The science of becoming batman - how to become a superhero without any superpowers.

I would venture a guess (without wanting to offend any of my friends and readers) that most of us fall into the same 'mediocre' level of natural human development. Other than Angus, Wessel, and Gus I don't know any superheroes.... And then, Gus is only special because he has a supernatural love, Pete is a superhero because he's kind, caring and courageous, and Wessel... Well, he was first in line when they gave out brains.

As for me... well, no superpower that I can detect (although my daughter does thing I am great! In spite of the fact that I 'walk funny' - perhaps it is my 'bionic leg' that makes me special!? For more about that simply search this site for 'motorbike' and 'accident')...

But, here's the kicker! Did you know that you could (possibly) become a superhero just by doing a few special exercises!? Well, that's what the author of this new books suggests.

If I were to be a superhero I would ask that I get a costume that was not too tight (otherwise I would have to stay in shape just to wear it), Oh, and I would ask that I can wear my underpants under my pants (i.e., UNDER pants... ) not like Superman, Batman and a host of other so called 'super' heros... Not so super when you can't figure out how to wear your underpants, now are you!?

E. Paul Zehr has a book coming out in October called Becoming Batman: The Possibility of A Superhero, about the physical and mental training one would need to become a superhero without any supernatural powers. Zehr, a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, is also a karate expert. Over at Scientific American, JR Minkel interviews Zehr about how one might train as the Dark Knight. From SciAm:

What's most plausible about portrayals of Batman's skills?You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We're seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics.

What's less realistic?A great example is in the movies where Batman is fighting multiple opponents and all of a sudden he's taking on 10 people. If you just estimate how fast somebody could punch and kick, and how many times you could hit one person in a second, you wind up with numbers like five or six. This doesn't mean you could fight four or five people. But it's also hard for four or five people to simultaneously attack somebody, because they get in each other's way. More realistic is a couple of attackers.

Batman and science (Scientific American), Pre-order Becoming Batman (Amazon)

Scanning the brains of jazz musicians.

This research shows that Jazz musicians 'switch off' (or at least slow down) parts of their brains - I know a few first year students who have the capacity to do the same thing! Ha ha.

Seriously, this is quite interesting. Since Jazz requires the capacity to move outside of the confines of what is generally acceptable in the composition music (through the inclusion of 'blue notes', crossing octaves, combining irregular timing etc. in the composition). I'm sure that there are many other things that require a similar capacity (e.g., surgeons who deal with the gore of cutting up a human body, social workers who face the brutality of human frailty and economic subjugation in their clients, sex workers who have to perform unnatural acts for survival, ministers who are constantly faced with crises, deaths, and sorrow, oh and of course Justin Timberlake fans.... say no more).

I thought this was quite interesting.

According to new research, jazz musicians unconsciously switch off regions of the brain involved in self-censorship and firing up the area linked to self-expression. The scientists from Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders used fMRI to scan the brains of jazz musicians as they played a specially-designed piano keyboard. From a press release:

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says (professor Charles) Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Link to press release, Link to scientific paper in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

Technorati tags: neuroscience, the human brain, control

Singularity and the Matrix... Spiritual Machines... Mmmmm... Contemporary crazies!? Maybe not?

John van de Laar gave an interesting persepctive on a 'religious movement' that has formed around the central ideas of the first Matrix movie.
I can certainly understand the appeal - after all, throughout history generations have always attempted to locate the sacred within the tools, symbols, and nomenclature of their contemporary culture. The Matrix seems to be so expressive of some of the existential questions, queries, and framing aspects of our reality (these include such issues as the relationship between humans and our technology, eternal existence in terms that we can understand, issues of good and evil etc.)

Some scientists have suggested that these issues may have a far greater influence, and in fact be truer than just sociology, theology, and psychology, could explain. Some others have suggested it is in fact nothing more than 'wish projection' (along the lines of Feuerbach and Freud's theory).

In short, every generation has a built in need to believe that there is more to life than just being born, living, and dying - we seek a transcendent truth (which you can read about in my Doctoral Thesis, by the way - please see the chapter on Neuroscience (chapter 3 I think it was) where I discuss the holistic and transcendent a-priori neural operators that are present in the human brain from birth). In our generation the 'mythology' of our time is intrinsically linked with technology (particularly those technologies that make our lives easier, and in some sense bearable).

