Computers and Consciousness

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bXACTqKIII

In May one of of my most popular blogs was called News From the Future, an entry which fancifully portrayed a moment two decades from now where we finally use technology to realize that humans are not nearly as unique as we've convinced ourselves. We continued the discussion of such ideas a few entries ago in "Do Animals Have Souls?". You may or may not be surprised when I tell you that this all ties to the entry prior to that as well, "Logic vs. Intuition", where we talked about Monica Anderson and her Artificial Intuition project. Monica's company Syntience is developing new algorithms which may help to make computers able to process The Stream , a potentially overwhelming flood of sometimes flawed information, in ways that parallel how humans are able to deal with these contradictions and holes and an incalculably large amount of incoming data: using intuition rather than logic (see Illusions and Reality for more about how humans assemble all this data together). Would such processes allow computers to some day become more self-aware? If you look in the column to the right, you will see that we are currently running a poll question here at the tenth dimension blog which asks visitors for their opinions on that very question.

I've been following Blogging the Singularity for related ideas to all this, a very active blog with a wide range of topics, check it out. As we saw in the above video "The Singularity is Near", the idea that we live in times that are rapidly accelerating seems to be driving us to a moment of a major paradigm shift, a "flip" into a new way of existing: such ideas are connected to the transhuman movement, which believes in a future where technology seamlessly melds with humans to make our lives better. The ideas in the above YouTube clip are related to Ray Kurzweil's book and upcoming movie, "The Singularity is Near": Kurzweil predicts that humans some day not too long from now will be able to upload the unique patterns that make them who they are into a computer, and effectively live forever as a result! In order for such a thing to happen, computers would have to be able to duplicate the processes that allow each human to have their unique perspective, a concept we talked about not long ago in "Where Are You?".

The Turing Test was proposed in 1950 by computing pioneer Alan Turing, and although it has its critics, it has been an essential part of the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence ever since. The picture at left is from wikipedia, which describes the test as follows: "player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player - A or B - is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination."

Nowadays it's not so uncommon to be fooled by a "bot" for a moment, where sly programmers convince you that you're talking to a real human who really wants to offer you a one-of-a-kind deal before you leave their webpage, or who has just written you a highly personalized email. I've talked before about the amusing "Chat with Einstein" window over at the excellent Journey By Starlight blog, which is somewhat similar to ELIZA, a simple psychotherapy program that first appeared back in the 60's. Even though such programs can sometimes seem to make interesting intuitive leaps, they are certainly not what we are talking about when we say Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Intuition.

Nonetheless, they do reveal two sides of an important coin: anthropomorphism doesn't just apply to animals, and when we see a computer responding in a human-like way we're more likely to believe the computer has a personality, a point of view, all those things that point towards consciousness. But what if we played with the Turing Test, were asked to decide whether A or B was the computer, but this time we were actually talking to two humans? How long would it take us to decide there was something "off" about one of the responders, and pronounce that person to be the robot?

This is the slippery slope we find ourselves on: if we are really moving to a time when people will be able to upload their consciousness to computers, then I would say it follows that we must also be moving to a time when a computer will be conscious on its own. Rather than interpret this to mean that humans and computers will then be superior to all other living things, we have to see this as being part of the continuum that shows us how all living things have varying degrees of consciousness. As computers start to become "aware", they will not just suddenly wake up one day to become indistinguishable from civilized adults: this will be a gradual process, much as an embryo first starts to become aware of its surroundings. Interestingly, award-winning science fiction novelist Robert Sawyer, who has been writer-in-residence at the Synchrotron here in Saskatchewan for the last few months, has just released a novel called "Wake" which talks about some near future time when the World Wide Web starts to wake up, to become conscious. Here's a quote from my local newspaper, the Regina Leader-Post, about the novel:

In Wake, Caitlin, a blind female math genius gets a signal-processing implant that may give her sight. Instead, she starts to perceive the actual structure of the World Wide Web. While she's looking at it, she becomes aware that there's an entity or consciousness starting to bubble up into existence out of the vast complexity of the Internet. Caitlin gets it into her head to play the role of Annie Sullivan, the famous teacher of her hero Helen Keller, to this "nascent consciousness" of the Internet.

