Open Laboratory 2008

If you remember OL2006, then you’ll want to participate in the 2007 run up. Go through the list of the final runners up to decide which posts go into the anthology this year.

Free will, but only after

Marcus Menezoid and myself sat late into the night talking about a bunch of things. Free will turned up into the picture with Marcus threatening to go get the kitchen knife, chop my finger off and offer to show me that it’s free will and real. This post narrates the line of thought I took to pooh-pooh the knife threat. And Marcus, here are some videos that explain how this works…

Neuroscience 2nd Century BCE

Last night this book called Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra was at hand, and I picked it up absentmindedly and opened a page that described the time lag between perception and cognition. Specifically verse 9 of the Vibhuti Pada. I’ll skip the sanskrit verse and straight to Taimini’s translation:

Nirodha Parinama is that transformation of the mind in which it becomes progressively permeated by that condition of Nirodha which intervenes momentarily between an impression which is disappearing and the impression which is taking place.

Nirodha = restraint+suppression / Parinama = transformation+result

Now this kind of bounced me, because I’m fresh from reading about Dr. David Eagleman’s research on Time perception and I immediately recognised the connect that it had to the last part of the sutra.

… intervenes momentarily between an impression which is disappearing and the impression which is taking place.

See a video by Eagleman labs about how the brain dilates time.

Patanjali is discussing perception, and he’s plainly making the distinction between mediate and immediate perception as well as pointing out the serial order of the impressions. Now, I know that the rest of the book is about modifying the mind to learn how to integrate it’s falsely conceived dualism, and Patanjali in the very begining makes the distinction between the atheist and the theist by claiming that you could either use a deity or not to practise yoga. Just so we know that religion isn’t being pushed in the name of science here.

Discovering Synesthetic Abstraction

I studied design in an art college. If you have a background in design education, you know how frustrating that can be. An art college views design from the point of view of applied art, or ‘applying art to commerce’. It doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the educators are all out of work painters, perspective artists and poets. While philosophy was abundant, there was absolutely no rationale or logic, business or otherwise. Design approval was arbitrary.

After the first 2 years of art college education, I began to feel irritated with the lack of accurate feedback. The internet wasn’t available to me at the time, and our college library only had art books. British library was ok, but I couldn’t decipher head or tail of the science books there because popular books on neuro-science weren’t as widely available. It was frustrating because, like any student I developed theories of my own on why some visuals appealed to some and not to others. Some worked and did what they had to, others fell flat, and there was no way of objectively verifying my theories…

The difference between knowing how and knowing that.

Two significant things happened today.I read Gilbert Ryle on the way to work, and I was thinking about his, “The difference between knowing how and knowing that”, when i ran smack into a project meeting. The client across the table was expressing marked distress over a bright red layout of mine, projected on a screen… The trouble was it didn’t have the brand colours. The theme of the layout was love, and somewhere between his recommendations of blue and the grey, it hit me.

I made the connect.

Sensitivity in design

 

A designer who makes posters for the education of under privileged children, at a lower fee than what he usually charges. Another, who designs leather belts. A third one, who designed the bazooka. So which one of these is actually a ‘SENSITIVE DESIGNER’?