Get Out of Your Own Way

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.

Corbis

"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

Through a series of intriguing experiments, scientists in Germany, Norway and the U.S. have analyzed the distinctive cerebral activity that foreshadows our choices. They have tracked telltale waves of change through the cells that orchestrate our memory, language, reason and self-awareness.

In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices.

To probe what happens in the brain during the moments before people sense they've reached a decision, Dr. Haynes and his colleagues devised a deceptively simple experiment, reported in April in Nature Neuroscience. They monitored the swift neural currents coursing through the brains of student volunteers as they decided, at their own pace and at random, whether to push a button with their left or right hands.

In all, they tested seven men and seven women from 21 to 30 years old. They recorded neural changes associated with thoughts using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and analyzed the results with an experimental pattern-recognition computer program.

While inside the brain scanner, the students watched random letters stream across a screen. Whenever they felt the urge, they pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.

Studying the brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision, the researchers identified signals that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

"It's quite eerie," said Dr. Haynes.

Other researchers have pursued the act of decision deeper into the subcurrents of the brain.

In experiments with laboratory animals reported this spring, Caltech neuroscientist Richard Anderson and his colleagues explored how the effort to plan a movement forces cells throughout the brain to work together, organizing a choice below the threshold of awareness. Tuning in on the electrical dialogue between working neurons, they pinpointed the cells of what they called a "free choice" brain circuit that in milliseconds synchronized scattered synapses to settle on a course of action.

"It suggests we are looking at this actual decision being made," Dr. Anderson said. "It is pretty fast."

And when those networks momentarily malfunction, people do make mistakes. Working independently, psychologist Tom Eichele at Norway's University of Bergen monitored brain activity in people performing routine tasks and discovered neural static -- waves of disruptive signals -- preceded an error by up to 30 seconds. "Thirty seconds is a long time," Dr. Eichele said.

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

Does this make our self-awareness just a second thought?

All this work to deconstruct the mental machinery of choice may be the best evidence of conscious free will. By measuring the brain's physical processes, the mind seeks to know itself through its reflection in the mirror of science.

"We are trying to understand who we are," said Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, "by studying the organ that allows you to understand who you are."

This movie depicts how Chinese workers are bound to repetitive chores, and stringent management in gigantic assembly factories.
The level of details are stunning. How each component are being manufactured and tested. How a wasteland is recycled by hand.
It brings me to the natural question of how to judge the value of a life or if that's possible at all.

Intensive physical labor are the largest export of China. There are various level of social stratification that exploit the value generated from this export. From management, business owners of OEM factories benefit from the revenue; local and state government benefit from the tax, foreign buyers benefit from the low cost utility of the products.

Even throughout the shooting of this movie, labor (film developing and processing, scene modeling) and material (cameras, tripods and rails) product generated from this flow are being used.

This maybe why the producer of the movie is not taking sides on the right or wrong of the fact. Instead, the producer, the director and the photographer all took a naturalist point of view, because that's the only way they can rationalize the fact every piece of modern civilization is built on top of exploiting the physical labor of those who have no better choice due to all the unfair disadvantages.

Nevertheless, this is a great movie! Just like all arts, it reflex the inherent irony in the modern society.        


 

BTW, on the note of exploitation using capital and violence (state is a violence machine).

The Hustler (1961) is a great movie about how professionals who love their work are exploited, too.

Microsoft, a company that keeps failing in technology, but managed to thrive on 2 cash cows (office and windows) had to part with its founder.
Thousands of books have been written on how to grow a company, including BillG's 1996 book "The Road Ahead". In which BillG repeated warned MS would one day become like IBM, a mature company that looks to the dust of a new company that may not have been founded yet (Larry Page enrolled into Stanford's graduate program in 1995).

Indeed, many of the things BillG predicted in "The Road Ahead" became true in the past decade (e.g. storage explosion, wallet PC, video on demand, DRM, and even Spam). For that matter, BillG is quite visionary. What MS failed is to capitalize on his vision. For the longest, MS didn't have an adequate solution to Spam. FAT32 & NTFS are still plagued by fragmentation (Linux's extfs doesn't have fragmentation problem). Windows CE, Windows Mobile, SmartPhone all failed to compete with RIM's blackberry.

The lesson here is, even with a lot of cash and a visionary leader, a company will still fail, because it can't chase all the disruptive changes with full steam. MS's strategy of concentrating on its cash cows is a double-blade sword. It helps its survival financially, but hurts its ability to enter new market.

MS also made the wrong investment on Speech and OCR technology. Granted, those were really cool technologies, but the application is too limited.  Many of the MSR executives have speech background, just like their counterpart in Bell lab or Xerox PARC. That shows how popular Speech technology was during those eras.

I imagine 10 years from now, the next next wave of tech executives will have "search" background, because "search" technology is so popular in this decade.

Who will dominate the next platform after Google. I bet it's a company that has not been founded yet. 

It should have almost been absorbed by now that Mid-west flood is pushing DBA to new high. But I still think the fact WSJ dedicate a front-page story on DBA will result in another short surge.
I should probably cash out a bit on Monday. Limit order $43.8, quantity 45%.

最近在看凤凰卫视的纪录片，从康梁变法到辛亥革命，从蒋家日记到200万人迁徙台湾。这些从另一个角度看中国近现代史的机会，让我再次体会到个人的渺小。

思想开明，主张立宪的袁世凯，最终却复辟称帝。
红色将军蒋介石，为了保住自己的王朝，落到一代枭雄的恶名。
在狱中写下"引刀成一快，不负少年头"的汪精卫，成了日本人的傀儡。
经时济世，领袖群伦的蒋经国，从一个纯粹的共产党员(到被自己的苏联老师称为"天真")，变成不惜滥杀无辜以儆效尤的特务头子。
李登辉，原是以领导共产主义游行出身，以反对台湾独立获得蒋经国青睐，最后却用台独势力终结了国民党对台湾的统治。

我相信他们年轻时的激情与真诚，残酷的政治斗争，使人异化到背叛自己，身不由己。

唯有梁启超，蔡锷，真正可以做到功成身退。

It's exciting to be a sales person, especially when the product I am selling is human resource. How to navigate the job postings, how to find the key person in the hiring process and how to package a candidate to grab the attention of the hiring manager are arts of their own. Of course, the bottom line is the candidate has strong credentials.

Sales skills are most essential to survive in the ever changing job market.

Right after I dump all shares in USO. It's down 1.97% today. I think another buy-in point will be around $85, if the price ever drop to that level. The capital gain tax has eaten away half of my profit. I wish I had moved more asset into my Roth IRA.

When customer cares about cost more than brand name, the product becomes commodity. The commoditization of a market is usually the opportunity for new-comer to beat the incumbent.

Camera becomes commodity when Japanese optical shops became camera makers (Canon, Nikon, Olympus) in 1930s. Leica, Kodak eventually lose the market.

Copy machine becomes commodity when Xerox patents expired in the 1980s, and Canon, Epson, after eating the low-end market, eventually took the majority of the whole market.

PC has become commodity since Dell took the market (HP is now the leading competitor). Webstore has become commodity since eBay is around (Amazon marketplace is the leading competitor).
Ironically both HP and Amazon was the market leader when those two sector were still "hi-tech" instead of commodity.

Cloud computing is at the verge of transfroming from "hi-tech" to commodity (Amazon EC2, Google App engine, MS live mesh). Sun, who came up with the slogon "the Network is the Computer" about 9 years ago, has lagged behind. Their Grid Computing in 2006 failed because of compatibility, and lack of on-demand storage solution to bundle with. They recently launched "Hydrazine" to catch up in this area that they pioneered. IBM, who commercialized computing on-demand using their mainframe is trying to lower the cost by borrowing PC-based technology from Google. IBM survived largely because their strong foothold government and defense market.

Search is still considered "hi-tech", although the technology itself has been quite mature (scalability is the real entry-bar now).
OS is still considered "hi-tech", although "free" Linux has beaten MS in the server market. MS still owns enough desktop OS market to survive. 

That's a lot of jargons to swallow if you aren't following these things. But my gist is the following:
Innovators usually miss the trend when their own invention becomes commodity. Their technical advantage can't beat competition from the low-cost competitors. They sometimes were able to catch up in the low-cost war (e.g. Amazon and HP), sometimes not (e.g. Leica, Kodak, Xerox, Sun, IBM).

So what will become the next sector?
Is it mass media? (newspaper, TV replaced by online media) Or publishing?