I love the idea that things are growing and changing at an ever-increasing pace, and what that could be mean to our new future. We're going to continue this discussion next time with more about technology, AI, intuition, and connections.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Connecting It All Together

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - June 09 Report

Previous lists:

. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.

1. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive - 31 to 40 (new)
2. News From the Future (6)
3. The Stream (9)
4. Does the Multiverse Really Exist? (new)
5. The Biocentric Universe (new)
6. Nassim Haramein (new)
7. Evolution's Fast Lane (new)
8. Augmented Reality - 10thdim Music Videos (new)
9. Surveillance (new)
10. Placebos and Nocebos (new)


And as of June 26th, 2009, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time.

1. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (1)
2. Slices of Reality (2)
3. Augmented Reality (3)
4. The Holographic Universe (4)
5. Urban Garden Magazine (5)
6. Modern Shamans (6)
7. Scott McCloud and the Brothers Winn (7)
8. The Comedian (8)
9. The Shaman (9)
10. Our Non-Local Universe (11)
11. Astrotometry (10)
12. Going to the Light (12)
13. "t" Equals Zero (13)
14. New Translations of Imagining the Tenth Dimension (15)
15. You have a shape and a trajectory (14)
16. Illusions and Reality (16)
17. Dark Gravity Across the Dimensions (19)
18. Where Are You? (17)
19. The Musician (18)
20. The Time Paradox (25)
21. Google Suggestions - March 09 Update (23)
22. The Big Bang and the Big O (21)
23. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive - 31 to 40 (new)
24. Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum (new)
25. The Invariant Set (new)
26. Mindwalk and Twitter (new)

As I remarked last time, the fact that the audience for this blog has grown so much this year does tip the balance in the above list, to the point now where all of the entries on our top 26 list were published within the last six months. Here are the last few older (but hey, still very worthy) entries which were bumped off the list this time around:

You are Me and We are All Together (22)
Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses (20)
I Know You, You Know Me (24)
Scrambled Eggs (26)

By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Computers and Consciousness

Do Animals Have Souls?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM5VFnirTmg

A few days ago we had to say goodbye to the family dog, a seventeen-year-old mostly-Bichon named Buddy. Buddy was one of those amazing creatures who exuded love, forgiveness, and understanding throughout his days, and our lives are richer for having known him.

Anyone who has spent time getting to know an animal can clearly see that there is an awareness, something that could be called a form of "consciousness" in there, that reasons, yearns, develops likes and dislikes, is happy or sad, energized or depressed from day to day, the same as you and I. In my recent blog entry News From the Future, I talked about this idea from an extreme point of view, but this is not something to be taken lightly - anyone who tells you animals do not feel emotions is, I'm sad to say, operating under a paradigm that has been in both the religious and scientific mainstream for centuries: that old school of thought teaches that we are simply projecting our own thoughts and feelings on these animals, anthropomorphizing their mechanistic actions as we delude ourselves into seeing more than what's really there.

I'm glad to see all the scientific articles that are being published nowadays that indicate science is now waking up to the possibility that animals are not simple automatons, operating in a way that is completely inferior to the human experience. Here's some examples from New Scientist Magazine from the last few months:
June 17 2009 - Monkeys, Coots, Salamanders, and so on can count
May 21 2009 - Evidence of speech in various species
May 13 2009 - Prairie Dogs communicate surprisingly detailed information with their calls
May 12 2009 - Evidence of empathy, compassion and a sense of justice in various species
May 6 2009 - Evidence of a desire for "play for the sake of play" within the animal kingdom
May 1 2009 - Parrots demonstrate an ability to "groove along" with rhythmic music
April 2 2009 - New book demonstrating surprising animal intelligence
March 12 2009 - Chimps use geometry to navigate through the jungle

And of course, in a discussion of whether animals can think, who can forget Alex, the African Grey parrot who demonstrated speech, reasoning, and creativity in his use of language:


A direct link to the above video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yGOgs_UlEc
Scientist Irene Pepperberg published a book late last year about this amazing animal's achievements, called "Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process".

