Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Finite and Infinite Games , James Carse has this to say on the topic of the damage we do to the environment, the machines and technologies we build to make our lives comfortable, and the waste we product: “Our domination of nature is meant to achieve not certain natural outcomes, but certain societal outcomes.” Once you keep that aim (comfort, a certain way of life) in mind, it becomes obvious why it is so hard for mankind to change its approach, regardless of the damage we do to the environment. “Abandoning the strategy of power in our attitude towards nature” will have “cultural consequences”.   Nothing new in any of that, of course. Then he adds: “Nature has no outside, it has no inside”. We are part of it too. And nature is not against us. Rather: “It is the display of a perfect indifference on nature’s part to all matters cultural.” We think of earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides as random. But: “Nature is neither chaotic nor ordered. Chaos a...

In an earlier blog , we looked at sensory substitution capabilities of the brain. In Livewired , David Eagleman next looks at the brain’s capability to deal with sensory enhancement , even addition of entirely new senses.   He cites the case of a lady who lost her sense of balance (due to an inner ear problem). So a helmet that read the tilt of her head was placed on her head that would send tilt/balance signals via her tongue (her ear channel wasn’t working, remember?), and voila! Her brain learnt to “understand the strangely routed information” and her ability to balance improved tremendously.   In another instance, a color blind artist attached a device that converted color to sound signals delivered via “bone conduction behind his ear”. Now he can “see” and differentiate colors. Even better, he can see colors beyond the normal spectrum that us regular mortals can see, because the range of his color detection sensors are better than our eyes!   Impressive...

In his book on the remarkable change’ability of the brain, Livewired , David Eagleman asks: how flexible is the brain? Can it even learn to make sense of an altogether new format of data it receives? “Would a small electronic chip, speaking the dialect of Silicon Valley instead of the language of our natural biological sense organs, be understood by the rest of the brain?”   If that sounded like a question for the future, you’d be wrong. For people whose inner ear isn’t working, no amount of amplification will help. Instead, they’ve had the option of cochlear implants since 1982: “This tiny device circumvents the broken hardware of the inner ear to speak directly to the functioning nerve just beyond it… (The implanted microcomputer) receives sound from the outside world and passes the information to the auditory nerve by means of tiny electrodes.” A recipient of the implant said it took some time for the brain to be able to make sense of the new format of data, but soon h...

Words matter. Even in science. When Darwin came up with his theory of evolution, he used the phrase, “natural selection” to describe what was going on. Unfortunately, that phrase led to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the theory, as his colleague Wallace pointed out.   In a letter to Darwin, Wallace wrote that “the term itself (“natural selection”), and your mode of illustrating it, however clear and beautiful to many of us”, was leading to misinterpretation among others. The problem was the word “selection”: some thought it meant there was “thought and direction” involved. Others, esp. those of the religious type, were happy with that prospect: there was a role for God in the theory!   Wallace, therefore, suggested that it might be better to switch to a different phrase from that point onwards, including future editions of The Origin of Species . And what could that new term be? Wallace suggested going with the phrase that the philosopher, Herbert Spencer’s ...

In his book, Finite and Infinite Games , James Carse says there are two types of interactions involving humans in the world: those that have an ending (“finite games”), and those that go on forever (“infinite games”). Finite games have clear boundaries (spatial, numerical, temporal) and agreed-upon rules. After all, without those characteristics, nobody would agree when the game ended. Or who won.   If that sounded too competitive, perhaps you prefer infinite games. But to keep the game going indefinitely, rules need to be changeable, at times to ensure the game doesn’t end! (See why governance is an infinite game?). But such games raise a different kind of problem: “Who, for example, won the French Revolution?” Notice how an infinite game doesn’t end even when players die? Even more confusingly, players can come and go as they please in infinite games.   A finite game forces you to be serious (there’s a specific objective,   you want to achieve it). Whereas ...

After Genghis Khan died, the men decided that it was time for time for them to enjoy the spoils of war and empire, writes Jack Weatherford in The Secret History of the Mongol Queens : “As the role of women in public life in the Mongol Empire continued to recede over the next century, the elite Mongol men fell into a life of debauched pleasure in their Chinese parks, Persian gardens, and Russian palaces.” Thus began the decline of everything Genghis had built, albeit it took over a few centuries for the empire to fade out altogether.   Even as the Mongols declined, war tech had moved along: “Advancements in firearms had negated the Mongols’ most important asset, their ability to use bows and arrows very effectively from horseback. No matter how well trained and extensively practiced, a warrior with a bow and arrow cannot compete with cannons and firearms.”   So it came to back that the now-driven-out-of-China generation of Mongols found themselves with only two op...

