Coke and debility

Article by Dr Mercola discusses the pervasity of Coca-Cola in Africa's economy, and soft drinks in general as the number one source of calories the average United States person's diet. Besides the usual points of diabetes from the sugar spike, he describes the biochemistry as a well designed drug: "The only reason you don't vomit as a result of the overwhelming sweetness is because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor."

I'm not an ascetic. I'll have a soda and many another comfort food on occasion, but I tend to notice that my body (the human body), as do (armchair) evolutionary pyschologists, has a disproportionate preference for the sweets, fats, and salts. Although I lack evidence of Mercola's claims, it's with sadness that I view children who dive into such things on a daily basis. Their minds and bodies potential to grow and develop is being destroyed. When I see them imbibe and then retain a half-stupor of concentration, even worse when zoned out to television (or... a videogame... but usually with the children I see, it's television), I see the Idiocracy is rising. Sadly, I see the child as the unwitting accomplice to their own limited cognitive and physical abilities that will plague them through adulthood and into an earlier grave.

Due to my profession (and my son's own near-addiction level of preference for four glasses a soda in a meal), I sometimes muse if perhaps a game would help a young mind to see how their brains are wired for an environment that went out with the stone age. And that to have more fun in this lifetime, one needs to avoid sabotaging their physiological machinery that enables their intelligence and play.

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Intuition defended

As an intuitive thinker (INTP actually), I was curious to read a discussion of the biological representation of intuition. Lars-Erik Bjorklund defended his thesis on the topic.

The article suggests that experience layers subconsciously to guide one's behavior and judgment in ways that are hard to trace. That's a reasonable summary of much of my stream of consciousness. I'm a little bit curious about how experts embed and retrieve tacit knowledge.

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Primates playing videogames

Rob Bass brought to my attention that a couple years ago, a video showed what I would guess is an exceptional bonobo, Kanzi, playing Pacman. As a fan of the game, I watched and was impressed at Kanzi's ability to manipulate the joystick and coordinate that to the visual display in a purposeful way. But the video never showed Kanzi playing independently. His tactics and the incessant positive, encouraging, and coaching speech by the human trainer suggested a cognitive ability of a preschooler. He left the game in the middle, his trainer kept reminding him when he could chase the ghosts and when he had to run, and he oftentimes became trapped in situations that experienced human players do not.

Related, a few zoo orangutans play matching games for food pellet.

Chimpanzees outperform adult humans in flash and remember experiment, similar to the one in Brain Age, in which they were rewarded peanuts. Might the humans have done well with an edible treat?

In some temple rooms of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wakers, I felt like a chimpanzee in a psychologist's laboratory experiment. I imagine the banana at the door as a I go through the virtual environment, inferring the spatial results of various jumps or lever presses.

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Fear and loathing in lying

Synopsis and article suggest that an expression of fear enhances peripheral vision and that an expression of disgust reduces airflow, both of which are adaptive responses to predators (to be afraid of) and toxic fumes (to be disgusted by).

Perhaps then the social functions of such expressions is useful for higher-order knowledge (knowledge of what another knows), which Andreas Witzel and Jonathan Zvesper have been discussing the design of for computer games. The exploitation of that meta-knowledge (pretending to be afraid or disgusted) might be closely coupled to the awareness of higher-order knowledge (that someone is afraid or disgusted). Rob Bass informed me that at the same age Theory of Mind is detected, by the Sally-Ann test, so is lying. It puts an eerie twist on the Jewish myth: When the fruit of the tree of knowledge is eaten, deception is available.

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What is a neural model of a noun?

Today's published research on Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns suggests that nouns activate both sensory-motor and planning networks in the brain. A noun activates the features of how it appears, tastes, and, some sort of plan. A plan of how to use the noun perhaps? The predictive model is far from perfect (70% where chance was rated at 50%), yet confirms that rather than understanding objects in a Platonic void, they are understood as things to be used, and much of their meaning is in how they are sensed and used.

