Monthly Archives: April 2013

Unlimited Internet and me

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Screenshot anime Nyarko.W

“Books, games, bras and missiles! All at your fingertips, ready to be downloaded!” Honestly, I have not downloaded any bras and missiles yet.

I am consolidating and expanding my Internet access. I had four different mobile broadbands from two different suppliers. The plan is to go to one mobile broadband from each plus one DSL landline broadband. It’s a low-capacity broadband, at 5 MB it is barely worthy to be called broadband by modern standards, but that’s fine with me. The main point is that there is no upper limit of n GB use per month, as there is on mobile broadband.

In my previous rented home, I had fiberoptic broadband, which was a huge overkill. But because I had rented the place for 5 years, it was actually quite affordable – it required a large initial cost to get the fiber to the small house by the riverside, but it was cheap from then on. Of course, the house was sold from out under me after a year and a half, so I decided to rely on wireless broadband for a while. This DSL broadband is a bit of a compromise. It cost nothing extra to start using, and I should be able to take it with me if I move to any house that has had copper-cable telephone at some time in the past. This was common until 20 years ago or less, so most homes fall in this category.

The DSL needs a special broadband modem. It comes with a wireless router built-in, so that’s nice since the phone contact is not in my home office. The modem is sent by mail, but the post office opens after I have gone to work and closes before I go home, except on Saturdays. Not a big deal, the line will for some obscure reason not be enabled until the 23d this month. I am pretty sure they just need to flip a switch, but perhaps this makes them feel important or something. I’ve made do with mobile broadband for more than a year and a half, so I can live with that for a couple more weeks.

Only after I ordered the DSL did I find out that one of my wireless broadbands actually has unlimited 3G, there is no n GB per month upper limit. (I have another with 8 and one with 5, I think – it varies.) Of course this was the one I used the least. I have now set it up as the default Internet connection for my home PC. So, it turns out I did not really need to buy anything new to have unlimited Internet… but at least I will now have 3 different sources of broadband, so I’m unlikely to get another 2-week vacation from the Net like I did back when I had only DSL back in the original (and best) Chaos Node, when Telenor threw the wrong switch and their helpdesk couldn’t find out what was wrong.

Anyway, I am celebrating my unlimited Internet by downloading and uploading more freely than usual. I’ve downloaded the new Neverwinter MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game). It is distributed via BitTorrent, a file sharing technology more famous for illegal copying, but which also is used for legitimate purposes like this (it is free to download and free to play, they get their income from selling various in-game perks and decorations.) So I’ve uploaded a few gigabytes of that.

But really, the Internet is too big for me to have it all running through my home, much less my mind.

 

Daydreaming with spreadsheet

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Screenshot anime Ore no Kanojo

“Not to brag, but I’ve got a talent for fantasizing.” As a neurotypical human, you probably don’t need meticulous text files, spreadsheets and dice to maintain the integrity of your fantasies. Wait, do human fantasies even have integrity? And why don’t I know for sure?

If I have been failing to update my journal regularly, it is not because I have been lost in prayer, alas, but quite the opposite: Because I have been lost in unusually intricate daydreams.

I have come to understand that a favorite brain activity of neurotypical humans is to daydream of what could have been if they were able to change some event of the past. I am led to believe that this happens spontaneously, or very nearly so. But I am not a purebred neurotypical, I come from a family where autistic genes have run for at least three generations now. Judging from self-observation, I probably have a few of them myself, although I am not a purebred Aspie either. More of a half-breed, I guess. But daydreaming is one of the things that is probably different. I strongly doubt there are many neurotypical humans who use spreadsheets or dice in their daydreaming.

I am told that autists don’t daydream, but I do. Sort of. Lately, I have done a great deal of time traveling in my mind, branching off from various times in my past, creating alternate time lines with various differences from the original. I have written down summaries of a number of these in text files, one file for each major timeline. I have a spreadsheet in which I track a parameter of divergence. I roll three 6-sided dice to simulate randomness in some of the outcomes. That’s just the way I roll! ^_^

In the online superhero comic Mindmistress, my old acquaintance Al Schroeder wrote about a mentally challenged young woman who became super-intelligent through a technology developed by her late mother. After the heroine learned about role-playing games, her super-intellect created an interior world into which she disappeared and almost didn’t escape alive. As a father of two full-scale autistic sons, Schroeder probably had an idea of what he was talking about. One theory of autism is that it is not a lack, but a superabundance of brain activity, amplifying normal stimuli beyond what ordinary people experience. In favor of this theory is the fact that the brains of autistic infants grow faster than those of neurotypicals of the same age.

Luckily, I too survived my immersion in my elaborate daydream, although I was at some risk, and may still be. There are still timelines I would wish to revisit, if I think I can do so safely. And I still have my spreadsheet and my dice at hand. But for now, I write this entry.

Germans are intelligent now?

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke.

“You can just go to America!” The USA has the highest proportion of people with a long education, but Japanese schoolkids do as much homework in a day as American kids do in a week, and a German high school diploma is roughly the equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree in America.

