Lucy In The Sky With Scientists

Posted on September 28, 2015 by admin

I was fortunate enough to attend a psychedelics seminar that presented the results of the first ever fMRI study that investigated what happens to the human brain on LSD. Read on to explore the science, my theories and as always the anthropological experience.

The conference

This was not a typical scientific seminar, there were almost no ‘professionals’ attending yet the conference hall was packed with around 150 people that were really excited, which is a rare case for university seminars. These people actually paid to support the study in what is possibly the largest crowd funding scientific experiment to date (the money side was head by WALACEA a site trying to democratize science).

The ‘Self’ network trying to predict the ‘meme’ machine we are made of.

I arrived early and used the time to conduct an informal survey. Most of the people were there because psychedelics had helped them or loved ones. Many of them had been following the media divulging very positive results regarding psychedelics experimental treatment for anything from alcoholism to the fear of death in those terminally ill. ‘My dad had terminal cancer and from what I read I wish he had access to psychedelic treatment’, one women told me and I found myself sharing with her and others my limited knowledge.
Psychedelics will reveal the scaffolding ‘you’ are really made of. The various networks that are creating a meme machine that is constantly connecting “cause” and “effect”, trying to predict the sensory inputs, will be exposed. These networks know nothing about permanence, they are in constant change being turned on and off according to environmental influence. It is only the higher level “self “ that has created an inaccurate model of permanence. This ‘self’ is just a network that links the other networks together trying to predict (and thus influence) the behavior of the whole organism, as well as other organisms (if you are interested you can read more in my neuro-philosophy paper). Once this specific network is destabilized and reality is experienced without it, a familiar sensation takes over, we have all felt it as young children before we had a “self” and if we are perceptive enough we get a slight glimpse of it every night for a brief moment before we fall asleep. If experienced in the right environment there is only wonder and openness in this state of being.

Some Background

Amanda fielding from the Beckley foundation for consciousness and drug policy research, which has been supporting this research, told a tale from her personal history. When psychedelics were still legal, they had a massive impact on her life, and she began working on the connection between consciousness states and blood flow to the brain way before fMRI was everywhere.

Prof David Nut, used his exquisite British wit and love of Aldous Huxley to delved into the idiocy of policy makers when it comes to drug research. “Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.” – he quoted Huxley hoping that after 50 years of spewing blatant lies policy makers will start looking at the science that shows the massive positive impact psychedelics can have and indeed have had on most pre-Christian cultures.

The results in a nutshell
With great clarity and a tad of British shyness Dr Robin Carhart-Harris presented his experiment and preliminary results to the mostly no- scientific crowd. 20 healthy subject with previous experience with psychedelics (16 m 4 f) received 75 mcg of lsd intravenously (which gives a stronger affect that digesting it. This was chosen because of the extremely expensive price of 3000 pounds! for a dose of ‘legal’ LSD from a lab in Switzerland). They were scanned in an fMRI machine while resting and then also listened to music in an experiment designed by Mendel Kaelen.

The ‘normal’ brain on the left (few controlled high ways) and the brain on Psilocybin (many new roads open), a graphics based on fMRI functional connectivity data.

I’m going to start with a metaphor that wasn’t used and is a little wider than what can totally be proven but I’ll show some evidence to support it and suggest some more experiments that can be done to test it so bear with me. Imagine your brain is a city with many neighborhoods each of them with its distinctive characteristic and function in the city. There is the stressed financial district dealing with money, soho with its art and hipsters, the industrial area with all the factories and down town with its restaurants. In order for the city to function these different areas have to communicate with each other and pass information and goods between them. To do that, imagine these neighborhoods were connected by highways but not everyone could get on these high ways. There were tolls and these highways were highly regulated by a central government that decided what has to go where. Then, imagine one day the toll company went on strike and these highways were closed down. What would happen?

At first each neighborhood would be less influenced and constrained by the others and could have more freedom in managing its activity. But for the city to still keep running some information would need to be shared and collaborated so the back roads would start getting used and new roads would start to be built, these roads wouldn’t be as regulated at the high ways so some soho artists could go to the financial district and start painting the buildings even if they weren’t asked to while some accountants and lawyers could go downtown to have a good time.

In this metaphor the people are the electrical brain activity, the neighbourhoods are the specialized networks that deal with specific types of information and the. The 5ht2a serotonin receptors in your brain sit at critical nodes constricting information flow, performing the function of a “Toll”. Lsd and psilocybin over stimulate these receptors and the ‘toll company’ goes on strike.

