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The glow of night



Garden Night, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This image was captured as the light was fading. You wouldn’t think that the conditions were right for photography, but with the high ISO abilities of today’s DSLRS and an fast prime (35mm f/1.8 DX).

How the Mind Controls the Brain

The study of the brain is really only about 150 old. And as recently as 100 years ago there were arguments about whether at least the cerebral cortex was intrinsically specialized or was some how able to assign any task to any part. We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress to the point that many neuroscientists are willing to talk about human behavior in terms of the brain, leaving consciousness and mind out of the equation.

This attitude generally called materialism or functionalism is placed firmly within the scientific tradition of studying only that which can be weighed and measured. While I’m a neuroscientist and professionally interested in the advancements of brain science, I’ve always found this disregard of mind troubling. Its as if the most important part of human experience is being ignored or, worse, just explained away.

I’m reading Michael Gazzaniga’s Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique. Its full of great insight into brain science as one would expect from one of the leaders in the study of higher functions of the brain. But in the latter half of the book, as he tackles the tougher questions, I get that old feeling that mind is being dismissed as being some how unreal and not worthy of study. There’s this dichotomy created between “instinct” and these unexplained “rational” agents that he seems to want to make the part of the brain that we experience as mind.

For example, Gazzaniga has a nice discussion of the data showing that the mind frequently makes up reasons for actions after the fact. This post-hoc rationalization by the mind is especially true for emotions triggered in a way that avoids conscious awareness of the input. Normally, emotionally charged stimuli like disturbing photographs go to all parts of the brain simultaneously, so the mosaic of the brain acts in concert. Our minds are normally in sync with our feelings.

One dramatic example is the split brain patients that Roger Sperry and then he, Gazzaniga, studied. These patients have had surgery for severe, uncontrollable seizures. In an attempt to stop the spread of seizures, the major connection between the right and left half of the brain was surgically cut. Sperry described how these patients can appear to have two minds in one brain. If, under experimental conditions, information is presented to half of the brain only, the other half doesn’t have access to the information. So if half the brain is asked to do something, for example peel and eat a banana, the other half of the brain doesn’t know why. When asked, the ignorant other half makes up plausible rationalizations, saying for example, the banana looked tasty.

In normal volunteers these effects can be studied with presentations of pictures for a very short time, too short to percieve consciously. They register and can provoke feelings that are not available to conscious perceptual systems. So the subject rationalizes why an emotion is being felt. It seems likely to me that this kind of rationalization occurs in people with mood disorders. Even if the mood is generated internally, one will tend to explain it based on external events.

Some one who’s depressed will walk through life seeing many things as depressing just to rationalize why they feel sad.

Materialists like Gazzaniga want to use this kind of data to convince us that all there is is brain. These mental agents in the brain are just some kind of internal explaining agents, which of course makes the brain the motive force for an individual. The mind becomes like some kind of narrator trying to make sense of it all.

Yet there’s a very telling phenomenon called reappraisal that shows that mind does affect emotion. It’s a two way street.

An external event can trigger a strong emotion. For example some one yelling and shouting stirs up all kinds of feelings in us. But as soon as we realize that the shouting is not at us, but at some one else, the emotions melt away quickly. When you realize that the police lights in the rear view mirror are just passing and not pulling you over, the fear turns to relief. There’s almost a limbic decay constant you can feel as the feeling evaporates over a few seconds.

As john Searle points out, materialists have an easy time going from brain to perception, but a much harder time seeing mind affecting brain, mind being causitive. The problem is that because they dismiss mind as being unreal, they are left with this strange residual of consciousness that we all percieve, we all think is causative in the world, but doesn’t seem to really exist. How can something that isn’t real do anything? These strict materialists end up sounding like dualists because they recognize brain and brain events only. The mind is unexplained except for being some kind of hidden brain process.

Adopting the attitude that mind is real, embodied in the brain, allows one to see the role of mind in the world. And there is a fascinating interplay between the mind and perception of the world, both external world and the internal world of body signals like hunger and fear.

Back in Business



Dark Woods, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

My photography efforts have taken a bit of a back seat to my renewed interest in writing. But I have my older Macbook Pro (15″ 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo) up and running again as a dedicated machine.

I have to hand it to Apple. The video on the machine had died. I brought the machine to the Towson Apple Store on Sunday afternoon, getting a Genius Bar appointment immediately. They sent it off for repair, $310 flat rate for logic board replacement. I had it back early Wednesday morning. Video fixed and the video problem on wake from sleep is now resolved.

If I have a complaint, its that Apple fixed earlier machines with the Nvidia card but stopped at a serial number prior to mine when I was clearly having the same problem. However I feel like the repair price was fair for a 3 and a half year old machine.

There’s now support for the D7000 RAW captures in Aperture and as Thom Hogan has said, the conversions are near the equal of Nikon’s own Capture NX2 without the hassle.

The updated edition of Vincent Versace’s “Welcome to Oz” has arrived and I’ve only had a few minutes so far to flip through it. As you can see here, he’s so right about bringing darkness into photos using a clipped curve. Here I’m highlighting a central tree, trying to create a believable reality.

The image isn’t quite there, but as Vincent says, quoting Vince Lombardi, Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You first have to practice at practicing.

A Predictive Theory of Reality

Truth is what works. -William James

William James may have been America’s greatest philosopher. His philosophical approach, one he dubbed, “Pragmatism” underlies my approach here. During the Enlightenment, beginning with Decartes, philosophy struggled against simple, materialist views of reality. Just about every possible view of reality between simple materialism and complete acceptance of mental phenomenon. And of course the dualism of Descarte, accepting both as reality.

