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Tag Archives: HUman Existence

Chocolate Instagram, digital consumption & the sweetening of social memory.

07 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

A.I., Apps, Brain Scans, Confectionary, Consiousness, Digital Consumption, Digital Obesity, Educational Psychologists, Fat Sugar Compounds, HUman Existence, Instagram, John Sweller, Justin Kent, Kodachrome, Long Term Memory, Maltesers, Mondelez, NeuroScience, Neurotransmitters, Nicholas Carr, Social Memory, social networks, Social Technologies, Swiss Chocolate, tenderness, Walter J Ong, Wonka Bars, Working Memory

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Could chocolate provide a simple low cost off set strategy to the impact of repeated use of technology, devices and the internet both on our individual long term and our collective social memory?

Could an old school tablet of a particular chocolate offset the dulling of our deeper human conscious software bought on by hi tech devices and surfing the net?

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows pointed to the neurological impacts of constant and intense internet usage on us – with evidence that suggests that how our brain works – the way we think and in deeper terms how we retain and internalise our experiences both immediate, short and long term – is directly affected by how we experience life through the lens of our digital age.

We use technology to accelerate and expand both the speed, reach and the expanse of our lives.

But we rarely stop to consider the impact of using technologies to do so. Any negative consequence of doing so would simply ‘get in the way’ of the immediate gratification and the life enhancing abilities of fully submerging ourselves in a stream of tech derived stimuli.

Its just cool kit right? That helps us be our fabulous expansive selves.

But as we are coming to realise, technology and all it brings has far deeper resonance on our humanity. It always has, regardless of type, culture, epoch and era. Let us not forget that, at one point, alphabets and writing were an exterior technology. But their impact on how we retain, process and express our most profound human selves has been immeasurable.

Carr cites Walter J Ong in that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness”.

Modern digital and social technologies, in rewiring how we think, are changing our capacity for retention of information – especially the kind that feeds our deeper long-term memory – in ways that may seriously affect how we remember – both individually and collectively.

Contrary to the previously held belief that “it played little part in complex cognitive processes such as thinking and problem solving”, long-term memory is more than just a warehouse for ‘stuff’, according to Australian educational psychologist, John Sweller – “long term memory is actually the seat of understanding. It stores not just facts but complex concepts or “schemas”. These schemas are the very things which give depth and richness to our thinking.

So how our working memory – the short term immediate variety – works and its ability to transfer information to our long term memory has a massive impact on and is central and fundamental to the ‘health and dynamism’ of consciousness.

So where does the Chocolate Instagram connection come into this?

Last year I had the pleasure of being party to a number of research groups across France, Germany and Russia run by the inestimable Justin Kent.

The research in question focused on deciphering the true ‘emotional’ heart and hook of an iconic Swiss chocolate brand. The theory was that the chocolate seemed to be rooted in a deeper sense of emotional well being and connectivity of a particularly tender variety. (I know, go with me on this one: its surprising what a group of supposedly sane adults can come up with in a room when they’re exercising their intellect and protecting their school fee paying salary and smart holidays.)

That the taste and experience of the chocolate might build an instant bridge between the Now and the deeper long term individual and collective social memory bank was to be fair not that ridiculous an assertion.

In two of the countries researched, millions of people had grown up with the chocolate, so its role in golden-fringed and highly personal memories of childhood and of naive simpler times was to be expected

But interestingly the research also revealed that this was a reoccurring theme across both the countries where the people had grown up with it and in those where it was a new arrival (albeit using very small highly qualitative samples – and with only one ‘new’ country in the mix).

Something in the chocolate’s sweet emollient nature – its texture and melting properties – and the way it made you play with the square of chocolate in your mouth (a quite childlike think to do)seemed to create a brief momentary sense of wellbeing that seemed to be rooted in taking people to a naïve and simpler place in their head, regardless of whether they had ‘grown up with it’ or not.

To be clear this was not a retro, nostalgia moment that lifted them up and out of the moment into a reverie removed from the here and now. It seemed to bridge the space between their ‘Now’ – their working memory – and their ‘Then’ – their long term memory.

Much like the Kodachromatic filter on Instagram that immediately makes any picture just taken look like a memory; plucked from some old family photo album (for those of you who can remember them), the chocolate was making instant snapshots in the family album of the Now, saturating and staining the living moment in a deeper simpler kodachromatic emotional mood.

This inspired me to badge this momentary product effect as Chocolate Instagram.

But in linking something as simple and old school as chocolate to something as advanced and rooted in the burgeoning digital age as a social app, a thought popped into my head.

That Chocolate releases chemicals like anandamide and theobromine to stimulate neurotransmitters that affect our mood and effect how we think is a well proven ‘given’. It has a singularly positive effect on our disposition (unless you are on 3 bars a day and diabetic of course). Could the positive act of consuming chocolate off-set the potentially stunting, shallowing effect of our consumption of relentless digital stimuli on the well being of our brain and ultimately our consciousness?