Carhart-Harris uses the term The Entropic Brain Hypothesis to outline his theory that claims that the brain in in a high entropic state with a higher disorder and more flexibility while on psychedelics.

How is this seen in brain imaging?

Passive eyes closed resting state fMRI scan Psilocybin decreases BOLD signals in DFM and decouples them. (R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., 2012; 2013)

Passive eyes closed resting state fMRI scan
Psilocybin decreases BOLD signals in DFM and decouples them. Similar results found for LSD.
(R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., 2012; 2013)

It turns out that this ‘toll company’ is actually responsible for a lot of the brain activity, and the main results seen in fMRI for both LSD and psilocybin is less blood flow in these critical areas of the brain. Especially in the Default Mode Network that deals with ‘self-memories’ and according to Carhart fits well with Fraud’s notion of ego (and my idea of a self being a model that predicts the organism’s behavior)

MEG data showing decrease in brain wave activity (Muthukumaraswamy et al., 2013)

Now when you look at what’s left of the blood flow you see that the correlations between areas grow representing this higher degree of connectivity and when looking as close by areas the blood flow becomes less homogeneous.

MEG results for LSD weren’t presented yet, but a previous paper (Muthukumaraswamy et al., 2013) showed that decrease in activity of brain waves each, bandwidth decreasing in a different area.

One surprising result in which LSD was different from psilocybin was that LSD increased blood flow to the visual areas while psilocybin didn’t. Carhart postulated that this might be because of the different time line of the drugs, the psilocybin when administered intravenously takes affect very fast while LSD doesn’t and the timing of the scan might show a specific phase of the drug. I would be very interested in getting the exact details of the experiment and comparing them, to see if there were any other changes in the experiment design that could explain this, some environmental influence that would activate the visual area in the LSD experiment more than it did in the psilocybin one.

Predictive Coding and my dream thesis

If you’ve been following my latest blog post you’ve already heard of predictive coding. The predictive coding framework claims that in essence the brain is a prediction machine, it tries to predict it’s sensory input to form a model of the environment (including itself). Predictive coding explains that the cognitive system is ordered hierarchically, in levels (Bastos et al., 2012). For any pair of levels, the higher-level will have hypotheses predicting the bottom–up signals from lower-levels. If the predictions are good, the bottom–up signals will be ‘explained away’. Only discrepancies between the winning prediction and the bottom–up signal remain as ‘prediction error’. This framework explains that sensory information is processed probabilistically, with prior predictions and posterior inferences made based on Bayesian optimized probabilities.

Google deep dream.
10-30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. Allowing a layer to become over active will produce “hallucinations”.

Since psychedelics seem to change the flow of information represented in the brain this framework can be a great model to help explain what is actually going on. Within the predictive coding framework I would postulate that Priors coming from the Default Mode Network aren’t passed to other networks and become less important in explaining away the bottom up sensory information. This will cause an increase in prediction error in lower levels of the brain. To deal with this, these lower levels will have to update their model more frequently without the constraint from higher layer priors. This can explain the visual hallucinations and the subjective experience of heightened senses, more vivid colours, sounds, taste and touch. The tree is perceived as greener because higher layer abstract prediction saying ‘yeah, it’s green, we’ve seen this a million times’ can’t reach the lower layer and turn off the incoming data. Furthermore subjective reports claim that hallucinations start out as just variations of a noisy signal, like clouds shifting and morphing, but after a few second of maintaining the same visual input a very vivid totally unrelated image might appear. This can be explained by accumulation of “prediction error” that finally makes it’s way through some back road and connect with some higher level network which suddenly explains away the prediction error with wrong higher level priors. This can also explain “trippy repetitive thoughts” because higher layer abstract networks can also be triggered in certain cases and hyper activated.

In other words Prediction error that gets into a network will be ‘overly explained” within that network which is released from it’s normal constrains This is exactly what is seen in Google deep dreams artificial neuron network. Neural networks trained to discriminate between different images can generate images too by inverting them (Mahendran & Vedaldi, 2014) and letting a layer enhance what it has ‘found’ causes very trippy images to be produced. Indeed, Cartheit mentioned that he believes something very similar is happening to the brain on psychedelics.

