A door into the mind
I am very interested by the idea of a language of the mind as has been discussed by many authors including the well known Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought and The Language Instinct. In any case, so far as I have read there is not a good way to bridge interface of human language and an underlying mental one, so called mentalese.
There seem to be a number of non verbal systems for surpassing common animal interfaces. One interesting example is in certain ant colonies, pheromones are used by wasps to essentially mind control the colony during some invasive procedure. In humans hormons can have similar effects although they tend to be much more subtle. (It is also often said that the sense of smell has the most significant influence on the brain because of its proximity and direct connection, as can be seen when sniffing a strong acid). In a recent TED conference however, Vilayanur Ramachandran discussed how nurons can be effected directly by the eyes in a strange kind of empathic consciousness.
Anyway, I am interested in this idea of having some kind of interface into and out of the mind for a few reasons.
- For design and psychology research being able to measure emotions more accurately by using digital smell sensors which give some idea of the endocrinological condition of a subject.
- For high speed learning, to learn logic structures faster without the barrier of language.
- For computational knowledge systems, something which is still largely nonexistent. Even Google's data scheme is not generally based on knowledge but just a coincidence of the way knowledge needs to exist.
- To create a kind of mental API
What do you think?
The image is obviously from the matrix.
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Labels:
API,
control systems,
endocrinology,
evolution,
neuroscience
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