ignoring the apparently substantive content altogether and sticking to a favored news source. Is skimming over fragments of stories actually changing our brains?  According to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, all this gisting may be harming our ability to engage in what she calls “deep reading.”

In this interview, Wolf talks to Robin Young, co-host of the NPR program Here & Now.  To quote:

YOUNG: You had a great line. You said TV produced soundbite culture; online reading is producing eyebite culture.

WOLF: Yes, I’m afraid that what we’re becoming is so inured to seizing the most salient word that we are literally eliminating the music, the thoughts in between those words, some of the most precious aspects of written language.

Wolf wonders if we are not evolving what Young summarizes in her intro as “digital brains.”  And I think this is more than just a generic term for our times, but is rather an appropriate reference for precisely what Dr. Wolf feels may be lost if what we’re witnessing is really a stage in evolution.

If you think about what any audiophile will tell you is wrong with digital music, it’s that all sorts of nuance no longer exists for the contemporary listener to a typical MP3, for example.  Overtones, undertones, and various other sounds are far too subtle to be captured by mass-production, digital sampling; and in a very similar way it seems to me, Wolf is concerned that our own habit of sampling disparate text might make us deaf to the music of written language or at least impatient with it.  Wolf describes her own experience after a period of 5 to 8 hours of screen-reading per day and being unable to return to a favored novel by Herman Hesse.  She states that it took two weeks of purposeful effort to reform those temporarily dormant connections in her brain.

Wolf is less concerned with adults than with children who have yet to build that neurological foundation, which  enables us not only to engage with richer texts, but even to enjoy them.  To hear the whole symphony, if you will.  She is quick to say that she does not advocate turning back the clock and cutting kids off from technology.  “We have to equip our children with 21st-century skills. But at the same time, we must know how to form those reading circuits that allow what I call deep reading. It takes years to form in a child, and it takes milliseconds in us to use. And those milliseconds don’t just come naturally; we have to learn to use them.”

Talking Cybercrime with Leandra Ramm (Podcast)

As most people know, we are this week watching a developing story after some as yet unidentified hacker, or hackers, gained access to naked photos of a handful of celebrity women and published them on the web.  As that investigation unfolds, especially into what appears to be a failure in the security of Apple’s iCloud server, many of us non-celebrities are naturally wondering how safe our information is, but we are probably still underestimating just how dangerous it can be to become the target of a hacker with the right skills and too much time on his hands.  The lines between hacking, identity theft, and stalking can get blurry very fast, and my guest on this podcast has some insightful, first-hand experience with that frightening reality.

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Photo by Melissa Hamburg.

In her early 20s, Leandra Ramm had her life and career derailed by a cyberstalker operating halfway around the world in Singapore.  It was about ten years ago when Leandra was an aspiring opera singer, living and working in New York City, her career just taking off, when she appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper to talk about her origins from the Genius Sperm Bank.  A Singaporean named Colin Mak Yew Loong saw the broadcast on CNN International and from that moment on, he made Leandra one of what turned out to be his many projects in stalking, harassment, and threats of violence.  The experience cost Leandra many professional opportunities, made her terrified for her safety, and left her in a continued state of anxiety.

Pressing a case of international cyberstalking is extremely difficult because laws vary nation to nation, and some countries have no cyberstalking laws whatsoever.  Nevertheless,  Leandra pursued her stalker aggressively along with the help of digital forensics examiner, A.J. Fardella, and as of last December, Mr. Loong is serving a three-year sentence as the first person ever convicted in a case involving cyberstalking across borders.

Leandra also wrote a book about her experience called Stalking A Diva, in collaboration with attorney D. Rocca. Today, these two women, along with Mr. Fardella,  represent the founding members of the Alliance Against Cybercrime, a new organization designed to address stalking and other forms of Internet-based crime through international advocacy, policy initiatives, and public outreach.  Leandra’s case and this new alliance were instrumental in helping to pass Singapore’s Protection from Harassment Act in March of 2014.

I am also happy to report that Leandra’s singing career resumed after her ordeal.  She continues to work in a wide range of genres, both recording and performing live.

