"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound.



What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating a metrical framework. This is simply astonishing were it be to true, but perhaps not unexpected given the sophistication of bird vocalization and communication. It is one thing for a bird to keep time with a beat and an entirely different for a bird to exhibit division of the beat.

When people sing (or compose a melody to sing) the tones are not of arbitrary duration. No one could sing a song consisting of a series of tones of arbitrary duration measured to fractions of a second. Could you imagine signing a melody: A 1000ms, F 1500ms, E 500ms, D 1000ms, A 1000ms? The human mind is not well suited for measuring duration in milliseconds on an ordinary basis (we can leave out extraordinary abilities some humans may possess or develop). What if someone asked you to pick up the pace to sign faster? Each duration would have to be recalculated down to the millisecond, in your head. For this reason, music is organized by relative measures of duration.

In reality, when people sing or play music, they use simple division of the beat to measure duration. This is usually achieved through the division of a steady beat by whole fractions, usually simple divisors, like two or three. The most basic division of the beat is by two. When a tone of shorter duration than the beat is required, the melody will use a tone one half of the beat, or one quarter or one eighth and so on, down to the ability of humans to resolve divisions of time. The other main division of the beat observed in music is by three. So for every beat you have the possibility of three tones, six tones, twelve tones and so on. The human ability for perceiving and manipulation this time structure is sophisticated. Musicians can anticipate the division of future beats, playing notes that persist across multiple divisions of the beat or create "holes" or silences for certain beats, playing with the listeners expectations (this is called syncopation). I have to wonder if the small movements he makes dividing the beat follow any ornamentation of percussion or melody in the song. In the background, another bird can be seen bobbing his head to the beat, in a clear parallel to human "head banging."

Although I would have to watch a lot more video to be sure, what I have seen suggests he may be dividing the beat and deserves further investigation. I would not be surprised to find that birds do erect a sense of metrical time in sound and can mentally divide the beat and even anticipate it, perhaps even perceive syncopation. It is fascinating to watch Snowball lose and pick up the beat again.

I did watch a couple of video clips. At about 2:00 into the following video he lifts his foot and waves time to the beat, but does not divide it.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s)


In the following video, notice how he keeps the beat when Stevie Nicks sings "ooh, ooh" on the beat? This suggests he has an expectation of the beat even when the beat is not marked by a percussive instrument. At about 1:05 he may have divided the beat with a wave. He does lose the beat more frequently when based only on Nick's vocals or less percussive sections. At 2:31 he appears to divide the beat with a wave again. And at 2:56. I'm not sure if he's just losing the beat or dividing it...but this is a seriously important question about the intelligence of birds. At 4:43 also.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMBIGTteWA&feature=channel)

(Note: The time required for a complete cycle of A above middle C is 2.27 milliseconds and a sixteenth note at a metronomic pace of 60 clicks per second is 250 milliseconds, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond 2009)

Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

The mind as storyteller

Jennifer Armstrong (author, The American Story) said in a talk (BookTv 1/29/07) at the Blue Willow Bookshop, "consciousness moves backwards and forwards in time." I stopped working as my mind dropped into gear and listened as she continued to talk about story telling and history. She had struck a chord in my mind with this observation. I thought how strange it is a thing to say. It seems obvious of course, since we all can move our minds back and forth over the events of our life, consider the future and reflect on the past. But it still struck me as strange.

She followed up her remark with a disclaimer reminding us that at the quantum level time is not very orderly or linear, a thought that occurred to me almost simultaneously with her first remark, a little voice rising against the implied linearity of time. However, the distinction between the mind's comprehension of time and natural time was made clear as was the capacity for the mind to create this construct of linear time in our heads out of the occurrence of events. It is a kind of tape recording of natural time in which we can move time back and forward at will. What gave rise to the strangeness is recognizing the linear conception of time and the ability to move forward and backward in it is a complete fabrication of the mind. We all think of time as obviously linear and fool ourselves into thinking that the time we move our minds back and forth over is the same as the time that exists in the natural world, but the time that exists in our mind is in reality a kind of narrative. I realized there exists a relationship between the mind's ability to move freely backwards and forwards through memory (within essentially a model of natural time) and narrative.

Although I am aware of the debate over the nature of time and that there is an argument that the mind orders time and creates it and that time may not be a physical reality, that what we know of as time is created by the persistence of memory just as a moving picture is created by the persistence of vision, the idea the consciousness moving within time was still striking. Science suggests there may be no "proper order" to the natural world and the linear way in which we perceive events may be an imposition of the mind. It suddenly seemed more important to understand this human view of time than to answer the question what time is in the physical universe, which seemed like a lesser question.

I was struck by the novelty of this idea of the consciousness moving backwards and forwards in time independent of actual time, knowing that one cannot actually move backwards and forwards in time, but the mind can, that it has the power to anticipate and reflect on time. That this storing of natural time as a mental narrative through memory, this ordering of events to comprehend them, is the basis of anecdote (the retelling of a series of events), which is the basis of storytelling. That memory ties in with narrative and natural time.

This reaffirms my belief that stories are the way the mind makes sense of the world, which consists entirely of chaotic sense perceptions. Narrative becomes the basic unit of thought. I believe stories are the way the human mind comprehends and make sense the events and phenomena of the surrounding natural world that come to it through sense perception. I believe storytelling evolved as a way for social animals to explain the world in the only terms they knew, social ones where natural events are caused by willful acts, just as in the social world all occurrences are willful acts of individuals. Storytelling is the most immediate and effective way of ordering and explaining social events. As our consciousness grew more powerful, this mechanism was adapted and extended to explain events of the nature world as willful acts powerful spirits and later people began to separate the events of nature from the supernatural actors, science slowly began to take over the job of telling the story of nature.

It might be said that the mind creates time by ordering events. I would go further than that, that not only does the mind create the ordering of events we know of as time, but that it creates "willful spirits" whose actions explain the events, which become a story. In ancient times, a willful spirit might have been a supernatural being where today the willful spirit may be a conspiracy or some other thing that may rationally be thought to exist. Since we no longer believe in capricious supernatural beings causing natural events, we choose our willful spirits carefully to accord with science and reason. Our mind still looks for the same explanations, we just sugar coat them so they acceptable to a rational society. It is interesting to note that this ability of the consciousness to move backwards and forwards in time arose, science tells us, approximately 50,000 years ago in a small group of humans who began to realize that if they found the tracks of an animal, that it had recently passed and might still be nearby. They could look forward into the future and know that if they followed the tracks they might come across the animal and make it their dinner. We take this ability so much for granted that we do not realize how significant a change this is. It is hardly imaginable, something akin to one of these experiments in simulating disability as part of making the healthy understand disability, what it must be like to not be able to perceive and manipulate time in this way. This underscores how much a part of our mind ordered time and narrative are.