One of the self-serving fallacies humans have bought into is that it's their giant brains that give them unique capabilities, and animals can therefore not be capable of the same achievements. While there's no question that brain size is part of the equation, we go too far when we assume a small brain can't exhibit any of our capabilities. The picture we're looking at here comes from an article published a few days ago by Reuters, titled "Fish Can Learn Despite Small Brains". Imagine how tiny the brain must be in the fish pictured here, which is called a nine-spined stickleback, and is found in streams across Europe. From the article: "Jeremy Kendal of Durham University and colleagues from St. Andrews University found in tests that 75 percent of sticklebacks were clever enough to know from watching others that a feeder in a tank was rich in food, even though they had previously got little from it themselves." The scientists described this as an unusually sophisticated social learning skill, normally only associated with humans. Isn't that amazing?

Let's back up for a moment. What do I mean then, when I say "soul"? Last week in "Happy Birthday Paul" I reviewed the idea that what is often thought of as the soul is really an interlocking system of memes and behaviors, a system that is constantly in a state of change and renewal, and which is connected outside of our physical bodies through ways that acknowledge the proven non-local nature of our universe. Last blog, in Logic vs. Intuition, we looked at a new approach to computer intelligence that might some day allow for the emergent properties of consciousness to arise in a very way similar way, using large numbers of tiny nested routines all working in concert with one another. Could the computer that some day demonstrates these emergent traits of consciousness be said to have a soul? Food for thought.

Here's one of the discussions I had about the concept of souls in my book:

Viewed as a set, one could describe the many memes that make up an individual as being their personality, or their way of looking at the world. One might also call this set of memes the soul. A common assumption is that each of us has a single soul which we carry with us from conception to death. But consider this: if we were to meet up with our own younger self from twenty years ago, what are the chances that we would share the very same set of memes? It should be obvious that the chances of direct correlation are virtually nil. According to this line of reasoning, the illusion that a single body contains a single “soul” is a fiction. Each of us is a dynamic system, mutating and developing over time. Certainly, there is a core set of physical memories that will be encoded over time into each of our brains that will create links from past to present to future unique to each of us. But the memes and belief systems that make up our “soul” are much more complicated and transcendent across time and space than the set of physical memories each of us carries in our neurons. The memory of “What I Had for Lunch Last Thursday” will stretch out across time only for as long as any individual’s brain cells recall it. Larger belief systems and emotions that make a person unique can extend well beyond the death of a body, and would be what survives, while the niggling details of day-to-day life would not.

Do animals have souls, some simpler, some more complex? It seems self-evident to me that they do, but as I mentioned there are branches of both religion and science which have insisted that animals' awareness of the world around them is not in any way comparable to our own. In Logic vs. Intuition we talked about scientific materialism, the old school of thought that says the only thing that matters is matter, and that consciousness has no part in the universe we are observing. Thankfully, that point of view is being gradually overturned, as new evidence comes to light that even bacteria communicate to each other, that our gene expression can be changed by changing our lifestyle and attitude, and all forms of life are not nearly so different from us after all.

Ultimately, we have to understand that humans are part of a continuum that connects from the simple to the complex, in fractal iterations that repeat at different scales, and we should abandon old ways of thinking that place humans as somehow being "better" than other life on the planet: the more that we can see that we are each just one part of a multi-layered system, the better the decisions we will make as a species. Here are some other past blogs where the subject of "what is a soul?" has come up:
Where Are You?
Could I Meet My Incarnation?
The Musician
You Have a Shape and a Trajectory
I Know You, You Know Me
Magnets and Souls

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, June '09 Report

Logic vs. Intuition

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrReVlTUpLA

Currently the most popularly viewed entry of all time here at the Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog is called Creativity and the Quantum Universe. Here's the video for that entry:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Life, consciousness, and creativity: these are all entwined together, different aspects of the same patterns. The idea that these processes somehow engage with spatiotemporal events in a way that embraces the proven non-locality of our universe is an important key here. Last blog we talked about imagining life and consciousness as an interlocking system which is constantly changing and revising itself throughout our lives. In his insightful book "What is Life?", Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that within our universe life is a unique process which creates pockets of "negative entropy" or increasing order: and within that context, consciousness and creativity can also be described the same way.

