Mind Control.

This article examines a brilliant new strategy for pain reduction: Simply teach people not to feel the pain. By using a live scanning device, known as an FMRI, people can quickly learn by trial and error how to control the contents of their own minds. I can see some truly revolutionary uses for this technology. In the future we might use such techniques to teach children at a very young age to control not only pain, but emotional responses as well, and even their own thought patterns.

I told you so.

CNN is reporting that Dolphins are now known to give each other names, making them capable of identity recognition, and interpersonal communication. As I posted earlier, Dolphins are among the ranks of a growing number of species which are now known to possess highly sophisticated language skills, potentially even parallel to our own.

Expectations and the law of averages.

During a conversation I had with Katherine the other night, we discovered a pair of hypotheses which would go a long way toward describing the ways in which I build expectations, and the ways in which I am disappointed or pleased with an anticipated event.

Question 1: Why am I more often disappointed by films, stories or albums than I am satisfied by them?

Hypothesis 1: This one is pretty simple. We figured out that this is caused by the way in which I filter events prior to experiencing them. If I hear a terrible album, I'll be less inclined to seek out further works by that artist, and so will never have my expectations exceeded by that artist's growth. If I hear a brilliant album, I will always compare later works of that artist to the highest point in their career. This makes it highly unlikely for that artist to achieve a critical success, at least in my mind.

Question 2: Is there an algorithm which might describe the approximate level of quality which a work would need to achieve in order to exceed my expectations?

Hypothesis 2: Indeed, it would seem that there is, and this algorithm is simpler than I thought it would be. It's simply a matter of examining the average level of quality which is routinely produced by that particular artist. If you were to rate every Radiohead album, for instance, ona scale of one to ten and average them all out, the work in question would need only to exceed the cumulative score of the preceeding albums. Make sense?