Category: blog

Today I visited the third Hippo Campus Lecture, provided by Kembo. Guest of honour: Prof. Gerald Hüther, neurobiologist and brain scientist.

Hüther focused his presentation on “Haltung/ innere uberzeugung/ innere Einstellung”. Like Aizen (see posts about planned behavior, approaches to attitude formation & multi agent and culture) he argues that behavioral change starts not with attitude, but beliefs, or a mindset as he calls it. He spoke about “Erfahrungen unter den Haut”, when “das cognitieve Anteil und das emotionelle Anteil vereinigt zusammen arbeiten”: “wenn man emotional nichts tut, andert sich auch nichts”.

He rejected a definite impact of emotional strategies, like rewards (joy based) and punishment (fear based). These strategies are control based. Instead “Gib menschen die Chance sich zu ändern (von ongustigen zu gunstigen Erfahrung)”.

His speech pointed out the creation of brain structure through both experience and physical, bodily small differences.

Most important: it is emotional disturbance that has the potential to let enthusiasm emerge: “Das Gehirn ändert sich nicht ohne Begeisterung”. We need a positive (“gunstige”) mindset in order to deal with and overcome difficulties and complexities. A physical space that invites people is very helpful in such a process: deliver the gift of gratitude to undo the clinging to old mindsets.
Don’t just make people look into a mirror, make sure you (help them) get under the skin.

The trick is to reach and deal with a dilemma, as part of the necessary transformation. Use each other as teacher.

In other words: we can and need to overcome pollution created by mediocracy of our environment, which limits us to maximal development of person and organisation. Very inspiring words in the showroom of Kembo furniture.

Wow.

Details @ ScoreLight page. Developed at the Ishikawa-Komuro Laboratory, directed by Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa

Potential for group interactions as well, don’t you think? More @ Reactable’s website . Don’t forget to check this hilarious human reactables clip.

Actually for sale now @ Sifteo

…my favorite.

Nice work by Po, with some guidance of JAM visual thinking.

Also check his blog.

Frans de Waal, professor of primate behavior, recently spoke at the 3th Day of self organization (Rotterdam 2011, Derde dag van de zelforganisatie).

De Waal talked about (1) Conflict and Power and (2) Empathy and Cooperation, two dimensions of the field of politics. A staccato briefing for the enthusiasts. Why staccato? I believe the elegance and strength of De Waal lies within his straight forward answers. Let’s not contaminate these answers, but beware of it’s context.

1) Conflict and Power

High rankers need support from low rankers
Low rankers expect favors from high rankers

These interactions extend both reach and power of individuals within a coalition.

As explained through one of his visuals:

The major and medior groups have the option to form a coalition. However this will be a weaker coalition, compared to a coalition of the medior and the minor group. This latter is stronger because of stronger dependency to withstand the major group.

A populist Alpha male supports loosers (provided that he is no bully)
A pre-Alpha male supports winners (in his run toward Alpha status)

I’m not sure what this means to a coalition like this, where there is not necessarily an Alpha male in the middle:

Aggression / conflict brings individuals together… after the conflict!

Also check the comments on my previous post on Methods of conflict management, related to the statement above.

2) Empathy and cooperation

There is an emotional channel, with emotional contagion
There is a cognitive channel, with self-other distinction

No comment to that. It reminds me of Leary’s Rose in a way… Check this older post about loyalty and disbehavior.

When a mouse sees another -familiar- mouse in pain, it bothers that mouse too.

In other words: empathy is not only a behavioral aspect of higher primates. Source: Langford DJ 2006

Getting attention raises the willingness to sharing
Pressuring reduces the willingness to sharing

Nothing new here, although in conflict individuals easily go from excitement to dominance to aggression. At least in the case of dogs, according to Dog Wisperer Cesar Milan… 😉

Unequal rewards induce (emotional) resistance.

Exactlty like Sarah Brosnan (Georgia State University) concludes. The final statement about language -in this video below- is somehow questionable, don’t you agree?

According to The handbook of Decision Making (Göktug Morçöl, 2006; Chapter 31: Participatory Decision Making, by Susan Summers Raines), there is a ‘holy book in the field of conflict management: Getting to Yes (1981, Fisher and Ury). After describing Sources of conflict, Psychological barriers, {the Cognitive barrier} Attribution bias, Trust and Procedural barriers, the Section 31.2.1 Methods for Group Decision Making kicks of with five steps to describe their basic problem solving and {group} decision making process:

1. separate the people from the problem
2. focus on interests, not positions
3. invent options for mutual gain
4. insist on using objective criteria
5. craft the agreement

Sounds logical… Although at first glance ‘invent options’ seems somewhat a ‘context-less’ approach. In my opinion the previous step ‘focus on interest’ is more crucial: how to get people to share and open up interests, as part of an envisioned collaboration? A collaboration with a reason of existance that 1 level above the problem areas. 

Interesting is the statement that 

…when conflict escalates, people “dig in” to their positions … and personalize conflict …

By now, we now that visuals have the ability to de-perzonalize decision making: visuals are able to dampen ego’s. Assuming expecially the Dutch are more about ego than character -a coffee company wisdom, for now- , there is much to gain using visualization in conflict management. At least for the Dutch 😉

Quoting p600:

Specific skills to encourage positive framing can be learned in order to enhance the quality of communication and the likelyhood of positive outcomes.  

