Video: A leap from the edge of space

In an attempt to break a record from 1960, Felix Baumgartner will ride in a pressurized capsule to 120,000 feet and

step off.

If all goes as planned, the jump will happen later this year.

The video in the beginning of the clip is from Joe Kittenger's original leap from a slightly lower altitude. Kittenger has elsewhere described - sorry, can't find the link - the surreal feeling of plunging to Earth at very near the speed of sound with no outward indication of just how fast he was traveling. At the time of his jump in 1960, no human had ever gone higher and no one really understood what to expect. The challenge was to field test pressurized suits because at the altitudes to which he ascended exposure would quickly boil a human alive. Kittenger's willingness to risk everything helped create safer equipment for the astronauts that followed.

Baumgartner: "I think I've always been one in a place where no one has ever been before."

Wayne

We know more than we can tell, cont.

The body "is not just a way to get our heads to meetings" - Sir Ken Robinson

Shape and form contribute to thought.

In the past several years, the idea that intelligence requires a body has become much more widely accepted among philosophers of mind and scientists alike, so much so that it might be more accurate to say that flexibility in thought would be impossible without our bodies, which offer an emotional reservoir into which our thoughts can recline - or be aroused. Emotion-free reasoning doesn't liberate our thinking from unwanted contaminants. Rather, it diminishes our capacity to feel, to absorb, and, ultimately, to understand. Likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, thought consumed by feeling - no matter how justified - will eventually veer into a self-absorbed inability to change or accept new information. Sadly, many emotion-fueled "stands on principle" often lose touch with the facts of the matter.

New research, however, goes even further than this, suggesting that environment should be added to the brain and body as a third element of intelligence. A physical world, after all, is necessary for an intelligent being to generate predictions. In reviewing this research, the arXiv Blog at Technology Review appears to offer a framework within which divergent or creative thinking can be understood: it's what possible when the brain-body predictions based on one environment are "decoupled," or find themselves in, a different environment.

"Embodiment, Computation And the Nature of Artificial Intelligence:"

But today he and Hoffman go even further. They say that various low level cognitive functions such as locomotion are clearly simple forms of computation involving the brain-body-environment triumvirate. 

That's why our definition of computation needs to be extended to include the influence of environment, they say. 

For many simple actions, such as walking, these computations proceed more or less independently. These are 'natural' actions in the sense that they exploit the natural dynamics of the system.

But they also say it provides a platform on which more complex cognitive tasks can take place relatively easily. They think that systems emerge in the brain that can predict the outcome of these natural computations. That's obviously useful for forward planning.

Pfeifer and Hoffmann's idea is that more complex cognitive abilities emerge when these forward-planning mechanisms become decoupled from the system they are predicting. (emphasis supplied)

If this is true, then science might be closer to understanding how divergent, original thinking occurs in intelligent biological beings like ourselves - and how the same might be achieved in circuitry and silicon.

Wayne

Synesthesia - there's an app for that

What if sight came prepackaged with sound, or we experienced numbers as colors as well as two-dimensional symbols?

Speaking at the IdeaFestival in 2010, prodigious savant Daniel Tammet described how this unusual ability, synesthesia, had shaped his life, from the day of the week - "Wednesday's are always blue, as you should know" - to how numbers appeared to him in rolling landscapes, the geography of which he was able to exploit to recite Pi out to 22,000 decimal places. Since synesthesia has a physical basis, his unique creative ability was not so unusual after all, he argued. Each of us might benefit.

I'm not sure he thought that benefit would come so soon.

Conceptually, synesthesia can be related to a couple of trends. One is the sheer volume of data being collected by Big Science and creatively mapped in innovative ways by the Allosphere, for example. Other projects like Zooniverse make participatory science possible. Given a pair of eyes capable of recognizing patterns, something that we humans are particularly good at, or a few spare clock cycles in your personal computer, that extra data can be meaningfully experienced and parsed. Synesthetes experience natural data that our mono-sensory selves don't.

Secondly, trans-media efforts have also become more and more common. As someone who loves the imaginative and functional art of studio furniture, and who has developed some skill in furniture making, projects like a 'Net-connected end table that prints memories open whole new fields for the talented craftsperson. Its creator, John Kestner, has gone on to partner in an interesting and consumer-oriented project, the highly modular and intelligent Twine. These "supermechanical" pieces give, as he suggests, "a soul" to electronics and bring the Web of things that much closer.

Ariel Waldman recently explained to me that a "synesthesia mask" had been created by hackers who had 24 hours to create something unique at the San Francisco Science Hack Day. It's a little creepy, but in its mind-expanding originality, that project should go nicely with the particle wind chime developed last year. Call it super-biological.

So given a surfeit of data and a willingness to experiment across media, perhaps its no surprise that the world described by Daniel Tammet might be closer than we think. It is. "Inside the Mind of a Synaesthete," a post at Neuro Tribes, takes all of this a step further, not only describing this unique condition in some detail, but introducing the synesthete, musician and media artist Perry Hall, who has developed an iPhone app that can be downloaded and used to sonify and record what the phone is seeing. A video recorded with the software is posted above. I've downloaded and been playing around with it, and as Steve Silberman explains in the blog post, the effect really doesn't feel forced. In fact, it feels like another layer of reality is opened up to senses of sight and sound tuned by history to be wary, and not necessarily expansive. If you have an iPhone, give "Sonified" a try.

Wayne

Too bad opposites don't attract

Too bad opposites don't attract because according to The Creativity Post, groups that feature a mix of young and old, experienced and inexperienced, are more creative.

If we want to broaden our intellectual horizons it's important to remember our natural tendency to drift towards and eventually connect with only likeminded people. Stories of innovation and discovery throughout history illustrate how important this point is. My favorite, which doesn’t get told enough, is the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB), a key piece of evidence that changed our understanding of the origin of the universe forever....

The story of CMB reminds us that when it comes to solving difficult problems, a fresh set of eyes, even one that comes from a different field, is vital. The CMB story shows itself in one form or another many times throughout history. The world’s great ideas are as much about other people as they are about the individual who makes it into the textbook.

Before she became Tiger Mother, Amy Chua described the value of diversity in ideas and people to some of the "hyperpowers" in history. Ethan Zuckerman has written at length and critically on our tendency to seek out others like ourselves. Aside from the "opposites" link above, Jonah Lehrer has pointed to research on how diverse social neworks come with "real, tangible benefits" for entrepreneurs.

Each of these people have spoken at the IdeaFestival, by the way. If you've never been to the festival, why not make plans to be there this year? You're guaranteed to encounter people and ideas that will inspire and energize you.

Wayne

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