Chocolate is certainly one of those rare compound experiences that seem to elicit both highly individual and deeply set emotional responses while also triggering immediate and ‘shared’ moments of equal emotional vivacity between people who have otherwise no connection to each other: much the same as the social apps and networks we fill our lives with.

If chocoholics are to be believed it certainly fulfils Ong’s task of being a technology that transforms interior consciousness.

Therefore it was interesting to me to ponder the possibility that the simple act of eating a piece of chocolate might be opening a synaptic connection between wells of feeling (sentimental data) in our deeper consciousness (our long term and social memory banks) and the immediate working memory of the Now, measured in seconds and moments.

Beyond the pleasurable feeling in the moment of playing a sweet melty square of chocolate around in your mouth, could chocolate create a parallel yet opposite effect? Heightening the receptors that shape how we consume the moment and subsequently how we process it? Perhaps we could build a complementary ‘conscious cloud’ computing system for our emotions predicated solely on the eating of chocolate?

That the low-fi technology of chocolate might have a similar yet potentially opposite effect on our conscious existence to the one provided by an super hi-end App used in the recording of that existence felt intriguing and in some ways complete – circular.

It certainly felt worthy of further exploration: especially by a chocolate business looking to off-set its avaricious peddling of more of its fat sugar compound pleasure with a higher purpose of sorts.

Even the simplest test might be revealing. What if we were to wire the brains of two sets or samples of people – and then have both sets undertake social networking and web surfing in isolation – the only difference being that one set undertook these tasks with the supplement of chocolate and the others without.

We could test them ‘in play‘ – eating as they undertook the tasks. We could also perform a secondary and tertiary set of tests – with consumption of chocolate happening prior to undertaking the tasks and finally one where the chocolate was consumed after the fact.

What would the brain scans reveal I wonder? No effect? Some effect? Would the activity be complimentary, conflicted; or would one either elevate or negate the other?

Who knows: but it would be fun to find out.

In the meantime, I suggest we break out the Whole Nut: oh, and a bag of Maltesers please. (And a Wonka Triple Chocolate Whipple) and consume heartily. And then perhaps tweet the empty wrapper picture to an waiting audience!

You know you want to.

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One Rusting, creaking planet, Repo Men & the Hipster ET.

03 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1977 Ford Bronco, 3rd Rock From The Sun, Aliens, Classics, Daily Mail, Downton Abbey, ET, ET Hipsters, Family Guy, Fast Radio Bursts, global warming, Hubble, HUman Existence, Intelligent Life, James Webb Space Telescope, kepler, NASA, Phone Home, Planetary Degradation, Repo Men, reposession, SETI

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 Are these mystery radio bursts messages from Aliens?

You have to give it to the Mail On Line. We underestimate their facility for tabloid ‘Phew What A Scorcher’ headlines at our peril.

The feature was around a series of 10 or so Fast Radio Bursts and the surprising revelation that they all form unexplainable multiples of 187.5 – colliding neutrons or signs of alien life?

The discovery of ‘communication’ from outer space is indeed amazing.

And listening for extraterrestrials or ‘intelligent life’ is a wonderful thing – impressive in a ‘Massive dishes pointing skywards in opening X-Files sequence’ kind of way.

SETI listens but hears nothing. Then Patterns appear. Wow! But from where? And Who? And What are they after? And How can we connect?

We have been clearly told to not expect ET. Even if alien life does exist it is apparently far more likely to be of the single cell amoeba variety as opposed to a complex multicellular organism with a light source in its longest digit.

But whatever they are, they have to come from somewhere (or do they?).

The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s grand successor, combs the galaxies for bio signatures (evidence of Not ET) by reading infinitesimal variations in light.

And what of the exoplanets we have already found with NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope? Like Kepler 438b – an earth-like planet capable of hosting life. We’re not sure whether it has an atmosphere but if it does, there’s the potential for it to have a surface temperature of 60 degrees Celsius and the potential for water to flow as a liquid – and therefore a source of potential life (and, let’s be optimistic here, a water park of sorts?).

But ET? Highly doubtful (but in all fairness, one must allow for ET believers in the absence of solid proof to that fact).

My question is less about ‘Who?’ and ‘What?’ And ‘Where?’ And ‘How?’

I am more focused on the Why?

We have lots of vibrant and robust discourse and debate on the former – usually complemented by sometimes wholly specious assumptions of the type, form and intelligence of the ‘alien’. But ‘Why?’ they would bother is a question I hear raised far less often.

I find this especially surprising as it is hardly going to be to invade, rape, pillage and plunder us. For that they would have to have ignored or been in ignorance of the patently obvious and immutable nature of the fact that the universe (and the multiple universes beyond that) is packed with planets stuffed with resources of every particular kind. Also, being smart, they would have assessed the condition of ours, so why travel all that distance to secure a substandard source of anything.

So what other motivation? Loneliness? For that we would need to arrogantly assume that the said intelligent alien organism had a moment of crashing deep space isolation and claustrophobic melancholia and thought, “Come On…its good to talk. Lets communicate with another organism. What’s the worse that could happen?”

(Given our shabby track record in the planetary stewardship department the answer to that closing remark doesn’t bear thinking about.)