In an earlier blog , we saw how the brain changes both its hardware and software. And how quickly it can do that. In Livewired , David Eagleman elaborates on his theory for an age-old question: Why do we dream?   The basis of his theory is the speed at which the brain can rewire itself. (Remember, from the last blog, blindfolded people started using their “sight” areas of the brain for “touch” activities within 40-60 minutes ). If that is how fast the brain can rewire itself, well, the visual cortex has a major problem unlike the sound, or touch areas of the brain . How does the visual cortex prevent itself from being taken over by the other parts of the brain, given that the world is dark half the time, thanks to that pesky thing called rotation? (Electricity is a very recent invention, in evolutionary terms).   The answer his team has proposed? “By keeping the occipital cortex active during the night. We suggest that dreaming exists to keep the visual cortex from b...

It is well known, as David Eagleman says in Livewired : “We drop into the world with a brain that’s largely incomplete. As a result, we have a uniquely long period of helplessness in our infancy.” So why are we human babies born that way? “That cost pays off, because our brains invite the world to shape them.” The technical term for all this is “plasticity”. As in plastic: it can be molded into any shape, and even better, it can hold that shape.   However, as we know all too well from experience, for certain topics: “(This reshaping of the brain happens) during a rapidly closing window of time. One the window is missed, it is difficult or impossible to reopen.” The good news though is that the time-window constraint doesn’t apply for all topics. Long after baby- and toddler-hood, the brain can still reshape itself: “The shape shifting of brains is not like the glacial drifting of continental plates, but can instead be remarkably swift.”   For example, re...

Even as India celebrated Neeraj Chopra winning its only gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, Leher Kala wrote this piece wondering whether the world has gone to the other extreme where it sympathizes, even pedestalizes, the athlete who quits in the middle of the Olympics because the pressure was too much. (She was referring to the US gymnast, Simone Biles).   True, the pressure is indeed very high in all international sports. But is the current tendency to pour out support for the likes of Biles going overboard? Sure, it’s one thing to understand why Biles may have dropped out, but the reaction goes far beyond that: “Quitting is being hailed as some sort of noble act.”   Besides, who doesn’t face stress, even if it isn’t at the Olympics or in front of the camera? “Stress is universal and a fear of failure haunts all of humanity… Not wanting to strive, resolutely, everyday, is rarely depression, anxiety — frightfully misused terms these days.” Leher says it tongue-i...

Everyone knows of self-fulfilling prophecies. Like the placebo effect: a medicine works because the doctor says it will work and the patient believed him (even though it is just an inert pill). Or its twin, the nocebo effect, writes Tim Harford: “If the doctor tells you a drug may produce side effects, some patients feel those side effects even if given an inert pill.”   As you might have noticed, self-fulfilling prophecies work only in areas where people are involved (so no, they don’t work in science). In fact, they are so common that they are considered a “staple” of economics! “A recession can be caused by the expectation of a recession, if people hesitate to spend, hire or invest. And a bank run is the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy.” Then there’s the twin of the self-fulfilling prophecy: the self- defeating prophecy: “If I credibly predict a surge in the price of oil next year, the surge will happen immediately as oil traders buy low now to sell high la...

In October last year (long before the vaccines came along), there was an amusing-if-it-weren’t-so-serious incident where the UK’s COVID contact tracing system “lost” 16,000 cases. The risk this created was high, writes Tim Harford: “These were 16,000 people who should have been warned they were infected and a danger to others, 16,000 cases contact tracers should have been running down to figure out where the infected went, who they met and who else might be at risk. None of which was happening.”   How had that happened? Because of a limitation in MS Excel: the older “xls” format supported only 64,000 rows. Enter any more and they wouldn’t get saved: “This meant that during some automated process, cases had vanished off the bottom of the spreadsheet, and nobody had noticed.”   Digital spreadsheets have replaced the original paper spreadsheet, those “big sheets of paper spread across two pages of an accounting ledger”. It started with VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3 unt...

I get very irritated when my 10 yo daughter makes “silly mistakes” in her school tests. You did the harder questions right. You knew the easy one; how then could you goof it up? To which she’ll retort: Everyone makes mistakes. Are you saying you’ve never made any?   I was reminded of that as I read Jonathan Rowson’s The Moves that Matter , where he described a chess match from 2006, where top chess program named Deep Fritz played world champion Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik was playing black, and after 32 moves, this was the position:   It certainly looks like Kramnik (black) has the upper hand here, as Rowson says: outside passed pawn, bishop versus knight. Kramnik thus was happy to exchange rooks and so, just a move-and-a-half later, this was the new position: It looks even better for Kramnik (black) now: the rooks have been exchanged, the bishop is threatening the white pawn, which looks doomed, following which his passed pawn should win the game. And so, Kramnik tries t...