the neuroscience of information obesity
- I recently heard a podcast of a lecture given by Dr. David Kessler, Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF and author of The End of Overeating. He discussed recent research showing that given an unlimited supply of highly varied kinds of food, animals will overeat and become overweight. It happens to mice, to monkeys, and to humans.
- Doesn’t it seem obvious that given an unlimited supply of highly varied kinds of information, we will overindulge on that as well? And that we will soon discover in the lab that the same kinds of neural rewards (i.e., dopamine bursts) that are being uncovered in overeating will turn out to be happening when we over-eat information?
- In ten years we’ll look back on our current practice of wide-open exposure to the Internet as a time of ignorance, is my guess. We’ll see the emergence of technological solutions to keep us data-thin, such as devices that disconnect after a certain amount of time, or much narrower filters for information-health.
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Because right now, as we know, we’re already drowning. Check out this beautiful graphic of how much data, in bytes, we consume today. Artist Rob Vargas created it from a study called How Much Information by the University of California at San Diego.
- According to the report, “consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video).”
- Here’s the kicker: Information at work is not included.
- Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don’t reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in “news” that didn’t contradict what they already believed:
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Powers and el-Nawawy show that global media consumers tuned in to international news media that they thought would further substantiate their opinions about U.S. policies and culture, and provide them with information on the international issues that they deemed most important. The study found a strong relationship between the participants’ attitudes toward U.S. policy and culture and their choice of broadcaster. Those who were dependent on BBC World and especially CNNI were overall more supportive of U.S. foreign policy.
- This shouldn’t be too surprising. As Ken Auletta recently reported in the New Yorker, cable news has grown increasingly partisan in recent years, seeking out an ever more balkanized audience. He cites a study of 35,000 viewers conducted by TiVo: for each Democrat who watches Fox News there are eighteen Republicans, and for every Republican who watches MSNBC there are six Democrats. It turns out that everybody wants their own set of facts.
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This is an old phenomenon that’s been exaggerated by new media trends. Partisan voters are convinced that they’re rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we’re actually rationalizers. The Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990’s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What’s interesting about this data is that so-called “high-information” voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren’t better informed than “low-information” voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn’t erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn’t follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton’s deficit reduction didn’t fit the “tax and spend liberal” stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. “Voters think that they’re thinking,” Achen and Bartels write, “but what they’re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they’ve already made.”
(Now more then ever would be a good time to call to mind RAW’s refrain: “Whatever the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” - Go out and read Prometheus Rising asap if you haven’t already - or buy it for someone you know.)
The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the U.S. intelligence community has authority to target American citizens for assassination if they present a direct terrorist threat to the United States.
“We have made complex, multi-team attacks very difficult for al Qaeda to pull off, but as we saw with the recent rash of attacks last year…identifying individual terrorists, small groups with short histories using simple attack methods, is a much more difficult task,” Blair said.
Blair said U.S. intelligence was rapidly working to counter the emerging problem. “There are some technical things, which are making it more difficult, with the use of social networking as opposed to simply looking at a Web site and responding by e-mail.”
Is Colonizing Mars an Imperative? Obama’s New Space Strategy Says “Yes”
- The Obama Administration unveiled its new far-sighted budget for NASA, which scraps moon missions but puts the focus on developing new space technologies, exploring the solar system with robots, and pushing humans closer to living offworld. All of which will be funded a budget increase to NASA of $6 billion over five years.
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- Under the new budget, we’d see a revamped NASA program focused on scientific innovation, rather than recreating old experiments. Specifically, as NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said: We will invent and demonstrate large-scale, new and novel approaches to spaceflight such as in-orbit fuel depots and rendezvous and docking technologies, and closed-loop life support systems so that our future robotic and human exploration missions are both highly capable and more affordable … as well as providing $3 billion over five years for robotic exploration precursor missions that will pave the way for later human exploration of the moon, Mars and nearby asteroids.
Boa Sr was the last of the Bo, a tribe on the Andaman Islands
- When Boa Sr sang in her own language, the result was gently hypnotic. “The earth is shaking as the tree falls, with a great thud,” she sang, on a recording captured by linguists.
- But the grey-haired, 85-year-old woman will not be heard again. And neither will her native tongue – Bo – aside from the recordings that have already been made. Campaigners revealed yesterday that the recent death of Boa Sr on India’s remote Andaman Islands marked the end of the Bo tribe and the loss of a language.
- Boa Sr was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, an indigenous group of the Andamans, a cluster of islands 700 miles east of the Indian mainland in the Bay of Bengal. The Great Andamanese once numbered more than 5,000 and were made up of 10 distinct groups each with their own language.
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The Bo are believed to have lived on the islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them one of the oldest surviving human cultures. But today, after more than 150 years of contact with colonisers, the diseases they brought with them, and the disastrous impact of alcohol, the Great Andamanese number just 52.
RIP.
