August 30, 2007 – 4:24 pm
Some brain injury patients exhibit a bizarre symptom called “confabulation.” The brain injury causes them to forget things or be unaware of certain problems, and their brain (attempting to make sense of the situation) creates excuses or lies to cover up the missing knowledge. Sometimes the results can be extreme:
- A stroke patient with weakness on the left side might lean against the wall with the left side to walk. When asked why, the patient might say “I’m tired” or “I don’t want to answer your question.” Such a patient does not realize there is anything wrong with one side of the body and explains away symptoms with illogical rationales.
- A patient with amnesia might come up with fanciful explanations for how he or she got to the current location. “I’m riding with the garbage to find out where the dump is.”
- Some drunks will give fanciful explanations for the situations they find themselves in. “I always wanted to see the city from the top of the bridge support structure.” The stories make sense to the drunk, but not anyone else.
I always thought confabulation was part of the disease.
It’s not. Confabulation is a normal, important function of the brain, but the brain only gets caught when the confabulation is way off. This rarely happens to normal people, but is much more likely when the brain doesn’t have enough information to go on or some part of the brain is feeding it bad information.
August 28, 2007 – 6:47 pm
It seems there are more gay and lesbian House and Senate representatives that are Republican than Democrat. Granted, we are talking closeted, self-loathing, “I want to abuse gays so you don’t think I’m gay” gay. But I have to say, I’m impressed.
August 24, 2007 – 10:06 pm
I wish I’d never heard the term “sausage casing girl.” It’s a rude way to describe heavy young women whose clothing is so tight they look like an over-stuffed sausage casing.
Damned if “sausage casing girl” doesn’t pop into my head as I see someone dressed like that
Some things one should not allow into one’s brain.
August 24, 2007 – 7:42 am
One of the take-home messages of Blink, Society of Mind, and Derren Brown’s TV show is that we make decisions for reasons we can never know, and then our brain lies to us about why we made those decisions.
I tend to be hyper-intuitive. Knowing something — and not knowing how I know it — can be frustrating. I’ve struggled on many occasions to defend “how I know what I know” when, in fact, I don’t know “how I know what I know.” Studies that show intuition is something that is learned and trainable. Based on those studies, I can get away with saying things like “this feels exactly like something I’ve seen before” or “years of training.”
Neural nets are famous for learning things that one might not have wanted them to learn. There have been several cases where a visual neural net system was trained to look for an object based on two sets of photographs. Unless care is taken, the neural net learns about photography — lighting, focus, etc. — rather than object discrimination.
That’s the problem with this intuition stuff — you don’t know what it’s really learned, and it is possible the intuition has learned the wrong thing.
August 22, 2007 – 4:56 am
I’m reading the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. He discusses the powers and pitfalls of the unconscious mind. Gladwell’s thesis, that our minds make decisions for reasons we will never know — and might disapprove of — is disturbing. His thesis is also spot-on, based on what I’ve read so far. Heinlein once said “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” I’m not sure even Heinlein knew it was this bad.
Strangely, Gladwell’s thesis fits in neatly with Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind. If you happen to have read Minsky’s book, you’ll understand the basis for a lot of what Gladwell is saying.
More later, I’m sure.
August 20, 2007 – 6:02 pm
Ludwig Boltzmann, of statistical thermodynamics fame, pointed out something bizarre. Given enough time (and it would take an extreme amount of time), through sheer chance a conscious entity will eventually appear out of nothing. These so-called “Boltzmann Brains” create extreme problems for physicists and theologians alike.
If, as the theologians claim to know and physicists suspect, the universe was created from nothing, then we ourselves are Boltzmann Brains.
I like that idea. It’s especially attractive for a blog that is both anomalous and anonymous.
You can call me “Chance.” Welcome to my blog.