We've talked before about Schrödinger's Cat, the thought experiment which was originally intended to show how silly it is to apply quantum thinking to the macro world, and which instead has now become a useful jumping off point for understanding Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and the multiverse landscape. A few entries ago, in Placebos and Nocebos I mentioned that I'm listening these days to an audiobook called Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman, and one of the important points they make is that our world is now starting to move away from scientific materialism (the idea that what we observe around us is all there is to reality, and that everything about our reality is logical and predictable if only we collect enough data). Instead, we're starting to move towards a more holistic paradigm, as we see more and more evidence that in order to understand how everything fits together we need to embrace that there are hidden patterns and structures that exist "outside" of space-time, and some of those patterns are fractal or chaotic rather than linear or predictable. That's true as we see the growing acceptance that our universe is only one of many, that roughly 96% of our own universe is completely invisible and undetectable, that the way our genes are expressed and even which genes are passed on to our offspring is strongly connected to our attitude and lifestyle, and that our holographic universe comes from the fifth dimension, connected together outside of fourth-dimensional space-time in ways that boggle the mind.

So. Scientific experiments are proving that life is able to use instantaneous quantum connections to function much more efficiently, and I've been insisting that seemingly "impossible" quantum effects like entanglement and tunneling are much easier to visualize when we think of them as coming from "folds" of the fourth spatial dimension through the fifth. I reached this intuitive conclusion decades ago, and we're now coming up on the three year anniversary of the launching of the tenth dimension website which has given me the opportunity to share these ideas with people from around the world. Which leads us back to the title of this entry: "Logic vs. Intuition". Which is more useful?


Recently I came across a website called "Artificial Intuition". It talks about a new approach to the quandary of how to program computers to think, and suggests that "Artificial Intelligence" (or "AI") runs into problems because it fails to understand how the human mind really functions: while logic should work for specific problem-solving within controlled parameters, intuition and inference applied to a sometimes contradictory input set better describes our day-to-day functioning. The english language is a perfect example - drawing meaning from words on a page or spoken to each other often requires us to fill in the blanks, accept contradictions, and make intuitive leaps, and this is what makes our language extremely frustrating to learn, particularly for persons not exposed to it since birth.

I would connect this back to the discussion we're having here by saying that Artificial Intelligence represents a more scientific materialist approach, while Artificial Intuition represents a more holistic paradigm: one which embraces the idea that there is more happening here than what logic alone can describe.

Artificial Intuition is the brainchild of Monica Anderson, who has a Master's degree in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden, but who now works in Silicon Valley and is a US citizen. Her company Syntience is working on ways to bring her innovative approach to market (check out their Facebook Fan page here). At present they are still searching for funding sources: if you'd like to help support their independent research here's a link from the Artificial Intuition website.

Let me quote a few paragraphs from their website, this is from a page in which Logic and Intuition are compared:

Intuition and Logic are two strategies for prediction and problem solving.

We hear so much about the virtues of logic that we'd be excused to believe that logic was somehow the superior method, but a quick analysis shows that most actions we perform on a daily basis mainly use intuition.

Logic is not better, just different. Both strategies have their advantages and apply in different situations. Sometimes we need to use both. Sometimes we can use either one, because the problem is so simple it doesn't much matter how we solve it. Sometimes it matters; if we happen to choose the wrong approach, it may prevent us from solving our problem.

Computer-based intuition - "Artificial Intuition" - is quite straightforward to implement, but requires computers (a recent invention) with a lot of memory (only recently available cheaply enough).

If you look at the label cloud at the top of my blog, you'll see that intuition has been a running theme with this project since it began. This connects back to my song "Automatic", which makes the assertion that there are many times when that logical "narrator voice" of our conscious minds gets in the way, and that there are many complicated activities such as golf, playing a musical instrument, driving a car, or solving a large problem which will work better when we allow the more intuitive, less analytical part of our minds to take the forefront: in other words, when we can do these things "without thinking". This idea relates to a book I've talked about before, written by Julian Jaynes, called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind": a challenging and fascinating work which suggests that the logical "narrator voice" of consciousness may only have developed in the last few thousand years, and that before that time all human beings operated in a mode where their conscious minds and the underlying "intuitive" parts of their minds were fully integrated. Although he died in 1997, the Julian Jaynes Society continues to promote his work, check it out.

