Intrepid Insights
leading edge intelligence
Conformity
Aug 29th
In stark construct to today’s vacuous reality television shows, Candid Camera provided viewers with a fascinating glimpse into the human psyche by using hidden cameras to film ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations.
Check out this segment illustrating just how strongly we feel the need to conform to the behavior of the “group” – even when it makes no sense whatsoever:
Ketamine as an antidepressant (revisited)
Aug 27th
Despite its notoriety as being a recreational “club drug,” ketamine has a long history of clinical usage for its effective anesthetic properties. In addition, ketamine is increasingly being examined as a viable therapy for treating major depression.
Researchers at Yale recently published a study that demonstrated how ketamine actually “rewires” neurons at a cellular level. In a process called synaptogenesis, ketamine rapidly forms new synaptic connections between neurons in specific pathways speculated to be involved with depression:
Back in April 2007, we interviewed Dr. John Krystal, one of the most influential researchers studying the role of ketamine and its effects on the neurotransmitter glutamate. It’s a fascinating topic, and I’m glad to see the research continue in this area.
Be sure to listen to the entire podcast below:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Do search engines really make us smarter?
Aug 23rd
For what it’s worth, I emphatically agree with the following quote from Eli Goodman’s article, How Search is Making us Smarter:
The Internet — and search specifically — has opened up learning opportunities that even the least intellectually curious of us is taking advantage of every day.
The Internet is an amazing resource, and there is literally no limit to how much you can discover and learn. And if you’re especially adept at using advanced search techniques, you can easily sift through the ocean of data and extract key nuggets of information that would not have been accessible just a few short years ago.
But is it possible that our gains in this area have come at the expense of other forms of our intelligence?
Much of our intelligence is contingent upon our ability to transfer information from our working memory to our long-term memory. This process – namely, the ability to convert facts and experiences into richer and more complex memories – was essential to our survival as a species. Those who couldn’t make this “cognitive leap” were often more prone to repeating fatal mistakes that led to a sudden discontinuation of their genetic lines.
Bottom line, these individuals failed to completely recognize and “take to heart” the critical patterns and signals lurking among the sensory data being generated by their immediate external environment.
In his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr presents a somewhat disconcerting notion that this unbridled access to Internet search opportunities might actually be undermining our intelligence at its most basic physical level:
When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
The key is, the human brain is not a static entity. It is constantly rewiring and reshaping itself in response to environmental stimuli. And even though it’s highly adaptive to our changing technological landscape, it’s also highly vulnerable to it as well.
For a more in depth look at this topic, be sure to check out, Virtual Worlds & False Identities: Social Media or Social Pathology?, my podcast interview with Dr. Susan Greenfield.
And stay sharp out there…
Mapping the Mind: Neuromarketing
Aug 16th
Neuromarketing: Journey The emotional gold mine
View more presentations from J.E.F J.E.F.
Down the River, Into the Brain
Aug 16th
Five neuroscientists go on a rafting adventure to see how the brain reacts when in a natural environment. Be sure to check out the whole article at the NYT that provides more details and insight on this.
Remember – when you’re not being constantly bombarded by digital noise, you actually begin to think and behave like a real human.
Is there too much data?
Aug 9th
Be sure to check out Dean Abbott’s blog post “Is there too much data” over at Data Mining and Predicative Analytics.
It’s a very concise post that zeros in on something I’ve been championing for years:
But even with mounds of data, the insight still occurs often on the micro level, with individual cases or customers.
Bottom line, don’t fall prey to the fallacy that only way to make an effective decision is to amass more and more data. Very often, the “game changer” manifests itself very subtly as a chance piece of informally collected information – or even a statistical outlier.
Remember, the original saying is “The good God is in the detail.”
Circadian rhythms and triglyceride levels
Aug 3rd
We live in a “24/7/365″ society that constantly inundates us with highly sanitized digital data. And one of the more insidious consequences of having to process these perpetual information streams is the disruption of one or several of our internal “body clocks.”
Researchers at the State University of New York recently concluded that these circadian rhythm disruptions can adversely affect human triglyceride levels and potentially lead to heart disease and metabolic syndrome. Per the study:
Hussain and colleagues found that the CLOCK protein, which is implicated in establishing the body’s circadian rhythm, also plays a role in moderating microsomal triglyceride transfer protein (MTP), which is in charge of moving triglycerides through the blood. Thus, when CLOCK was not functioning properly, neither was the triglyceride transporter MTP.
A disrupted body clock has already been linked to weight gain, but “this study establishes a molecular link between circadian physiology and plasma lipid metabolism,” the researchers noted in their paper.
Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Ilia Karatsoreos of Rockefeller University, one of the leading researchers in this field. You can check the entire interview here – Broken Body Clocks: The Consequences of Disrupting Our Circadian Rhythms.
The “Pulse of a Nation” project: What can we really infer from opinion mining?
Jul 27th
A group of researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University tracked and analyzed over 300 million tweets between September 2006 and August 2009 and created this dynamic cartogram illustrating how mood states fluctuate throughout the day in various parts of the U.S.:
Some of the key observations:
- Positive mood is highest in the Southeast region and in the western states. This is especially the case in the coastal areas such as Florida, California, and Washington state.
- Both of these regions have mood spikes during the evening hours of 9pm to 11pm
- Both also have mood spikes during the morning hours of 5am to 7am – although the Southeast region sustains this until 9am
- The time period of 12pm to 4pm seems to be a generally dour period for most of the country – but especially for the Midwest and upper East Coast regions
Population mood measurement and sentiment analysis is a growing trend among researchers, analysts, and marketers. And the above study certainly raises some interesting questions.
But can one really accurately capture and quantify large-scale happiness or the temperament of a social network? I’d welcome your thoughts on this.
