There are those among us who are “health blind”, i.e., handicapped at sensing the health signals most of us easily recognize on others around us. They are the color blind. But we at O2Amp can fix that.1. The Health-Blind Among UsDespite the presence of modern electronic medical sensing tools, medical personnel still rely on their naked-eye visual skills when examining and judging the symptoms and health of patients (Savin et al. 1997).
The hardback of The Vision Revolution has been out for one year, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction it has received, including reviews in fantastic places like the Wall Street Journal and Sciam Mind and mentions in places like the New York Times. Soon it will appear in China, Korea and Germany.
You are an idea-monger. Science, art, technology – it doesn’t matter which. What matters is that you’re all about the idea. You live for it. You’re the one who wakes your spouse at 3 AM to describe your new inspiration. You’re the person who suddenly veers the car to the shoulder to scribble some thoughts on the back of an unpaid parking ticket. You’re the one who, during your wedding speech, interrupts yourself to say, “Hey, I just thought of something neat.” You’re not merely interested in science, art or technology – you want to be part of the story of these broad communities.
I recently finished the draft for my upcoming book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella, 2011). To give you a better idea of it’s aim, here is the current draft of the introduction.The Reading Instinct
Have a talent and enjoyment for inflicting prescribed doses of pain? Your dream job awaits. (Biology undergraduate required.) Contact: 555-8428 …as seen in classified ads.You are not supposed to be reading this. You’re an ape who never evolved to read, but you can do so because writing culturally evolved to be shaped just right for your illiterate visual system. As I have argue in my research and recent books, culture’s trick for getting writing into us was to harness our ancient visual system for a new purpose (The Vision Revolution), a trick also used for speech and music (upcoming in Harnessed). (Hint: The trick to harnessing is, in each case, to mimic nature.)
In How Many Limbs Should Humans Have? I described my Limb Law, an empirical law I discovered which relates how long an animal’s limbs are to how many limbs it has. This law is explained by virtue of animals having evolved a limb design that minimizes the amount of needed materials to reach out into the world (see links to my academic work in the previous piece).
In War of the Worlds, giant alien robots emerge out of the ground and begin vaporizing large numbers of actors. There’s a lot to like in those scenes, but there are three things I could not stand.Like those three legs they walked around on. Not their fragile-appearing spindly-ness,but their actual three-ness.
Note: RPI put out a press release today (4/29/2010) on my work today so I am reposting this with today's date also.
As I lay inside the box in the pitch blackness waiting for the show to begin, I wonder if the operator forgot to start it. Nothing is happening – no sound, no sights…nothing at all. Ah, wait, did I just hear something? Maybe, although perhaps that was just part of the box’s machinery I am not supposed to hear. But now I’m hearing it again, more distinctly – a raspy visceral groaning.Definitely the show has begun!
In Writing As Superpower I outlined how writing is for the eye, at the expense of the hands, despite the fact that our brains may have evolved to comprehend speech. We still prefer to 'listen' with our eyes, despite our eyes not having been designed for this. In Harness The Wild Eye I showed how non-linguistic visual signs are a visual system designed to recognize objects and efficiently react to the information. To begin to grasp why using object-like visual symbols for words is a good strategy, consider two alternative strategies besides the objects-for-words one.
In Writing As Superpower we discussed that writing is really for the eye, at the expense of the hands, despite the fact that our brains may have evolved to comprehend speech. We still prefer to 'listen' with our eyes, despite our eyes not having been designed for this.The way we write is for the hand but the shapes of our symbols are for the eye. And that is due to culture.
Communicating with the dead is a standard job requirement for a psychic such as the infamous medium John Edward of the television show Crossing Over who claims to be able to listen to what the deceased family members of his studio audience have to say. Hearing the thoughts of the dead would appear to be one superpower we certainly do not possess. Surely this superpower must remain firmly in the realm of fiction (Edward included). However, a little thought reveals that we in fact do this all the time. …by simply reading.
There’s a good chance that you’re listening to music while reading this, and if you happen not to be, my bet is that you listen to music in the car, or at home, or while jogging. In all likelihood, you love music – simply love it. Why? What is it about those auditory patterns counting as “music” that makes us relish it so?