More fun with Quora! Humans can ask the most amazing things. “Why does Germany tend to have a large amount of intelligent people?” This question is correctly marked with the label “Questions that contain assumptions” but is answered with great seriousness. There is even a short answer-wiki that sums up the consensus of the answers.

My first reaction was pretty much today’s subject heading. Germans are considered intelligent now? That was certainly news to me. But then I am Norwegian, while Quora is still somewhat America-centric. And in Norway, Americans are considered stupid (and fat and lazy). Of course, these are simply the stereotypes, we are well aware that there are many who are not. Even that stereotype may be wrong, since it is largely based on tourists. For a long time, America was the only country rich enough that even stupid people could afford to go abroad for fun. Therefore, the observation of stupid Americans.

As for Germans, the observation here in Norway is that they seem to be suicidal. German tourists rent a small boat and go out to sea when a storm is coming, then drown. They decide to hike in the mountains when a blizzard is coming, and freeze to death. They fall into raging rivers, or into cracks in glaciers, or drive with summer tires on icy narrow roads. Not what we consider intelligent, but I suppose they do well enough in their homeland, where nature is largely reduced to decorative parks rather than a main player in everyday life.

***

The generally agreed answer is that Germans are not more intelligent, exactly, they just have better education and live in a society where intellect is regarded more highly and money less, compared to the USA. German schools teach children many seemingly useless things, because a cultured German is supposed to have broad interests, including things that rarely earn money, like literature and arts. And because of that culture, they keep up with this knowledge later in life as well.

If I may here, I will point to my previous entry,  where I mention that children who learn many different things will have a head start on learning later, because as an adult you can associate things with what you already know, which is much more effective than learning something in a void, isolated from the rest of our life. I am surprised if American children don’t also learn many “useless” things, but perhaps these things are chosen differently, and the role of school in America may be more similar to daycare for a longer time than in Europe and specifically Germany.

One point that is mentioned repeatedly is that higher education is free in Germany. Actually I was of the impression that this is the normal in the civilized world, except if you want to attend an elite university and you don’t have any particular qualifications to commend you other than money. Well, it is that way here in Scandinavia, and evidently also in Germany. Of course, it is still not a life in luxury – you usually need to take a part-time job or borrow some money for your living expenses, even if tuition is free. Unless you are lucky enough to live with your parent(s) or working spouse within a short distance from the university, it may not be exactly literally free, but close enough that it won’t hold back those eager to learn.

But perhaps more important than the formal education is a culture where coming across as “cultured” is looked up to and respected, in much the same way as being rich is in America. You want to have a number of fully stocked bookshelves in your living room when guests come over, including classics you may not actually have read. You want to be seen at the opera or theater, and you want to be able to discuss arts and sciences instead of just the weather.

This is not just Germany. The Japanese are very much into this cultural refinement, and being intellectual is a badge of honor even if in many cases it earns you substantially less money than those who are less academic. There is some of it in much of Europe as well, and it used to be some of it here in Norway too when I grew up. We have always been a bit Americanized for a European country though, and we still are, although we may hesitate to admit it.

One thing however where Norwegians and Germans are on the same side, is the feeling that being exceptional is a bit suspicious (unless it is in sports, then it is great). If you are resourceful, you should be a little better at everything, not committed to one thing where you are the best of the best. People who specialize are referred to in Norwegian as vocational idiots (loosely translated, the original Norwegian word would probably be stopped by most English profanity filters.) This is a typical European attitude. An American may ask: “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” but in Europe, we might ask: “If you are so smart, why do you only speak two languages?”

One thing is the same on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: The day still only have 24 hours, and you cannot do everything in a lifetime. You have to choose. Germans often choose differently from Americans, and this is probably why many of them come across as more intelligent. They have used their time differently.

Improve the ability to learn?

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke

“You try to get good marks by studying just to deal with the tests ahead.” That’s a bad idea. The brain is not that easily fooled.

Let’s play Quora again! Here’s a question in the category Neuroscience: How can one improve their ability to learn?

There are a couple good answers there, most notably living healthy and be physically active. A little caffeine would probably not hurt either, for most people. But this is not really a question that should be confined to neuroscience. Learning is a process influenced by many factors. Let us look at a couple of them.

***

To stick with neuroscience at first, how do we learn? We learn in three phases, four if you count the fleeting phase of sensory input. Next is the bottleneck of short-term memory. On average, an adult human has the ability to keep 7 items in short-term memory, but this ranges from 5 to 9 without a huge impact on daily life. You may be able to increase this number by 1 with systematic training, and it may give you an edge in a few situations. Like remembering Norwegian phone numbers, which are 8 digits. ^_^ (Seriously, for some years most of the calls I received were people dialing wrong number. The surge of smartphones has nearly put an end to that though.)

In practice, short-term memory does not have the huge impact one would expect. Most things we notice are either deemed unimportant and quickly forgotten, or passed straight on to working memory. While we hold things in short-term memory just for a few seconds, working memory may keep things floating around for several minutes at least. Memory loss after concussions and electroshock imply that memories may not be transferred to long-term memory until after half an hour or two, but some of this processing is surely subconscious.