William James rejected these continental theories in favor of an approach that arose from a more naive point of view of a psychologist and experimentalist. Doubting everything, James took the scientific view that predictive ability was the value of any theory, whether in psychology or in philosophy.

Taking this pragmatic view of evaluating the truth of a theory, we look only at its predictive value. The more generally a theory can predict, the more true it is. If it misses some cases or is not generally predictive, a truer theory can be found.

If metaphysics is a theory of reality, what can be predicted? I’m working towards a systems based metaphysics that takes complexity into account with probability. This view predicts that knowledge of reality is derived purely from interactions with the systems around us, but that knowledge is ultimately limited by our perspective and system complexity. Getting outside of a system and having a longer, broader view is needed to transcend the limitations.

The Devil’s Triangle: Fear, Uncertainty, Control

The great goal of Deciding Better is to escape the trap of fear, uncertainty and control.

Decision making is hard when the outcome is uncertain. What’s so bad about a little doubt? Joined to uncertainty are two interacting factors: Fear and Control.

Uncertainty provokes anxiety. When we don’t know how things will turn out, the emotion of fear comes into play. It gets us ready for fight or flight. This is anxiety, a neurochemically induced cognitive state. It’s a deep seated brain mechanism with great adaptive utility. A little fear can be a very good thing at the right time.

The problem is that we experience this fear constantly. Then we call it stress and anxiety. Our big brains help us see how uncertain the world really is. I talked about it the other day in a discussion of what makes decisions hard. Decisions aren’t only hard, they provoke fear because of the associated uncertainty.

So what’s scary about uncertainty? Ultimately, its having to face a loss of control. When we’re masters of our environment and in control, we know what to expect. Lose that certainty and we lose control. Causing anxiety and stress.

Deciding better must include embracing uncertainty without engaging the other two sides of this triangle of fear and control. At least not any more than necessary.

The more we understand about the world and its complexity, the more profound our appreciation of how unpredictable the world really is. We are never really in control of outcomes and we are truly powerless to bend the world to our will. We can powerfully influence the world through our actions, but we can’t control anything other than how we choose to act in the moment.

I believe this is at the core of why what Stephen Covey called the world’s “wisdom literature” emphasizes humility and releasing the illusion that we’re in control of the future. At the same time, Covey started with his First Habit, “Be Proactive” as a step in controlling ourselves rather than controlling the world.

What makes decisions hard?

Lets start out with the simplest possible definition of a decision. In as situation with multiple possible courses of action, the choice is the behavior performed.

Animals do things that are remarkably purposeful and directed even with simple nervous systems. I think especially of animals that alter their environment to suit their own purposes. People build buildings, birds build nests, ants, bees and termites cooperate to build large and complex communal nests.

Its not hard for ants and birds to choose how to build these structures. They seem to do it based on internal rules that are pre-built into to the nervous system. I imagine there must be good and bad places to build an anthill, but the colony isn’t particularly bothered by the decision. They just get to work as group without blueprint. There is uncertainty about the final quality of the structure, but it doesn’t make deciding hard.

An architect has much harder decisions to make in choosing where to build a house, what kind of house should be built and how it should be built. In some of these decisions that need to be made, the number of potential pathways is large, but not all of the options are available. The home buyer wants a colonial, not a modern house. The range of potential choices is immediately restricted. Alignment of structures along north-south lines has well established rules and limits choice more. There are building codes that force choices.

The limitations on house building arise from bias, established practice- knowledge of what will happen depending on choices made. Its crystal clear that only layouts for colonials will yield colonial houses. You’ll never end up with a modernist cube.

But there are tons of hard decisions here as well. A single or two zone heating system? Well there are differences and cost and potential comfort. The cost is clear, but the benefits are much more uncertain. How will the areas of the house be used? Maybe three zones are really needed. Should the floor-plan be modified for energy efficiency? Maybe a heat-pump for some areas and area systems for others? And gas, electric? Hydrothermal?

Picking just one detail, we can wander out into a decision space where nothing is clear. Trading off cost and value is subjective and ultimate benefit hard to predict. Now start looking at interactions of this one decision with all of the others that need to be made, decisions get even harder. How many windows, insulation types create structural decisions that need to be made.

Decision making is hard because the choices are complex, the results of particular choices are uncertain and may have unintended consequences later on that we never even thought about.

Decisions making is hard for us compared to ants and birds because of our ability to contemplate the complexity and imagine a future we can’t control.

Clipping Curves

Leaf with reflection, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

My primary photographic mentor is Vincent Versace. His book “Welcome to Oz” is a relative short book, written in an unusual style that more workshop than manual, but it is full of techniques that permit manipulation of light within photographs.

I’ve had many influences over the years both as models of how to pursue this art and as technical inspirations. Vince is pretty accessible through his Flickr group in particular.

I’ve been struggling to suppress light in photographs. His advice has been to clip the light end of the curve in photoshop. And he’s right. It achieves the goal of lowering contrast and killing the brightest highlights. In this image I burshed back the darkness over the central leaf to have it emerge from the darker background.

Thanks Vince.

Topaz InFocus



In the Mud, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

InFocus is a Photoshop PlugIn that uses deconvolution to sharpen images by refocusing. Different from edge methods like unsharp masking. Back in my microscopy days, these methods were just starting to come into use, often with the use of multiple focus planes for virtual confocal microscopy.

This is not the best example as a photo, since the water is causing blur in this photo, but a good test of how this PlugIn works to recover detail.