And please spend some time over at the Artificial Intuition site learning more about this fascinating alternative methodology for making computers "smarter" in ways that more directly reflect our own strengths as human beings. This could hold immediate promise for tasks such as document understanding, speech recognition, OCR correction, and implementing the Semantic Web. In the long term, I suspect this could allow the creation of computers that develop the emergent traits of consciousness through using a huge web of tiny little processes that are running concurrently. In that sense, the Artificial Intuition approach would appear to have connections to the consciousness theories of Douglas Hofstadter, who I've talked about many times before in blogs such as You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, I Know You, You Know Me, and We're Already Dead (But That's Okay).

To close, here's that song: "Automatic".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Do Animals Have Souls?

Happy Birthday Paul

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeG_gfx1b60

Tomorrow, June 18, is Paul McCartney's birthday. Happy 67th birthday Paul, wherever/whatever you are right now!

(This, of course, is the greeting I also posted for John Lennon and George Harrison on their respective birthdays this past year. Am I being morbid here? Not at all! Instead, what I'm trying to do is recognize that all of us are made up of patterns that extend well beyond the limits of our own physical bodies, and while that may be easier for us to imagine once someone passes on, it is just as true for those of us who are living right here, right now, in this current slice of the multiverse.)

Here's Paul singing "That Was Me": one of his more recent songs, and one that I think relates well to the discussions we've been having here.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWB8AM3xWfY

In entries like You are Me and We are All Together, We're Already Dead (But That's Okay), Everyone Has a Story, and Your Fifth-Dimensional Self, we've talked about one of the conclusions we are forced to look at when we think about our existence within a multiverse of other universes, most of which we couldn't exist within: is this nothing more than luck? Or could the new Biocentric Universe theories be correct, and our presence within the universe actually have "reverse fine-tuned" the constants and patterns that were previously indeterminate? Last week, the work of Professor Louis Crane was discussed at physorg.com, and he has some amazing theories about future (or past) civilizations using fine-tuned black holes to create future universes that support life, creating a potentially infinite chain from one universe to the next.

As I've said before: when you consider how unlikely our universe is, and when you consider all the bad luck or malicious intent that could have killed each person reading this before now, how could you not feel anything but wonder? And now, imagine yourself being Paul McCartney, looking back at a life that even with all of its heartache and challenges, has been incredibly blessed? In the above song, Paul pages us through a scrapbook of his memories, little snippets that sum up a life well-lived.

But why does he say "That Was Me"? Shouldn't it be "That is Me"? Isn't he still Paul McCartney?

I believe Paul, as he has done so many times before, is pointing to a profound truth here with a simple but catchy melody and a nicely crafted lyric. My song Change and Renewal and blog entries like Making New Connections have explored similar concepts to what his choice of verb tense is referring to here: Paul is not the same person he was when the Beatles became famous, all of the cells in his body have been replaced many times over since then, and many of the belief systems and meme patterns that made him who he was back then have been modified and replaced over the years.

The same is true for all of us, of course. While we each obviously have a direct fourth-dimensional connection to our younger selves through our physical bodies, it would be foolish to suggest that we haven't changed: that's what life, creativity, and the universe are all about.

Here's a few paragraphs from the end of chapter 5 of my book which discuss this higher-dimensional interlocking system that makes each of us who we are down here in the fourth dimension:

Parts of that system of beliefs will extend back through our lifetime, attached to our physical bodies through memory to become a feeling of “self” that may not ever change. But, as we have already discussed, there are also parts of that system of beliefs that will constantly be in flux, altering over time as life experience changes the ways that a person thinks about themselves and the world.
We could think of this constantly changing system as a “society of memes”. Like Minsky’s concept of consciousness and intelligence, there will always be a large number of memes within each physical body which are competing for dominance, and which are brought to the forefront or suppressed depending upon their relevance and usefulness at any particular moment. It is the physical being we have been since conception, combined with that interlocking system we think of as our soul, that entwine in the sixth dimension to create an ornate and highly textured shape that is each of us, and which we see only a tiny cross-section of as we move along our line in the fourth dimension.
The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension.