Do we really believe that intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos have got through all the Intelligent Life antidepressants on their current planet/s and whatever the Intelligent Life equivalent of every full boxed set of Family Guy, 3rd Rock from the Sun and Downton Abbey might be before they really hit the emotional skids?

For that we are also having to assume that they interpret their existence in something as clumsy as Emotional & Rational intelligence. And that in turn assumes that they are comprehensive or cognitive of the fact that they ‘exist’ in some form that we might even begin to understand.

So perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps it bears more relation to the mind and vision of Douglas Adams.

Perhaps there is some planetary Repo Man at work in the Universe. Perhaps someone somewhere thought “Right. Not only are they a bloody disgrace as a universal species. More importantly they have just NOT a) kept up the payments on their planet and b) respected the conditions and obligations of the lease therein.”

The amount we invest, collectively, civilly and individually, in ensuring that our planet remains a resilient and habitable environment in which to sustain our desired state of existence is desperately wanting on every level. Even achieving some form of decent consensus on what the level of that investment might be and how we all can contribute to it seems to be beyond the wit of Man.

And as for the damage we inflict on the rock we live on I can see the clause like it was printed in front of me.

Contractual Conditions and Obligations of Planetary Leases –

Clause 12. Sub section 9: Paragraph 5: Damages & Dilapidations: Fines, Extraordinary Damages & Repossession.

The Lessee agrees to keep [planet ref goes here] in both reasonable working order and within the desired state and condition in which it was received from the Lessor at at all times throughout The Term – and to make all endeavours to mitigate the possibility of or make immediate amends for the damages and dilapidations thereof to said planet.

For the removal of any doubt and/or conjecture to this condition:

Any Dereliction, Degradation or Damage to the material nature and integrity of the Lessor’s property found to be the cause of willful abuses in the maintenance of said property

Or

Any devaluation and diminishment of the Lessor’s property to that effect that might be caused by the neglect, evasion or avoidance of the required attentions and supplementary maintenances and provision of said maintenance or actions by the Lessee that might justly be found to stand in breach of said Conditions will result in the immediate application of penalties, fines, or, in extreme circumstance, the immediate repossession of the said planet – which might allowably be undertaken with any force thought necessary.

Put that way. We’re Busted. Bang to rights guvnor. Lease nulled and voided.

Perhaps that is it – we have been found wilfully in breach of contract as the extant and dominant species on said planet. And the Intelligent Life is hunting us down to repossess it.

But then again perhaps intelligent life is more (or less) advanced and sophisticated than we think. Perhaps there is no universal interest in us and our planet – only a small interested community in the midst of that Intelligent Life.

If that were the case, who would be interested in Planet Earth as a possible ‘win win’ scenario?

When we’re not ripping, butchering, gouging, shooting, stabbing, bombing, mutilating, raping, brutalising, enslaving and generally degrading our own species we’re merrily dispatching the others we share this rock with and the environment in which they live; all to our own selfish benefit.

In fact if there was an accolade for general planetary mismanagement we are over achieving both in the roll of indolent tenant and tyrannical landlord.

We would undoubtedly win Universal Gold for our exemplary works in pursuit of acidifying our oceans, plundering every resource we find far beyond its ability to renew itself while sending our planetary existence up in a plume of terribly cheap highly convenient and ultimately very damaging smoke while turning every blind eye we can find (and making some more when we run out) to that fact.

So when we take the space-eye view of the planet seen from an IL Point of view, maybe the answer lies in the truth of that.

We’re the planetary equivalent of that rusting, primer-patchwork, bent-axled, one bald tyre 1977 Ford Bronco one might find in the corner of an old barn on the forgotten farm at the end of the Universe.

A ‘dog’ of a planet, neglected. Forgotten. BUT…

To the right person, somewhere in that heap there’s a glimmer of vision – a spark of potential – of something really, really special. Just in need of a little TLPC

To the Universal ET Hipster with an eye for a classic perhaps? Sure, there are newer fresher more efficient planets out there – Kepler 438b with its fancy fecund and seductive atmosphere for example – but hey, where’s the individuality? They are devoid of planetary personality. Where are the dents, rents and marks? No life scars. It’s alive yeah but has it really ‘LIVED’? Does it have a ‘story’?

So that’s my punt – when SETI do identify those wave patterns, I reckon there’ll be a Universal ET Hipster at the end of them – with an eye for a wheezing rusting Classic.

Which with the ridiculously childish finale to an overworked metaphor leads me to one thought.

If you were to think, even for a moment, that that pile of rusting wheezing junk in your back yard ‘might’ be a Classic – would you allow someone to come and take it off you for close to nothing – knowing that with a little investment in its reconditioning: a little love and attention – they would find themselves in possession of a beautiful highly individual and priceless thing?

Or would you find a way – any way possible – of doing the same yourself – and reaping the reward for yourself and for everyone you passed it down to subsequently?

Bleep ptrrrzzzpppp farp bleep bleep ptrrrzzzpppp

I know what I’d go for.

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