A couple years ago, a friend of mine, who is studying Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, introduced me to some ideas which completely changed the way I looked at the world and myself. Among those ideas was Csikszentmihalyi’s work in Positive Psychology. This lecture was another.
As an English student, this bridge between literature and psychology is extremely compelling for me. It runs about an hour, but I highly recommend it to anyone with the time who has an interest in the value of narrative in everyday life.
If you’ve seen Beowulf:The Movie or Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within, the ‘Uncanny Valley’ needs no introduction. Proposed by Masahiro Mori some thirty years ago, the valley is what happens when you encounter something closely resembling a human but it misses the mark in such a way that it triggers repulsion.
I remember how excited people were about the Final Fantasy movie. Everything seemed so lifelike, some even speculated that real life actors may soon be out of a job. (By the way, when people start making apocalyptic comments like that, I always get sceptical). As people sat through the film, this annoyance of the just-less-than-real CG caused a reversal. People stopped finding the movie awe-inspiring, and just started to find it repulsive. The acting and the writing were not bad, but the emotional content of the movie really required you to care deeply about the characters. This is much harder when you’re constantly comparing what you see to the real thing. People are very good at facial recogniton, and spend most of their days practicing it, so when you come across something trying to trick you, you can’t suspend disbelief. And if you think you’re looking at corpse, even subconsciously, what else should you be feeling but repulsion?
Alan Turing came up with a test to define if a computer had finally achieved human-like intelligence. You sit with, say, a text messaging device, and you can comunicate with two contacts: a person and a computer, but you are not told which contact is the machine. If, over the course of your conversation with the two, you cannot tell which is the real person, and which is the machine, that machine can be justifiably deemed intelligent. I think something like this might be the only way to get past the Uncanny Valley.
If, while watching a movie, you can’t tell which characters are human, and which are CG, the game and film industries will have finally clawed its way out of the valley. Until then, however, I don’t think there are any simple technical tricks which will be able to prevent this very natural response to facsimile faces.
The presentation in this game is remarkable. The interface applies the mouse in a completely unique way and the graphics are unparalleled in today’s flash games. Add to that an amazing soundtrack by Tin Hat Trio. Keep an eye out for more work from these designers.
I don’t know where I got the term. It might have been from Gödel, Escher, Bach. At the very least, I know what it means - I’ve been using the concept for a while to help understand analogies.
Look at the image I drew above. It has two distinct spacial interpretations. You’ve probably seen something like this before in an Escher drawing. Somehow, you interpret the image one way until *flip* the image reverses itself and you see it another way. You can’t interpret it both ways at once.
However, you might try showing an Escher drawing to a young child, and they won’t get that same flipping. Somehow that meaningful change doesn’t happen automatically. So are they only seeing their first interpretation and never flipping to another one? It seems to effortless for us, until you encounter something you haven’t learned to flip.
Try looking at this ballerina. Which way is it she turning, clockwise or counter-clockwise? Now: can you get her to turn the other way? It’s not easy for everyone.
This is one of those games you play, wishing you came up with the idea yourself. Yoshio Ishii has a truly innovative game here. Cursor* 10 cleverly uses a mechanism which records your interactions, then echoes it back to you. Your task is to collaborate with those echoes to solve puzzles. I think there is a lot that could be done with this premise.
The solution to insight puzzles often relies on restructuring. This usually means that the problem-solver has made a mistake somewhere in their interpretation of the problem, and before they can make a solution assumptions need to be changed. For example, take this insight puzzle:
A man has married over forty people in his life. He has never been divorced and he is not a polygamist. How can this be?
Like most people, I would get tripped-up by the word ‘married.’ Marriage the most important concept in the puzzle, and it helps define all the constraints: getting married more than once implies divorce or polygamy. Of course, a simple solution is to say, ‘He murdered all his wives.’ Technically, this solves the problem, but nobody would admit that the solution took any insight. The real solution is that the man is a priest, and by ‘married over forty people’ we mean he oversaw the ceremonies.
What characterizes this difference between the cop-out answer (murder) and the valid answer? Is it the change in meaning for the word ‘married’ which causes that ‘a-ha’ feeling?
Here is a very evocative 3-minute piece for the BBC on a man afflicted with anterograde amnesia.
I found the exchange at the end particularly haunting. He can not form memories, believing he exists in a void - marooned. Then, he spot’s his wife and he’s rescued, if only for a moment.