A final perspective, which I think is the most rational of them all, is the perspective offered by Professor Cornel du Toit, who suggests that any duality that we create between ourselves and our technology is a false duality. Just think about it, your cell phone is not just an object that performs technological functions, it has become an integral part of your life. For many of us it extends our ability to communicate, it offers us a sense of security, connection with others, and for some (like myself) it even regulates how one lives one's life (e.g., my cell phone has a diary function that alerts me to appointments etc.). Another example cited by du Toit is contemporary banking. We have created both a hard technology (notes, coins, cards, ATM machines) and a soft technology (values, exchanges, commodities etc. which cannot be felt or weighed, or seen, but which have value). Just try to live your life without money and you will soon see how we have allowed a 'created' technology to become an integral part of our identity. How many people do you know whose identity is formed by what they earn, what they drive, and what they use?

I tend to agree with this - faith and technology are not separate realities that are discovering one another, they are complex interwoven system of creating and forming meaning. Both are dependent upon each other.

Anyway, enough of my 'ramblings'....

Read the article below for more on the concept of 'singularity':

Science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker takes a running swing at the idea of the Singularity, the moment in human history when we disassemble raw matter, turn it into "computronium" and upload ourselves to it, inhabiting a simulation of reality rather than real reality. It's a fine and provocative turn from our Mr Rucker, who has a fine and provocative and deeply weird and wonderful mind.

Although it’s a cute idea, I think computronium is a fundamentally spurious concept, an unnecessary detour. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the maximum possible rate. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality...

This would be like filling in wetlands to make a multiplex theater showing nature movies, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination eco-resort, or killing an elephant to whittle its teeth into religious icons of an elephant god.

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts.

Link (via Futurismic)

By the way, my own doctoral research considered some of the theological issues in relation to these notions - you can download a copy of my Doctoral Thesis here (please see chapter 2). Two other superb books to read are:

The age of spiritual machines, and Are we spiritual machines. By Kurzweil.
Wiredlife - who are we in the digital age? By Jonscher.

Technorati tags: The Matrix, Singularity, Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil, Dion Forster

Pictures of the machine that is intended to find the 'God particle'...

Trying to prove God's existence by reason and science is ultimately a futile endeavor! After all, if we could contain God's essence, God's being, or God's self within any part of our human reason or logic, we would be able to contain God within our minds (logically that would mean that we would be more knowledgeable than God! Surely we can see that this is a logical inconsistency!) It is for this very reason that belief in God will always require FAITH, the belief that what one experiences to be true can be true even though it cannot be explained, quantified, or measured.

We do this all the time in our ordinary relationships - I love Megan! I cannot measure that love objectively (i.e., I could not tell you how much it weighs, what shape it is, or even exactly what makes up this complex emotion called 'love'). Even if one were to stimulate the brain to oscillate at the same frequency, and ensure that the same chemicals were present in the brain as when I feel love for Megan, that would not be love. Love has an element of the mysterious to it. There is something about it that does not require understanding, rather it is intended to be enjoyed, to be loved, and experienced!

That, is in some poor way, a representation of faith.

Another great misunderstanding about the relationship between science and faith is that faith is the 'stuff' of religion, whereas fact is the 'stuff' of science. Nothing could be further from the truth! Both science and religion depend on both fact and faith. Science has a great deal of faith within it. For example, when one builds a large bridge, it is built in accordance with the principles of Newtonian Physics (i.e., as long as it is strong enough, and the two ends meet, it should join up and you should be able to travel along it. We 'believe' this to be true because this is what we have come to experience to be true. However, if you are a Quantum physicist you may not be as confident in this fact - Schroedigger's principle shows that at a quantum level we cannot accurately predict the exact outcome of any supposed mathematical 'certainity'. At times when particle is fired into Gate A it will exit through Gate A, but at other times when fired at Gate A it will (for some unknown reason, called the 'uncertainty principle' exit through Gate B.) That something will happen the way we anticipate it to take place is as much a matter of faith as it is of fact. We cannot assume that science is based entirely on facts!

Of course the same goes for religion, not everything in religion is based on indisputable 'facts' (in the sense that this word has come to be in modernism). To say that my wife has eyes as blue as pools of clear water does not mean that they are 4 meters deep and can be used to quench the thirst of animals! BUT, but the same token, it does not mean that my statement is NOT factually true! Quite on the contrary, it could be one of the most trustworthy and true things that I know about my love for her. Context moves faith to fact (and allows facts to take on a variety of 'true' meanings).

