Inspire

TED 2008: Jill Bolte Taylor on Brain Research, a Whole New Mind and Living the Right Hemisphere

My favorite event TED 2008 has started today. Below one of the highlights I picked up following different tweets from the audience. The quote is by Bruno Giussani, thanks a lot ! Inspiring, enchanting, powerful, 100% TED :) I couldn't agree more with the fantastic end.

Jill Bolte Taylor is incredible: she's a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who has suffered a stroke and studied it "from inside", as it happened, while her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness. It took her eight years to recover, and to become a spokesperson for the possibility to come back.

"I studied the brain because I have a brother who's been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals diagnosed as "normal" and those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder? On the morning of December 10 1996, I got my own mental illness: in the course of four hours I watched by brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. I could not walk, talk, think.

If you've ever seen a human brain (she shown a real human brain -- picture above): it has two hemispheres. The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left emisphere functions like a serial processor. So they process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things, and I would say that they have very different personalities. Our right hemisphere is all about this very moment, righ here right now. It thinks in pictures, Information in the form of energy sterams in simultaneously through all of our sensory system and then it explodes into what this present moment feels like. I'm an energy being connected to the energy alla around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. And through that we are all connected. And in this moment we are perfect, whole, and beautiful.

Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It's all about the past and about the future. It's designed to take that collage of the present moment, and pick out details after details, categorize them, associate them with all of what we have learned in the past, and project into our future possibilities. It thinks in languages. It's the internal chatter that connects us to the external world. It's the calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. And most important it's the voice that tells me "I am". And as soon it says that, I become separate from you. That's the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On that morning I woke up to a pounding pain on the back of my eye. It just gripped me, then released me, then gripped me, then released me. I got up trying to perform my usual routine, jumping on my exercise machine, and I realize that my hands look like claws. It's like as if my consciousness had shifted away. I got off the machine and walked and realized that my body had slowed down, every step was very rigid. I stood in my bathroom ready to go into the shower and looked down at my arm and realized I could no longer define the boundaries of my body, of where I begin and where I end, the molecules of my arm were like blended with those of the wall, am all I could detect was energy flowing. Then the chatter in my brain went silent. For a moment I was shocked to be in the total silent. Then in an instant my left hemisphere came back online, and I realized that I needed help; then I drifted out again, into "la-la-land"; then in again. I was walking around my apartment, telling to myself: I have to get to work. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: wow, this is so cool, how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside? But I need to get help. I get to my office, I pick up a card, I can't figure out what's on it, my brain is back in la-la-land. Then I have a wave of clarity. Drifting in and out. (She goes on describing the difficulties of dialing a phone number and communicating to get help, unable to read the number, "because the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background"), and then I would wait for a wave of clarity. It took me 45 minutes to find the right number.

I'm in an ambulance towards the hospital and I realize that I'm no longer the choreographer of my life. Maybe the doctors will give me a second chance, maybe not. And right there, I just feel my spirit surrender -- I say goodbye to my life.

When I awoke, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. My life was now suspended between two strains of reality: information streaming in but I could not pick voices out from the background noise. Sounds were so loud and chaotic. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space. I felt enormous and expansive, and my spirit soaring. I found nirvana. I remember thinking: there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside my tiny body. But then I realized: I am still alive. And if I found nirvana, then anyone who's alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world full with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate people who knew that they can come to this space at any time. What a gift a stroke can be to the way we live our lives. That motivated me to try to recover.
Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and removed a blood clot the size of a tennis ball. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we? We are the life horsepower of the universe, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who we want to be in the world, we can choose the consciousnesses of our right hemisphere or that of our left hemisphere. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe the more time we spend choosing the peace of our right hemisphere, the most peace we will project into the world and more peaceful our planet will be."

Inspiring and Original Video by Nokia Research on the Future of the Mobile Phone due to Nanotechnology

Just watch this video.... fantastic in my view ! I believe this hits the spot on different levels as I will post more on biomapping/biosensing this week.

Kevin Kelly on Co-Creation, Filtering, Top-Down Control and Bottom-Up Self Organization (The Bottom Is Not Enough)

I used to read a lot of books on complexity science, ranging from Sante Fe professor Stuart Kauffman, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, Ralph Stacey and Mitchell Waldrop. Inspiring books ! One of the recurring topics that fascinated me (and it still does) is the right balance between top-down control/design and bottom-up self organization within all my online and offline experiences. When I read all these books (around 10-15 years ago), there was no buzz surrounding co-creation, open source, mass collaboration, wisdom of the crowds, collective intelligence and web 2.0. Funnily, these fields intersected around 2003 when I read Smart Mobs (Howard Rheingold) and when Yme Bosma showed me the importance of blogging as well as web 2.0 applications, technologies and tools (thanks again Yme !!).