...and in chapter eight I said this:

The same is true of all the molecules in our bodies. We are constantly going through a process of exchange and renewal, so that in the passing of ten years many of the molecules inside our body are not the same as the ones that were there previously. Imagine the fourth- and fifth-dimensional net connecting the carbon that was in your body ten years ago with where it is today. Imagine the connections across time and space back to the creation of that carbon in the dying of other stars billions of years ago, since that is where all carbon in our universe comes from originally. Once again, the image of a fantastically huge new web of connections is made, and those connections are invisible and unknown to us within our limited viewpoint traveling along our narrow fourth-dimensional line.

So, Sir Paul, thank you for sharing this song and your many talents with us, and a very happy birthday to all the parts of you that are not only connected to your physical body at this moment, but to all the other parts that have been or will be, and which now float out there in the other layers of our reality.

To finish, here's a fun song, one of the 26 I wrote for this project. It's called "Hang a Left at the Lights", and it's about the process of choice, change, and renewal that each of us are constantly participating in as we observe our fourth-dimensional line selected from the available paths of our fifth-dimensional probability space.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCTkcMADHk4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Logic vs. Intuition

Surveillance

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljzjYh0g6fI


(Edit: now that June 26th is past and all the positive reviews for this film have come in, I've published a list of some of my favorite quotes at this link: www.talkingdogstudios.com/news/ )

One of my guilty pleasures for most of my adult life has been horror films that get so outrageous that you have to laugh - 1986's House and 1987's Evil Dead 2 being examples from way back when. The last few years of what the media have come to call "torture porn" (grim films like Saw and Hostel) are definitely not what I'm talking about here.

Last blog I talked about a new classic from Sam Raimi, creator of the original Evil Dead/Army of Darkness series, and also now famous as the director of the blockbuster Spiderman movies: the film is called "Drag Me to Hell" and it has a level of inventiveness and an outrageous sensibility that makes this film exactly what I'm talking about: even when bad things happen, we as an audience are allowed moments to laugh at how unbelievably horrible it all really is. Some would call this style "black comedy", and as long as you can appreciate how "black" our main characters' futures can get in movies such as these, then I think "black comedy" is an entirely appropriate term for this, one of my favorite kinds of movie.

Imagine my thrill, then, to be allowed to work with Jennifer Lynch, who co-wrote and directed a film that will be in select theatres in North America later this month: "Surveillance". The image at the top of this blog is from the apple trailers website. Here, from YouTube, is one of the trailers for the movie:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk5Lrgf3iQ

I'm honored to say that my company, Talking Dog Studios, created the music and 5.1 theatrical sound for the movie, which was invited to appear last year at the Cannes Film Festival where it received a standing ovation. Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film these nice comments: "The film looks great, with cinematographer Peter Wunstorf using different stock and inventive angles to good effect while Todd Bryanton's score helps maintain a constant undercurrent of dread. Lynch fills the screen with elements that some viewers of the film will want to go back to watch more than once..."

Watching the trailer, you'll get the impression that this film is going to be ultra-violent and dark, and that's not far off the mark. But within this film, there is also a quirky sense of the absurd, and a slightly surreal approach that tells us the apple has not fallen far from the tree, as Jennifer Lynch's father is of course David Lynch, who acted as executive producer of the film. I'm sure this film is going to find an audience who will want to watch it many times over, and for me I think that is because as dark as this film gets, there is still a bemused humor that keeps peeking out to save us from being completely dragged into the abyss.

I do hope those of you who are fans of this genre will go out and see this movie. And enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Happy Birthday Paul

Placebos and Nocebos

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2Fxp7DgX0

Last weekend I had a great time watching a new movie from Sam Raimi: "Drag Me to Hell". Like some of Mr. Raimi's early work (Evil Dead II being the classic example), this is a film that successfully walks the line between horror and very black comedy. We've talked before about empathy, audiences, and comedy and in entries like The Comedian and The Musician, we're connecting to that idea somewhat here as well.