I hope this makes sense. So, does a God particle exist? Perhaps! Does it prove that God exists... Well, I could spend the billions of Dollars used on that machine in far better ways to prove that a loving, healing, life changing, God exists - for some food will be the truth, for others it will be medicine, for another it will be a job... Yes, God's existence can be proved. It can be proved in love.

Anyway, here's an interesting scientific experiment.

Great photos and an article in Nat Geo about the Large Hadron Collider being built and tested at CERN in Switzerland to search for the so called ‘God particle,’ the massive Higgs boson which is believed to exist, but no one has seen one yet. I like this description from the article about the difficulty in finding it:

Building a contraption like the LHC to find the Higgs is a bit like embarking on a career as a stand-up comic with the hope that at some point in your career you’ll happen to blurt out a joke that’s not only side-splittingly funny but also a palindrome.

Technorati tags: Science and Religion, CERN, The God particle, Large Hadron Collider

Neuroscience meets mail room...

I love the mind... I love the way the brain, the most complex of human organs, functions to help us construct reality... It is truly one of God's most wonderful creations - much more than just a 'sack of neurons' floating in an 'electrical storm' and a 'chemical bath'...

NOW, my love for Neuroscience has found a new application - postage stamps!!! Heck I would LOVE to receive a letter with a 'brain' stamp on the front of it!!!!

Here's what I'm talking about:

The University of Washington's Neuroscience For Kids site has a fantastic gallery of postage stamps from around the world that feature neuroscience-related themes. From left: USA/Medical Imaging, United Nations/Drug Abuse (opium poppy in background), Belgium/Drug Abuse, Israel/Medical Engineering. Link (via Mind Hacks).

10 Stephen Hawking quotes - stand aside Chuck Norris, you're no match!

From time to time I get the feeling that some people think I am a Geek... After all, I like computers, I love complex equations, I have a doctorate in Strong Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience...

BUT, then I am reminded that my _geekiness_ is nothing compared to some of the world's UBER Geeks!

Stand aside Church Norris, I have just reassigned your spot to a new superhero... Stephen Hawking! Not only is he a genius, he's also got a great sense of humour!

taken from here.

I have recently been reading up a bit on the life and work of British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. In my reading, I have run across a number of his famous quotes that are both funny and insightful. He is widely considered to be among the most intelligent people living today. Here is what he has to say...

10. "Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."

9. "I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."

8. "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."

7. "I find that American & Scandinavian accents work better with women." In response to a question about the American accent of his synthesiser.

6. "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."

5. "My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."

4. "To show this diagram properly, I would really need a four dimensional screen. However, because of government cuts, we could manage to provide only a two dimensional screen."

3. "Life would be tragic if it weren't funny."

2. "The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."

1. "Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."

The Matrix... It may not be all that far fetched after all!

I loved the first Matrix movie! It appealed to my love for gadgets and computers, and also had some great action scenes in it!

Other than a Barney (yes, the purple dinosaur) DVD that I bought for Courtney, the Matrix was the first ever DVD that I owned! In fact in some ways, it was that, and the movie Blade runner were the first movies to challenge me to ask the question 'what is true identity?'. This would eventually become to subject of my doctoral research. My research led me to discover others who had considered this, and similar, issues - these included Jacques Vallee, John Keel, Rudy Rucker, and Hans Moravec.

Now, however, an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom has developed a mathematical theory to support this notion of complex virtual identity.

More recently, however, there has been a further development (among credible scientists), that suggest that this notion is not all that incredible!

This is in the form of a paper entitled "The Physical World as a Virtual Reality," written by Brian Whitworth and published by Massey University's Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science in Auckland, New Zealand. From the abstract:

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.

Link to PDF of paper

Previously on BB:
• Hans Moravec on living inside a simulation Link
• NYT on the "simulation argument" Link

Technorati tags: The Matrix, bladerunner, identity, research, virtual reality

Right brain test... See how creative you are...

Many people that I know who have done a Masters or Doctoral research degree have told me that after completing their research project they went 'off' the topic for a little while.

This is true for me! My doctorate, and the years that lead up to its completion, were often taken upon by hours and hours of pouring through medical journals, books on the human brain, consciousness, and neuroscience. It was not exactly entertaining (the only entertaining bit about it is when people would ask me, as a minister, "so what is your doctorate about!?" They would usually expect some fairly regular response like, "Oh, I am studying .... in the New Testament...". Ha ha, when I said "I am studying the brain to see how we process identity, consciousness, and religious experience" they would get a sort of blank stare!)

Anyway, it has been over a year since completing that project - and I am pleased to say that I am already starting to develop a slight distaste for the subject of my next doctorate (I have been working on that for about a year now...)