While constructing a game that encourages the user to practice a foreign language, I'm wondering if a neural-inspired representation of nouns is useful. Object-oriented (object, property) and (object, method) data structures come to mind. Yet also behavior-oriented (event-driven, functional and aspect-oriented) representation comes to mind, if one considers that the actor and not the object is the determiner of how an object is used. Rather than The Sims, which encodes behavior of the agent in the object (the television tells the Sim how it will be used), the abilities and desires of the actor alter the meaning of the noun. Because of the need to unit-test and rapidly edit code in cross-cutting concerns behavior-oriented representation is already appealing. Computational linguistic representations of nouns and verbs, and associated architectures, strike me at first glance as daunting for constructing rapid prototypes. I suspect there is a lightweight middle-ground that could achieve some succinctness by modeling nouns according to agent usage, as humans do.

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DanceDance Creativity

Sundar and Hutton at Penn State, had participants play DanceDance Revolution and subsequently measured their arousal and mood. Both happy and sad players (and at either extreme of high or low arousal) tested as more creative (and what does that test mean?)

I faintly recall anecdotes of mathematicians who had brilliant thoughts while riding a bicycle, and can recall some inspired moments during exercise. Because DanceDance Revolution requires footwork and it can be a form of exercise, I wonder: how would the results compare to non-videogame exercise, and how would non-exercise videogames (those that say, only require hand activity) compare these results? Perhaps they are in the forthcoming paper?

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Pleasures of a game monitored?

This research area is insightful. Thanks to Cynthia for posting a link to this brilliant find! I especially found the correlation of spatial cognition, reward, and learning insightful.

I'm already predisposed to believe their (speculative) conclusions, yet after reading the Journal of Psychiatric Research article (Gender differences in the mesocorticolimbic system during computer game-play, I have questions. Their contrived videogame strikes me as an atypical case in the medium. How does their methodology's game of clicking moving circles quickly generalize to videogames? How does their selection pool of Stanford students (which is biased toward education and mechanical technology) generalize to males and females that typically play videogames? If someone were motivated enough to be in an higher-educational institute (that is famous for geekiness in the heart of the Silicon Valley), would not their motivation be likely to contain a predisposition for finding technical interaction rewarding? What difference would it make if the participants had been informed of what the rules of play were (which is the typical use case for computer play)? And then, there's the pet peeve I have when enjoyment and addiciton appear to be confused. If they define addiction by mesocorticolimbic activity, then what pleasurable activity does NOT meet this definition of addiction? I'm a designer (damn it), not a scientist... so I'd appreciate input.

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Tracking colors and progress

Psychologists at John Hospkins said color-coding enables a user to track up to 70 points, which is not revolutionary but suggests an experiment for a game like Geometry Wars or the Raiden-style games with many projectiles.

At Cornell, third-person perspective correlated to perceiving and achieving more of what one is looking for (progress or consistency). RPGs tend to be third-person perspective, rather than first, to accentuate task-critical information such as simpler aiming (in first-person) and environment navigation (in third-person). But third-person also emphasizes the character on screen, which in an RPG is important for detecting change in the character. As Sangwon Chung (former Nexon CEO) suggested to me a decade ago, does an RPG's third-person view accentuate the psychological reward from seeing the character's costume upgrade?

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Real moral dilemma, not fun

Users reported discomfort and aversion to an experiment that gives them a moral dilemma: to feed inequally or to starve equitably. While deciding, fMRI correlated insula activity to variations in equity, putamen to efficiency, and caudate to integration of both. On first reaction, it sounds to me like a real moral dilemma is not a fun choice to make, and that entertainment is better off presenting the illusion of a dilemma.

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New habits stimulate creative thinking

According to the New York Times article, practicing new habits stimulates neural pathways that may correlate to innovative thinking. I applaud the wisdom, yet I would be more impressed with some deeper insight. The advice given has already been in the self-help literature for decades, and perhaps in yogic traditions for milennia. I first came across it as a teenager in Your Erroneous Zones, published in 1976. Neophilic behavior has a been a conscious part of my practice since then. Hardly news, but I would like to know details of more precisely effective behavior. I have a lurking suspicion that milennia-old meditative and yogic practices will be among the neuropsychologists' conclusions.

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