If we had short-term memory but not working memory, we would not be able to make sense of things like novels, scientific texts or poems, where we have to remember much more than a handful of words, but don’t commit every detail (or even most of the details) to lasting memory. We automatically select the parts we think are important, and keep these around and put them together into meaningful structures, such as mental images or stories. It is unclear to what degree our furry friends have the same ability, since they can’t talk, but our use of working memory seems pretty special.

If the working memory runs full, which it easily does during focused study, you can not add more without losing some of what you already have. There is another bottleneck in the transfer of knowledge from working memory to long-term memory, which is encoded as actual physical changes in the neurons (nerve cells). At a minimum, the sensitivity of certain synapses (contact points between neurons) is changed. Over time the physical size of synapses may change, new synapses may grow, and the tendrils of the neurons may change in shape or size a little. In a few parts of the adult brain, new neurons are born. This applies mostly to the hippocampus, a small part that seems to serve as the brains “index” where links to memories are laid down. A lot of memories exist in the adult brain that cannot be recalled. Electric stimulation can cause such memories to appear, but there seems to be no system in them, except a rough categorization into smell, sight, sound etc. Without the hippocampus, memory as we know it cannot exist, although primitive conditioned reactions can bypass it.

Transfer from working memory to long-term memory is greatly aided by sleep, notably deep (delta) sleep which helps brain cells grow, and dream (REM) sleep which helps integrate memories. Also, during sleep we don’t cram more data into the working memory, so it gets a chance to unload.

Recent studies show that moderate physical activity also helps the brain encode information from working memory to long-term memory. This could be because our species did not originate in chairs, but our ancestors spent much of their non-sleep time on their feet. Or it might be as simple as the increased blood flow caused by a more vigorous heartbeat.

This explains why strategic use of sleep and exercise can improve learning, all other things being equal. It also explains why cramming for long hours is wasted time, and it is better to study in intervals.

***

But neuroscience is not the only aspect of learning, and not the one that makes the most difference in practice, except for the few where it does not work as it should. There is much that can be done to improve learning through the “software”, the data structures, rather than the “hardware” of the brain. I want to say a bit about this.

Adults learn mainly by association. Babies have nothing but basic instincts to associate with, but have a higher ability to just pack random data into their brains and retain them. Then again they spend more than half their time in REM or delta brainwave states, with delta even appearing while awake for a while. As the infants become children, this ability begins to fade, and in teenagers it goes downhill fast. For the rest of our lives, we depend heavily on association.

If you were introduced to many different experiences as a child, you will have the hooks to associate similar things. For instance, if you spent a year of your childhood in a foreign country, you probably have a rudimentary knowledge of the language. This makes it a lot easier to pick up that language later and learn to speak it fluently.

What if we simply don’t have the relevant experiences? Well, we can still learn through repetition. I have occasionally mentioned Spaced Repetition, a system where you recall a fact repeatedly but with exponentially increasing intervals, so as to recall it as close to possible before it is forgotten. It is possible to learn utterly alien things this way, but it takes some time. You cannot do this just before an exam, to put it that way, or just before you go on a vacation to a foreign country and need to understand a bit of the language.

Another strategy is “bridge building”, where you learn something unnecessary but related to what you already know, and then use this knowledge again to learn what you really need. Arguably much of school is spent doing this, learning useless stuff so that we can bridge the gap from counting on our fingers to making a Mars rover. Of course, different things are useful for different people. But learning by association is so powerful that it can be used as a conscious strategy to learn otherwise meaningless information.

The impressive memory feats of memory artists are usually done this way: By associating new data with existing structures in a form that is not necessarily entirely sane if you were to describe it to an outsider. For instance, English is my third language and I may want to remember the word “gaffe”, a social blunder or embarrassing mistake. Being already familiar with the giraffe, which has a similar name in my native language, I may imagine a giraffe tripping over its own legs. There is no actual connection between gaffe and giraffe (I looked it up), but it causes my brain to build a “bridge” from a word I already know to one I don’t. Your giraffes may vary.

The more associations we build to a new fact, and the more vivid they are, the better we learn. Part of the “more” is location. You may have seen people who walk into a room, can’t remember why they came, and have to go back to the room they came from. Then they remember. So that shows that even a small change in location can influence memory. We can turn the tables on this by learning something, then going to another room and recall it. This can be enough for the brain to not archive it as location-specific, but general knowledge. (Of course, if we only need to remember it in one specific place, it is best to learn it there if possible. Or at least somewhere similar.)

Neuroscientifically, it may not be strictly necessary to go through all these tricks to learn things. There are a few scattered persons who seem able to remember pretty much everything in reasonable detail – whether they want to or not. This is a mixed blessing at best, as an endless torrent of memories runs through their head all the time. Remembering just the things that fit into our world and that we meet repeatedly makes life rather easier. So that’s why, if we expect to need something we learn, we should focus on just these two things: Integrate it in our world by linking it to things we know, and repeat recalling it, preferably in different places. Good luck!