However, I am starting to find the brain interesting again. So, when I saw this little test on the internet I thought I should post the link here! This is the little blurb before the test:

Being creative or artistic doesn’t mean you know how to draw or play an instrument. Being creative is a way of thinking, a way of viewing the world. Creative people use the RIGHT side of their brains more than the LEFT.

Click here to take the test. I would love to hear what you discovered! So, if you have the time please do come back and leave a comment.

PS. I just LOVE the domain name of this site 'wherecreativitygoestoschool.com'.

What does your brain process faster? Reality or your memories?

My fascination with the human brain is never exhausted... In fact I hope to prove that I actually have one of these [a brain that is] one day! Perhaps that will be the topic of another doctorate ;-0 ha ha!

However, here's a very interesting post from boingboing.net:

Memories processed 7 times faster than reality.

Scientists have show that when rats sleep, they play back memories as much as seven times faster than the events really transpired. The research, conducted at the University of Arizona, may shed light on how memories are processed. From a University of Arizona press release:

Memory stores patterns of activity in modular form in the brain's cortex. Different modules in the cortex process different kinds of information - sounds, sights, tastes, smells, etc. The cortex sends these networks of activity to a region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus then creates and assigns a tag, a kind of temporary bar code, that is unique to every memory and sends that signal back to the cortex.

Each module in the cortex uses the tag to retrieve its own part of the activity. A memory of having lunch, for example, would involve a number of modules, each of which might record where the diner sat, what was served, the noise level in the restaurant or the financial transaction to pay for the meal.

But while an actual dining experience might have taken up an hour of actual time, replaying the memory of it would only take 8 to 10 minutes. The reason, (professor Bruce) McNaughton said, is that the speed of the consolidation process isn't constrained by the real world physical laws that regulate activity in time and space.

The brain uses this biological trick because there is no way for all of its neurons to connect with and interact with every other neuron. It is still an expensive task for the hippocampus to make all of those connections. The retrieval tags the hippocampus generates are only temporary until the cortex can carry a given memory on its own.

Link

Technorati tags: brain, neuroscience, memory, reality

The paper I presented at the Theological Society of South Africa.

There are few things quite as boring as sitting through some strange man telling you all about neurons, dendrites, objective and subjective reality, quadrants, hierarchies and a host of things that would normally put the average person to sleep...

However, whilst there are few things as boring as being PRESENT to hear a paper, the one SURE FIRE thing that IS MORE BORING is reading someone else's BORING paper.... Ha ha!

So, I just wanted to announce that there will be a test for all my friends (particularly for those of you on facebook that keep poking me!) So you had better start reading the paper (all 31 pages of it) or else you may not go to heaven! What do you think Wessel, is that a fair soteriology!?

So, click here to download the BORING paper!

Do South Africans exist.doc

Here's the Abstract (hint - study this and you should be able to pass the test ;-)

A generous ontology: Identity as a process of intersubjective discovery - An African theological contribution.

The answer to the question "who am I?" is of fundamental importance to being human. Answers to this question have traditionally been sought from various disciplines and sources, these include empirical sources such as biology and sociology, and phenomenological sources such as psychology and religion. Although the approaches are varied they have the notion of foundational truth, whether from an objective, or subjective, perspective in common. The question in the title of this paper comes from the title of a book by WITS academic, Ivor Chipkin, entitled, "Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of 'the People'" (2007). This paper will not discuss Chipkin’s thoughts on nationalism and democracy in any detail, however it will consider the matter of human identity that is raised by his question. The approach that this papers takes on the notion of identity is significantly influenced by Brian McLaren’s postmodernist approach to Christian doctrine as outlined in his book "A generous orthodoxy" (2004) - a term coined by Yale Theologian Hans Frei. The inadequacies of traditional approaches to human identity and consciousness that are based upon 'foundational knowledge' will thus be considered. Both subjective and objective approaches will be touched upon, showing the weaknesses of these approaches in dealing with the complex nature of true human identity. The paper will then go on to present an integrative framework for individual consciousness that is not static or ultimately quantifiable, rather it is formulated in the process of mutual discover that arises from a shared journey. The approach presented here draws strongly upon the groundbreaking work of Ken Wilber and Eugene de Quincey and relates their ontlogical systems to the intersubjective approach to identity that can be found in the African philosophy of ubuntu. This paper will show how the ethics and theology of this indigenous knowledge system can contribute toward overcoming the impasse of validating individual identity and consciousness.