I agree most people have difficulties to state concerns while being aware and overcoming attribution abias, casting blame or personalization of conflict. However, when learning to overcome these difficulties, I feel these skills should help framing both positive, neutral AND negative resonses. For instance positive responses can trigger constructive self-pride, neutral responses invite to problem solving and negative responses can trigger constructive conflict.

It is impossible to make every person a specialist in conflict management. We can provide tools to overcome basic gap though.

45 Minutes of your live not wasted. Here’s part 1 of 3 (15 minutes):

Dazzle painting was used not to camouflage ships, but camouflage location characteristics. A pre-radar ‘technology’ making it very hard to determine size, distance and directions of ships at open sea.

… a nice way of opening up AND improving the control (= minimizing risk of being sunk)

I started reading an article “Computational modeling of visual attention“, by Itti & Koch, 2001. First conclusion: ‘perceptual saliency of stimuli critically depends on the surrounding context’. It deals with the idea of a (single) lady in a red dress.

Further reading on centre-surround mechanisms, brought me to this news article: “Visual Attention: How The Brain Makes The Most Of The Visible World” (ScienceDaily 2011), based on two articles of Sundberg, Mitchell and Reynolds, plus Reynolds and Heeger.

(Credit: Salk Institute for Biological Studies)

“When we instead direct our attention to a stimulus in the surround — the violinist let’s say — the neuron’s response to the now irrelevant bassist is suppressed.”

I response to the neuron-metafor used in my previous post, let’s do a thought experiment and quote the the news article and replace specific words:

Neurons Persons in the visual cortex group view the world through their “receptive fields,” the small portion of the visual field individual neurons persons actually “see” or respond to. Whenever a stimulus falls within the receptive field, the cell group member produces a volley of electrical spikes thoughts and/or responses, known as “action potentials” that convey information about the stimulus in the receptive field.
But the strength and fidelity of these signals also depends on other factors. Scientists generally agree that neurons persons typically respond more strongly when attention is directed to the stimulus in their receptive fields. In addition, the response of individual neurons individuals can be strongly influenced by what’s happening within the immediate surroundings of the receptive field, a phenomenon known as contextual modulation.
“The surround has the ability to suppress the neuron’s persons response,” explains first author Kristy Sundberg, Ph.D., a former graduate student in Reynolds’ lab and now a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. “It keeps us from responding all the time if there’s something that’s big and uniform and not particularly interesting or useful. This raised the possibility that the receptive field surround might provide a way to suppress the responses of task-irrelevant distracters.”

The text above seems to describe one previously found metafor.

Reading further on computational modeling, Itti and Koch state:

So, whereas certain features in the visual world automatically attract attention and are experienced as ‘visually salient’, directing attention to other locations or objects requires voluntary ‘effort’. Both mechanisms can operate in parallel. {Luckily we are not blind to the world outside our attention span}
…
Attention {1} allows us to break down the problem of understanding a visual scene into a rapid series of computationally less demanding, localized visual analysis problems. In addition to these orientating and scene analysis functions, attention {2} is also characterized by a feedback modulation of neural activity for the visual attributes and at the location of desired or selected targets. This feedback is believed to be essential for binding the different visual attributes of an object, such as colour and form, into a unitary percept. By this account, attention {3} not only serves to select a location of interest but also {4} enhances the cortical representation of objects at that location. As such, focal visual attention has been compared to a ‘stagelight’, successively illuminating different players as they take centre stage. Finally, attention {5} is involved in triggering behaviour, and is consequently intimately related to recognition, planning and motor control.

Visual attention is a principle also used by chess players, recognizing game states. However, when in a meeting, I asume groupmembers are not consiously aware of some sort of mindmap at hand. Two questions arise: (1) do we use a similar principle -like visual attention- when dealing with a narrative or a more abstract dialogue? Or don’t we? (2) What is the relation of principles known as ‘association’ and ‘priming’ to the constructs of visual attention?
Itti & Koch focus on focal bottom-up attention, and not on top down, volitional component of attention. If I understand this correct, this latter aspect seem scloser related to the second question regarding ‘association’ and ‘priming’.
All together, Itti & Koch describe (a) the dependance of saliency on context, (b) the idea model of a salience map, (c) the principle of Inhibition of return, (d) an ‘control/coordinate’ interplay of attention and eye-movement and (e) how sceneunderstanding and object recognition constrain selection of attention.

 

After reading a book for children and parents about the learning states of a brain (dutch: Breinlink), I realized I forgot to share an interactive sketch which resembles our beloved axons and dendrites.

We start with two persons, who have a dialogue. In this dialogue, the experienced reach and the effective reach are not the same. In the middle we find the effective reach. The experienced reach is highlighted from the red persons persective (first image) and from the yellow persons perspective (second image):

Whether or not this difference between reach stays the same when adding members to a dialogue is questionable:

Suppose we have some interaction in a group of five. Each dotted line represents an interaction between 2 groupmembers. The rosettes in the outer ring represent the interactions per person. The pentagon in the middle is an overlay of all interactions between the 5 persons. Only the reach of the red person is highlighted:

Let’s also suppose these persons all work for different organizations. They all have an organizational backbone. Let’s draw the interactions with these backbones as well:

The picture starts to resemble a small system of brain cells, each with its dendrites and axons, doesn’t it? Here’s a really short video:

{mp4}21102011001{/mp4}

Wanna play yourselves? Here’s the applet. Make sure your browser supports Java.

I found myself surprised with this interesting rectangular layout of a 3D/triangular model. Original (source):

And my here’s suggestion: