Worth Playing

I hope to post something soon about the new position and living situation that's taken me so much away from you good people - but for now one of the things that's a delight about it is the joy of supporting people like this.

http://games.cs.washington.edu/Refraction/

Sure, it's not super-professional, but the design ideas are solid, and there are important things here about how they make side-quests. That, and it's the most fun I've ever had with division.

Worth Watching

Here's something you can watch for free. July 24th, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube. An Oscar-winning director whittled it all down. Ridley and Tony Scott produced it. It's on YouTube for free, and it's well worth a watch.

So often, caught up in the strength and joy of combat, adventure, and danger, storytellers forget the joys, dangers, fears, loves and hopes of everyday life. This film doesn't.

http://www.youtube.com/lifeinaday

Be warned - several shots are not for the squeamish.

Action: Setting up a baseline

It’s never too early or too late to set a baseline. Even if you don’t plan on starting brain training any time soon, take five minutes a day and set a baseline. If that’s too much, take fifteen minutes every Saturday to set a baseline. This is perhaps the most important step you can take, because it gives you something concrete to measure against, despite all the dangers of concrete measure.

Here are a few ways you can start setting a baseline:

Dual-N-Back

Measures working memory.

downloadable: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

online: http://www.soakyourhead.com/dual-n-back.aspx

Flash cards:

download: http://ankisrs.net/

online: http://www.memrise.com/welcome/

To really measure your baseline, you will need to set up a number of sets. I'll talk more about how to do this as I do it.

General:

A surprisingly challenging game, probably the most fun of these options:

http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/mindtree.jsp

I look forward to the day that I actually get organized enough to do in-depth reviews and comparisons of these, especially as I attempt to see how something like mind-tree influences my Dual-N-Back task. And yes, I'm probably overthinking this, I really just need to choose one.

Book Review: Improve Your Memory by Ron Fry

Fry, Ronald W, and Ronald W Fry. Improve Your Memory. 5th ed. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson Delmar Learning, 2005. Print. Ron Fry’s how to study program.

TL;DR: Skip it. There are better.

Longer version: Fry covers the basics of memory training, and scatters a fair number of very, very basic (in my opinion, often ineffectual) study tools in as well. You're better off reading other books, which will be reviewed here hereafter. Very little by way of scientific method as well. An anemic introduction at best.

Lessons Learned: Have a baseline... but how?

Over the past few weeks, I've been doing a number of experiments. I've practiced through a memory book (book review to come) and I've been trying different sleeping schedules. There's only one thing I neglected - I didn't set a solid baseline, against which to measure any progress I've made.

My guess is most of us don't have a set baseline for mental performance, and being able to establish one would help move us all forward. Yet, especially when it comes to the brain, how does one set a baseline? Sure, there are some basic tests like word and number-spans, mental object rotation, etc, and I do want to improve on those tests - but what about complicated mental creativity? If I improve my dual-n-back, will my writing skill and accuracy really improve? Entirely plausible - but difficult to say. Dual-N-Back is just one among many competing baselines.

And of course, once you have chosen a baseline for mental activity, how do you create isolated experiments? You may sleep less or more at night, but how do you know that's having the effect, and not the time you woke up, or the timing of your breakfast?

A possible answer: Results must be big.

Sorry about the vague, philosophical post, but I'm feeling vague and philosophical at the moment. And unsolved.

Continued interruption

I forgot to mention - about Inception. It wouldn't have to change much to incorporate a different theory of mind. I think I've mentioned before that one of my favorite ideas for a different ending to Inception would be making Mal a pure creation of Cobb - Ariadne is actually his wife, trying to bring him out of the dream-world. In this case, Mal might have been so convinced of his ability to incept that he created a reality in which it made sense and worked - and to bring him out of it, Ariadne creates a labyrinth (which could have worked in all that cool labyrinth stuff I wish had been included toward the end...) and the entirety of the labyrinth - the context - could have been her way of inception - to create a context, rather than a single item. Which is really what a movie does, come to think of it.

An interruption: Inception

Still haven't re-watched it (need to do that one of these days...) but a thought struck me the other day:

Inception seems to have a very rationalistic theory of mind - as if the mind is very organized - if you get down through the security and plant an idea deep enough, that idea can change all someone's life.

I'm not an expert by any stretch, but it would seem to me that the best studies of mind today have come to the opposite conclusion - whether or not one is a rationalist, one's mind is very empirical and tends to base ideas strongly on preponderance of evidence.

As Thomas Harris said, our conclusions are a lump, not a sum.
AKA Context, context, context.