My view on the future development of bottom-up structures is similar to the one conveyed in this great post by Kevin Kelly on bottom-up self organization. It will increasingly be the common modus operandi. The balance will slowly shift towards open source (see also the highly recommended books by Yochai Benkler and Don Tapscott) while still leaving room for top-down design, filtering and control.

I would like to add an additional point : we have physical, biological and social systems. In my view the whole thinking about self organization is most applicable within physical and biological systems. Social systems are behaving more biological than before (as Kelly wrote in Out of Control in 1994) BUT they are inherently more complex due to the nature of the mind. The mind (and its powers as well as limitations) makes purely bottom-up solutions and self organization less effective relative to physical and biological systems. The complexity of coordinating the individual and group minds is a daunting task. Even Wikipedia has some top-down controls built in. In my own experience right now within Mobile Monday Amsterdam we as a team are asking ourselves the same questions related to which degree open source and bottom-up structures can be applied to offline events. I believe Reboot and LIFT Conference are interesting bottom-up offline events in this respect. Our MoMo members/audience can create the whole event themselves in the near future (location, speakers, theme, etc. etc.), albeit as an experiment or not.

Below some highlighted quotes from the post by Kelly. Really looking forward to his newest release The Technium :-)

"What's new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
...ad infinitum.

The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare. The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.

Judged from where we start, harnessing the dumb power of the hive mind will always take us much further than we can dream. Judged from where we hope to end up, the hive mind is not enough; we need an additional top-down push. Since we are only at the start of the start, it's the hive mind all the way for now."

LIFT Conference 2008 Highlights Part 4: Nokia Shows Great Ideas for New Mobile Phones

If you like mobile phones/internet, you will definitely like the following creative presentation from LIFT conference 2008 by Nokia with extensive anthropological research around the globe. Inspiring !

LIFT Conference 2008 Highlights Part 3: Violet on Robots, Wi-Fi and RFID Enabled Rabbits like Nabaztag

This presentation really struck me as important. RFID and robots can be used for outsourcing activities. The first part of the presentation is interesting but the second half is original and impressive. Funny, inspiring and opening many new possibilities.

LIFT Conference 2008 Highlights Part 2: CIA Berlin on the Principles of New Digital Agencies, Enterprise 2.0 and Generation Y

Great presentation on modern work attitudes, principles and behavior by the agency CIA in Berlin. Recommended for all start-ups and agencies.

Film: Auf Der Andere Seite

Just saw a great movie called Auf Der Andere Seite. Nominated for the European Film Award in 2007. Topics included are: politics (immigration/integration, EU) pain, redemption, coincidence or synchronicity, symmetry, rules/bureaucracy, love, purpose and acceptance. Beautiful and touching.

LIFT Conference 2008 Highlights Part 1: Kevin Warwick on Silent Messaging, Telepathy, Direct Brain Interfaces, Cyborgs and Cybernetics

Just returned from the LIFT Conference 2008 in Geneva . It was pleasant and open experience across the board (organizing team, speakers, facilities, connectivity, attendants, food, relaxed atmosphere, good party). Thanks to the whole organisation for making this happen ! Professional, innovative, passionate and high quality. For me, an example and inspiration for Mobile Monday Amsterdam

Below my first highlight of this conference, Kevin Warwick. One of the first 'cyborgs' (Steve Mann/MIT is another one with a different angle: Augmented Reality and Wearable Computing) with direct brain interfaces. Can you control machines all over the world using your brain and internet ? Can you use telepathy ? Can you communicate non-verbally with your loved ones while being in different places ? Mind-blowing video with resonates strongly with the current research projects within DARPA/Pentagon using Silent Messaging techniques.

Kevin Kelly on the Evolution of Value Creation and Business Models on the Web (Better Than Free)

Better Than Free is a new blog post by Kevin Kelly with a lot of buzz on the web this week. It is about the evolution of business models and value creation on the web. Important piece of thinking, especially for all those involved in the digital content/entertainment business. In my view this post resonates with the attention economy and the emerging business models within social networks/platforms (recommendtions, social economy). Additionally, people pay in my view increasingly for experiences (physical and social) and context and less for the content itself. Both are relatively scarce.

"When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. Well, what can't be copied?

There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

There are 8 key value drivers : Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation/Support, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability"

Paul Saffo on Effective Forecasting

Below one of my favorite presentations from the LongNow Foundation on Fora.tv. Paul Saffo - one of the most experienced and high-impact forecasters around the world - talks about tips for effective forecasting, the evolution of the web, robotics, the singularity, climate change, uncertainty, inflection points, the S-curve, the importance of history and psychology. Highly recommended, especially the second half and the Q&A at the end.