Coincidentally, Raimi's film can be related to a word I just learned a few days ago: the word is "nocebo", which is the opposite of "placebo". In entries like The Placebo Effect, Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, and Evolution's Fast Lane, we've talked about the surprising scientific evidence that a person's attitude can affect their own health right down to the expression of their genes, and in The Biocentric Universe we talked about the even more remarkable information that this can affect what genes they pass on to their offspring! A placebo, then, can actually confuse the results of a study testing a new drug, because some of the people receiving the placebo (which should have no effect at all) will experience an improvement in their condition because they believe they are being given a drug that will help them. As it turns out, it's their own attitude which is effecting the positive change they experience.

How does a nocebo work, then? Let's say a doctor gives a patient a harmless placebo as part of a test for a new drug, but warns the patient of possible side effects. What does it mean if the patient then develops those side effects? They didn't take the drug, all they got was the sugar pill, and now their hair is falling out because the doctor warned that this was a possible side effect? In the same way that the placebo effect tells us that people can improve their health simply by changing their attitude, the nocebo effect shows us that a person can make themselves ill by the same process.

In Drag Me to Hell, the main character is cursed by a gypsy woman, and told that she has three days to live. How different would that story be if we replaced the gypsy woman with a cancer specialist, who then told the main character they had three months to live? If we are to believe an article published recently in New Scientist magazine, the answer is that both scenarios may be more similar than we realize. Here's a quote from that article, written by Helen Pilcher:

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

Ideas telling us that we live in troubled times, where there is little hope for the future, that environmental toxins are slowly killing us, or secret government agencies are deliberately poisoning us, then, take on a whole new significance. Could modern society be creating a dangerously poisonous environment with a constant influx of fear-based input? Could it really be so simple as avoiding entertainment and news that are designed to scare us, and we'll become a healthier society? Here's another few paragraphs from that New Scientist article:

Alarmingly, the nocebo effect can even be catching. Cases where symptoms without an identifiable cause spread through groups of people have been around for centuries, a phenomenon known as mass psychogenic illness. One outbreak (see "It's catching") inspired a recent study by psychologists Irving Kirsch and Giuliana Mazzoni of the University of Hull in the UK.

They asked some of a group of students to inhale a sample of normal air, which all participants were told contained "a suspected environmental toxin" linked to headache, nausea, itchy skin and drowsiness. Half of the participants also watched a woman inhale the sample and apparently develop these symptoms. Students who inhaled were more likely to report these symptoms than those who did not. Symptoms were also more pronounced in women, particularly those who had seen another apparently become ill - a bias also seen in mass psychogenic illness.

The study shows that if you hear of or observe a possible side effect, you are more likely to develop it yourself. That puts doctors in a tricky situation. "On the one hand people have the right to be informed about what to expect, but this makes it more likely they will experience these effects," says Mazzoni.

How many people thought they might have caught the H1N1 virus in the last month or two but were actually fine? How can we protect ourselves from the nocebo effect when we are bombarded with information about how sick we are about to get? If we really are all connected together in ways unseen, then we have to get better together. Certainly, laughing at to the boogeyman can help (another reason I bring up black comedies like Drag Me to Hell), but clearly there really are things that make us sick, and recognizing which is the nocebo effect and which is a real danger to our health and our future requires us to not bury our heads in the sand.

As another coincidence, I just started listening to an audiobook called Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman, and not far into the very first CD it too mentions the nocebo effect. Here's what they have to say about it: ultimately, knowing about nocebos should be no different than knowing about placebos - in both cases, we are shown that we have more control over our own lives than we've been led to believe, and all we have to do is recognize the patterns that make us the way we are now, and find ways to change the patterns that we don't like. Lipton and Bhaerman caution us, though, that some of these patterns are so deeply ingrained from a very early age that it can be hard for us to even recognize which patterns are limiting us: as with most of what we've been talking about here, it's our need to move beyond the "now" of our limited position within spacetime, and embrace the much larger "everything" that is timelessness, that will help us to find the way to a better version of ourselves and our universe.

To finish, here's a video for my song about using the power of the mind, imagination, or meditation to get to a safe and healing place: "Turquoise and White".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89oKPEmMT_k

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Surveillance