Browsed by
Category: creativity

Syntegration: The key to innovation

Syntegration: The key to innovation

Comments 1 comment

This TED talk discusses how tech innovation is driven by those with diverse experience that syntegrate a variety of genres instead of specialists that are limited to a few. They call it ‘lateral’ thinking but that term sets up a dichotomy with hierarchical thinking, which the syntegral approach is certainly much more than. The hierarchical complexity approach would limit that way of thinking merely to what it calls horizontal complexity, again missing the boat entirely of the sort of cross-paradigmatic…

Read More Read More

Evolutionary robots – Future of embodied AI?

Evolutionary robots – Future of embodied AI?

Comments 0 Comment

An article in Nature Machine Intelligence reports on R&D efforts employing evolutionary approaches to getting robots that are better adapted to their environments. We propose ‘multi-level evolution’, a bottom-up automatic process that designs robots across multiple levels and niches them to tasks and environmental conditions. Multi-level evolution concurrently explores constituent molecular and material building blocks, as well as their possible assemblies into specialized morphological and sensorimotor configurations. Multi-level evolution provides a route to fully harness a recent explosion in available…

Read More Read More

how does music affect the brain?

how does music affect the brain?

Comments 0 Comment

The blurb: “In this episode of Tech Effects, we explore the impact of music on the brain and body. From listening to music to performing it, WIRED’s Peter Rubin looks at how music can change our moods, why we get the chills, and how it can actually change pathways in our brains.” For me the most interesting part was later in the video (10:20), how when we improvise we shut down the pre-frontal planning part of the brain and ‘just…

Read More Read More

Informative neuroscience presentations at NYU Center for Mind, Brain & Consciousness

Informative neuroscience presentations at NYU Center for Mind, Brain & Consciousness

Comments 0 Comment

The NYU Center for Mind, Brain & Consciousness hosts presentations, including topical debates among leading neuroscience researchers. Many of the sessions are recorded for later viewing. The upcoming debate among Joseph LeDoux (Center for Neural Science, NYU), Yaïr Pinto (Psychology, University of Amsterdam), and Elizabeth Schechter (Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis), will tackle the question, “Do Split-brain patients have two minds?” Previous topics addressed animal consciousness, hierarchical predictive coding and perception, AI ‘machinery,’ AI ethics, unconscious perception, research replication issues,…

Read More Read More

Future discussion topic recommendations

Future discussion topic recommendations

Comments 2 comments

Several of us met on Labor Day with the goal of identifying topics for at least five future monthly meetings. (Thanks, Dave N, for hosting!) Being the overachievers we are, we pushed beyond the goal. Following are the resulting topics, which will each have its own article on this site where we can begin organizing references for the discussion: sex-related influences on emotional memory gross and subtle brain differences (e.g., “walls of the third ventricle – sexual nuclei”) “Are there…

Read More Read More

People’s brains store and recall stories the same way

People’s brains store and recall stories the same way

Comments 0 Comment

New scientific findings support the idea that different humans’ brains store and recall story scenes the same way, rather than each person developing unique memory patterns about stories. Also, people generally do well recalling the details of stories. I want to see more targeted research that determines whether information packed in story structures (a person wrestling with a difficult challenge and changing as a result) is more readily and accurately transmitted from brain to brain via storytelling. This would be…

Read More Read More

AI Creativity

AI Creativity

Comments 0 Comment

Google and others are developing neural networks that learn to recognize and imitate patterns present in works of art, including music. The path to autonomous creativity is unclear. Current systems can imitate existing artworks, but cannot generate truly original works. Human prompting and configuration are required. Google’s Magenta project’s neural network learned from 4,500 pieces of music before creating the following simple tune (drum track overlaid by a human): Click Play button to listen-> Is it conceivable that AI may…

Read More Read More