Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, and angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
From the Fringe Department… This article is making the rounds today. It’s about a 15 year old boy in Nepal (see the picture) who is said to have been meditating under a tree without food or water, or even moving or going the bathroom, for 6 months. Interesting. Although unfortunately, now that he has been [...]
Now this is really interesting! New research has found that certain parts of the body emit measurable numbers of photons. This may open up new diagnostic techniques. But that’s just the beginning. Spiritual healers from many different faiths have long said that they experience light coming from their hands, and can feel (and even see) [...]
George Dyson wrote a nice piece on his impressions from a visit to Google, and some speculations about the future of AI on the Net.
Related Posts:Minding The Planet — The Meaning and Future of the Semantic WebMinding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global MindVideo: My Talk on the Evolution of the Global Brain [...]
Today I read this nice article which provides a short consumer-friendly overview of the history of the Digital Physics paradigm. Digital Physics is not mainstream physics — but it is growing and someday could become huge. It brings together computer scientists and physicists in an interdisciplinary approach to physics. While many advocates simply take the [...]
A cutting-edge research program is injecting human brain cells into monkey brains, to investigate whether this causes their brains to become more "human." This poses a potential ethical challenge: If the monkeys do become more human, would they be considered "human subjects" and be protected by ethical guidelines governing research onto humans? At which point [...]
Alex is a very smart parrot indeed. To the surprise of researchers, he understands the concept of zero, something which human children don’t grasp until they are 2 or 3 years old. Read more about Alex here.
Related Posts:A Universal Classification of IntelligenceMust-Know Terms for the 21st Century IntellectualMinding The Planet — The Meaning and Future [...]
Although it has always seemed obvious to me that animals have emotions and complex personalities, it’s taken the scientific community a long time to reach that conclusion. This article describes new findings in the field of animal behavior which indicate that not only do animals have emotions, but they also have a level of ethics, [...]
Fascinating article about research which has successfully extracted video from monitoring cat neurons. They have actually reconstructed what the cat actually saw from its neural signals. This opens the door to recording our day-to-day perceptions (lifelogs) and perhaps even to recording our dreams. And of course there might be options for playback as well. This [...]
A new technique has been successfully tested which appears to be able to bring dogs back to life after 3 hours of being clinically dead. This research may hold promise not only for saving lives in cases where clinical death happens before surgery can be performed or completed, but also perhaps for preserving and later [...]
In a very interesting new finding, researchers have discovered the people’s brains contain individual neurons, or small groups of neurons, that seem exist only to recognize particular people or concepts. This would imply that there is one neuron, or at least a small group of neurons, in our brains for every unique thing that we [...]
Researchers in Europe have completed the first phase of what may be the largest computational physics experiment in history: They built and ran a simulated universe through 14 billion years of development. The experiment used up 25 million megabytes of memory, and the biggest supercomputer in Europe for a month. The result was a “Cube [...]
There’s a very interesting event taking place at MIT tonight — the first (and only?) Time Traveler Convention. The organizers are inviting anyone in the future who is capable of time travel to travel back to the geo coordinates of this event (to be held at MIT) and attend it, along with proof that they [...]
A number of readers sent me links this week about the new Sony patent for ultrasonic neural stimulation. It is definitely interesting and could represent a useful new approach to non-invasive brainstate manipulation. However, it is by no means anywhere near being useful for entertainment, virtual reality, or mind control. Our understanding of how the [...]
After 30 years of research, a very interesting new theory of cognition has been announced. The theory posits that all human cognition and behavior is based on just one simple, non-algorithmic procedure that has been named confabulation. If the theory is correct it could offer a radical new approach to artificial intelligence, knowledge discovery, and [...]
Dr. Ian Stevenson has amassed 3000 documented cases of children remembering events from past lives.
In each case of children’s past life memory, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child’s statements. Then he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person’s life that match the child’s memory. He even [...]
Years ago I read about Persinger’s work on the induction of unusual states of consciousness using magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe and always wanted to try it — unfortunately the only way to do that was to go to his lab (assuming you could get invited). The Shakti Helmet brings this technology to the [...]
MIT neuroscientist, Guosong Liu, has found that human neurons compute in trinary, using signals that are the equivalents of -1, 0 and 1. By contrast, all computers compute in binary, using just 0 and 1. Because the units of trinary computation can in some cases be additive (e.g. 1+1=2) or can "cancel out" (e.g. -1 [...]
This article provides an overview of the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which has found that the behavior of a network of specially shielded random number generators deviates from stasticial randomness prior to major world events. I have been following this project for several years and have made various suggestions for further experiments to test [...]
I was fortunate enough to wander across this amazing online Flash presentation that reveals the hidden meaning of the film, "2001." It’s a thoroughly engaging, brilliantly produced, fascinating production — one of the best uses of Flash animation that I’ve ever seen. It also makes some really interesting points about human evolution, our relationship to [...]
The New York Times has published a wonderful and fascinating set of mini-essays by leading scientists about their beliefs in the unknkown and unexplained — from consciousness, to God, to life on other worlds, and the existence of true love. There are some terrific thoughts in it — one of thoses rare articles that breaks [...]
A new study has found that particular types of dreams take place during different phases of sleep, lending credence to the theory that dreams are not random.
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This just in: Read this article about an amazing child prodigy who may be one of the greatest musical geniuses in 200 years. Not only can he compose like a master, but he can compose multiple pieces of music at once! How does he do it? It’s a bit spooky — maybe he’s the reincarnation [...]
This interesting new brain
study reveals processing differences between Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory in human brains.
Nature performs these functions differently, and there is probably a good reason why that
is so. On the Web we don’t really have an equivalent of Episodic Memory or Semantic Memory yet… but we’re working on it!
Related Posts:Minding The Planet — [...]
Here’s an interesting speculation. Assume for the moment that our universe is in fact a simulation running on a vast computing system created a race of beings that is far more advanced than we can presently imagine. The next logical question would be, “Why would an advanced civilization want or need to undertake such a [...]
New research has found that running a mild electric current through your brain can significantly boost your verbal skills, with no side-effects, as far as anyone knows so far. Very interesting. It appears to decrease the firing threshold of neurons in the path of the current. This research was applied mainly to the frontal lobe [...]
This is pretty cool stuff — growing brains using live tissue and then teaching them to control software:
from an article in Slashdot: “Scientists at the University of Florida made a living ‘brain’ by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat’s brain and culturing them inside a glass dish. Then, the neurons began to extend lines to [...]
Scientists have discovered that by blocking the effect of a gene called D2 in a particular part of the brain they can transform normal monkeys into “drones” that will work as hard as they can, continuously, on repetitive tasks, without needing any expection of reward to keep going. In other words, they can transform regular [...]
Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers)
Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net)
INTRODUCTION
This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater.
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
The Semantic Web enables the formal [...]
Well, I’m finally doing it — I’ve started studying Classical Tibetan. After many years of procrastinating I’ve taken the leap. You may wonder why anyone would need to know Classical Tibetan — the answer is that it is the language used in all the classical Tibetan Buddhist texts. One of my main interests in life [...]
Notes:
Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to a [...]