Positive Technology Journal

Via Networked Performance

"(W)e are living a fusion of real and unreal time, an ongoing undulation of overlays and intersections...It's most like the way good old-fashioned thinking and imagining work in relation to sensing and perceiving ... It says that back before representational technologies developed, before literacy itself, people were also living in a fusion of real and unreal time because they were daydreaming while they were doing this or that. Just having a mind is to be in unreal time as well as in real time ... What that says is that representational technologies have colonized our minds ... To the extent that our thoughts no longer wander around on their own, stocked only with materials drawn from direct experience, to the extent that they follow flows of representations instead--to just that extent that we don't think our own thoughts. Literally...

When the term first arose, "real-time" implied speed, intensified velocity. The medium doing the representing was transforming reality into representation immediately. The expression was first used in connection with digital processing of information ... It was a term of praise that focused on how fast a computer could record the file transaction as compared with paper-shuffling clerks. It wasn't until the fact that computers could keep up with events was taken for granted that we noticed that security cameras in public places were real-time media too. And nothing seems slower than those! How strange. Why is that? No editing. No manipulation of what is presented.

In the same way, an innovation like videoconferencing could surprise us with a real-time capacity that the telephone had all along. Bit we only noticed that a lot of analog media were in real time after computers achieved sufficient processing speed to do it too. It was the malleability of digital transformations that made the difference. The fact that we could now manipulate what had once just been conveyed on a screen or over a wire, that's what go the juices going. That's why "interactive" became the mother of all buzz words. The idea that real time emerged when we became players on screens we had once viewed passively. The fusional loop of subject-object that is a video games expresses most cogently the thrill of real-time existence in unreal realms. You tweak the joystick and press the buttons and virtual swords flash and machine guns blaze in some tunnel on asteroid in a distant galaxy--not as a result of, but as a function of, at the same time as, your fingers on the console. You exist as agent and instrument simulateously in two places, in the meat world of fingers and consoles and the virtual world of cyborg warriors. Representational being incarnate. The primordial aim of the human imagination realized--literally "made real.

So "real time" is a compliment we pay to representations that reflect our agency either directly or in the way they conform to our designs subsequently ... Incidentally, remember when people thought that the Web was going to build bridges between communities and inspire cross-cultural understanding, etc.? ... The multiplication of niches has been so intense that the word fragmentation doesn't begin to describe it. What with these search worms and filters and custom advertising hooking you up with stuff you're already interested in ... you can spend your whole life online and never leave your own head." From Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It by Thomas De Zengotita.

Via Networked Performance

Are you Living in a Computer Simulation? by Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University.

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. 

"Why the Matrix? Why did the machines do it? (Human brains may be many things, but efficient batteries they are not.) How could they justify a world whose inhabitants are systematically deceived about their fundamental reality, ignorant about the reason why they exist, and subject to all the cruelty and suffering that we witness in the world around us?" From Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be In One: by Nick Bostrom.

Also see: Simulism is a concept that deals with the possibility that we are living in a simulation.

Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Jun 27;

Authors: Brefczynski-Lewis JA, Lutz A, Schaefer HS, Levinson DB, Davidson RJ

Meditation refers to a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes. One of the most basic forms of meditation is concentration meditation, in which sustained attention is focused on an object such as a small visual stimulus or the breath. In age-matched participants, using functional MRI, we found that activation in a network of brain regions typically involved in sustained attention showed an inverted u-shaped curve in which expert meditators (EMs) with an average of 19,000 h of practice had more activation than novices, but EMs with an average of 44,000 h had less activation. In response to distracter sounds used to probe the meditation, EMs vs. novices had less brain activation in regions related to discursive thoughts and emotions and more activation in regions related to response inhibition and attention. Correlation with hours of practice suggests possible plasticity in these mechanisms.

PTSD symptoms, substance use, and vipassana meditation among incarcerated individuals.

J Trauma Stress. 2007 Jun 27;20(3):239-249

Authors: Simpson TL, Kaysen D, Bowen S, Macpherson LM, Chawla N, Blume A, Marlatt GA, Larimer M

The present study evaluated whether Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptom severity was associated with participation and treatment outcomes comparing a Vipassana meditation course to treatment as usual in an incarcerated sample. This study utilizes secondary data. The original study demonstrated that Vipassana meditation is associated with reductions in substance use. The present study found that PTSD symptom severity did not differ significantly between those who did and did not volunteer to take the course. Participation in the Vipassana course was associated with significantly greater reductions in substance use than treatment as usual, regardless of PTSD symptom severity levels. These results suggest that Vipassana meditation is worthy of further study for those with comorbid PTSD and substance use problems.

Cerebellar activity evoked by common tool-use execution and imagery tasks: an fMRI study.

Cortex. 2007 Apr;43(3):350-8

Authors: Higuchi S, Imamizu H, Kawato M

The purpose of this study is to identify the functional brain networks activated in relation to actual tool-use in humans. Although previous studies have identified brain activity related to tool-use gestures (Moll et al., 2000), they did not investigate the brain activity involved in such tool-use. We investigated brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while human subjects mentally imagined using sixteen common tools and while they actually used them. Brain activity for both actual and imagined tool-use was found in the posterior part of the parietal cortex, in the supplementary motor area, and in the cerebellum. Under imagined tool-use conditions, we found brain activity in the premotor and right pars opercularis. Under actual tool-use conditions, we found it in the primary motor area, in the thalamus, and in the left pars opercularis. Our precise analysis in the cerebellum indicated that activity evoked by imagery was located significantly more lateral to that evoked by actual use. We found a relationship between activity in the tool imagery and execution conditions by comparing their t-value-weighted centroid of activation coordinates. Moreover, for half of the subjects the spatial distribution pattern for each tool was similar, suggesting that neural mechanisms contributing to skillful tool-use are modularly organized in the cerebellum.

Motor imagery and action observation: cognitive tools for rehabilitation.

J Neural Transm. 2007 Jun 20;

Authors: Mulder T