Visit Leandra’s music website here.

Buy the book Stalking A Diva here.

Visit the Alliance Against Cybercrime here.

Remix Culture & Food?

It was while sneaking one of my guilty pleasure foods, a small bag of Cool Ranch Doritios, that I read this article in the New York Times “Rethinking Eating” by Kate Murphy in which she reports that Silicon Valley is getting into the food business.  Well, the sustenance business anyway.  I’m not sure food is the goal in any of the cultural, social, or personal connotative senses of that word.  But technologists getting into the sustenance game isn’t necessarily a bad thing, applying algorithmic genius to the task of creating nutritional, and maybe experiential, substitutes for animal protein based foods.  Certainly, your vegetarian friends will remind you that animal-protein foods come with myriad downsides, ranging from environmental impact to cruel treatment of the animals themselves to any number of potential health hazards for the eater.  At the same time, too much of the still-growing world population remains hungry, and so it is not inconceivable that computer scientists mucking about in the world of algae and protein could be the legacy of Norman Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the hybrid “dwarf wheat,” credited with saving a billion lives.

As Murphy reports, “Instead of the go-to ingredients previously used in animal protein substitutes — soy, wheat gluten, vegetable starches — Food 2.0 companies are using computer algorithms to analyze hundreds of thousands of plant species to find out what compounds can be stripped out and recombined to create what they say are more delicious and sustainable sources of protein.”  No question, it’s an interesting area of research, and in all likelihood, this experimentation will yield some benefit the scientists aren’t even seeking.  Isn’t that part of the fun of science?

On the other hand, food scientists still trying to understand Food 1.0 have only just begun to seriously explore the microbial biodiversity of the human gut.  It is understood, for instance, that the innards of typical Western citizens are home to a more homogenous microbiome than they likely were in the past, while societies still living and eating more “primitively” show signs of a greater diversity of microbes.  How exactly certain microbes benefit humans — and thus how their absence may be harmful — is still science in its infancy, but researchers theorize that an increase in certain diseases in the developed world may be manifestations of our unwittingly killing off symbiotic species of bacteria and the like.  And since research in this area is so new, I’m going to assume that the algorithms being tested in Food 2.0 labs cannot account for these myriad chemical interactions between man and his meat, as it were.

At a glance, the efforts of these food tech entrepreneurs appear contrary to contemporary trends in culinary wisdom, which seeks food sources unsullied by mass production processes that often strip the very elements our bodies need in the first place.  While gut biodiversity science is still nascent, the general consensus among the food conscious is to follow the wisdom of experts like Michael Pollan who advises (if I may paraphrase), “Eat food and enough of it, and don’t eat that which is not food.” (My Cool Ranch Doritios definitely belong in the “not food” category.)  In short, we don’t necessarily need to know what every microbe does so much as we understand generally that we need to consume a fairly broad range of foods that are not over-sanitized because different symbiotic microbes thrive on different elements in the diet.  This is why the Western diet that is a bit too protein and sugar-rich has sustained certain microbes and killed off others.

And of course nobody needs me to tell them that, at its best, food feeds the soul, which may be much harder to factor into any equation than the probable influence of a single microbe.  So, it will certainly be interesting to see what comes from this new line of R&D, but historically, technology has a way of tasting like technology.  Anyone who has ever eaten a grocery-store tomato alongside a farm-stand tomato knows what I mean.  If this research leads to solutions that address world hunger and/or environmental and health hazards associated with current food production models, bring it on.  But if it’s a bunch of guys developing yet another way to treat food like a necessary evil that gets in the way of work or some other activity, that may not be progress for the human experience.

We like what appear to be ready solutions — like eCigarettes, which are so far unregulated on the assumption that they’re safe and are, therefore, being marketed to kids with sugary flavors like snicker doodle (yeah, I was surprised by that myself). So, perhaps these food tech guys are onto something, but they certainly appear to be investing in the opposite proposal that suggest maybe we just stop poisoning the apples and eat the damn apples.