I stumbled upon an excellent lecture on the inner workings of the human brain.
Ramachandran presents a fascinating look at the relationship between what we see and how we interpret things. I love his idea with the $3 mirror to train the brain. I hope this method proves successful with more patients. I’m wondering if people can be trained to see color when they hear sounds.
By the way, I was with the 99% of the people with the choice of the Martian alphabet.
Enjoy!
Will Wright is quite remarkably one of the most influential game designers. He has given us amazing games like the Sims and Spore, which I have greatly enjoyed. Not only that, he has provided new frameworks of creating games using simple rules and algorithms.
I found one of his talks along with a famous British composer, Brian Eno, on fora.tv. In this joint talk, these two guys discuss how generative systems are developed and explored in the world of music and games. More specifically, how these generative systems evolve through time and how their interaction with the audience or the player affects things.
One of the most interesting things about this talk is the reaction of the speakers as they try to have a conversation while the music is being played in the background. It is quite interesting to note how their tone, volume, posture, and speed of conversation changes as the music changes.
One of the most interesting things that Wright mentioned was the idea of compressing information that looks quite complex but can be stored in a very small amount of bits. There is actually a very nice book on this topic by a Nobel laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann titled: The Quark and the Jaguar. Gell-Mann was able to look at the overwhelming catalogs of sub-atomic particles and using just a few simple rules he came up with the constituent quark model for hadrons. In his book, he describes how information and complexity play together. The book gets a bit boring by the end, but it is quite entertaining and informative for the most part.
Enjoy!
Puneet Khetarpal