Forward vs backwards connections –
Granger causality
(Zheng & Colgin, 2015)

Psychedelic Treatments

Psychedelic treatment for addictions and post trauma are getting amazing result (see ref at the end). My speculative theory is that traumatic memories or addictive behavior are usually stored in the ‘worst neighborhoods’ isolated from the rest of the brain activity but still have managed to get enough access to the “tolls” and send out their predictions to the rest of the brain, effecting the general mood and behavior. While on psychedelics other networks that are being activated have an opportunity to reach that bad neighborhood and renovate it, add some color, good food or financial maintenance. This does work both ways however which is why the right “set and setting are crucial” and why Psychedelics should be treated with the utter most respect and care. There are many reports out the of a bad trip having long term and even permanent results on people.

My dream thesis

Recent papers have found that slow brain waves (alpha and beta) correspond with top down activity and expectations the brain creates while gamma activity corresponds to bottom up activity. They did this by using MEG data and performing a Granger causality analysis that can assess what signal is more likely to cause the other signal. I believe that comparing this type of analysis on the brains of people that have ingested psychedelics will allow us to characterize the different flow of information and possibly prove this theory. Specifically I would expect to see a lower Ganger causality in the Alpha bands coming from higher levels of the hierarchy to lower levels showing the decreased effect of the higher level priors. While within lower close by areas I would expect to see higher Granger causality in the Alpha band (if MEG is accurate enough to source locate close enough areas). And perhaps it would even be possible to locate areas that have a higher Gamma band Granger causality than usual because prediction error has been rerouted through them.

Short Summary

Couldn’t resist being a fan and asked Carhart-Harris for a photo

The science of psychedelics is finally starting to develop after years of being blocked by political reasons. Understanding how these substances affect us has the potential not only to teach us about ourselves but also to help treat some of the 21st centuries biggest problems. We really shouldn’t let closed mindedness stop the progress of this field, so how about sharing these thoughts with some friends or colleague?

___________

Psilocybin showing success in treatment of addictions and OCD:

•Alcohol addiction: abstinence increased significantly. Gains were largely maintained at follow-up of 36 weeks. (Bogenschutz et al., 2015)

•Nicotine addiction – 80% showed abstinence at 6-month follow-up (typically <35%) (Johnson, Garcia-Romeu, Cosimano, & Griffiths, 2014)

•OCD – tested in nine subjects in a within-subjects design. Produced significant decreases (Wilcox, 2014)

Adventure Mode

Posted on September 8, 2015 by admin

After more than 10 days at burning man I’m going to try to explain what makes Black Rock City a unique niche environment that biases behavior towards playfulness, improvisation and adventure. I’ll try to explain why this is so rewarding for the brain and why the hippies got the ‘go with the flow’ thing right. Wish me luck and read on!

The man at the center

The predictive coding framework (Friston & Kiebel, 2009) claims that in essence the brain is a prediction machine, it tries to predict it’s sensory input and form a model of the environment as well as predict the best interaction with the environment. The reason for this is flat out survival. Biological life must “maintain their states and form in the face of a constantly changing environment” (Friston, 2010) yet interactions with the environment are needed for food and reproduction.

One way to make predictions easier for the brain is to actively intervene and change the environment, making it more predictable (Clark, 2013). Almost all animals do that, create nests, lairs or mark their territory. Human’s just do it on a much larger scale. We create cities, social norms and chain stores to make things easier to predict.

Black Rock City is a unique man made environment, on one hand it is more predictable than most cities. It is designed in a shape of a clock with the man at its center, there are public toilets at every corner and a fence making sure people don’t get lost in the desert. Due to the high ticket price and the gifting economy an environment of plenty is created making it much safer than most cities. Not to say that crime doesn’t exist, our bike got stolen from under our nose and I heard of a sexual assault in another camp but relatively speaking, it is safe and allows your brain to stay away from ‘fight or flight’ mode. Safety exists also in the social domain, as Burning Man defines itself as an inclusive community which allows for radical self expression. You will not be excluded for being naked, or gay, or having a unique fetish or hobbie.

no way to predict the next moment? WTF is that?

The predictable infrastructure is the basis for all the mayhem that grows on top of it. Just standing on a street corner you have no idea what crazy art installation, costumed person, game, or strange social interaction might come your way. The weather too includes maddening dust storms that come out of no-where and the fact that there is no cell phone reception (well, this year to my dismay there actually was some) makes creating concrete plans and sticking to them virtually impossible.

So what does this have to do with improvisation and playfulness?

Let’s get back to the brain for a second, these predictive processes in the brain are organized in a hierarchy. For any pair of levels, the higher-level will have hypotheses predicting the bottom–up signals from lower-levels. If the predictions are good, the bottom–up signals will be ‘explained away’. Only discrepancies between the winning prediction and the bottom–up signal remain as ‘prediction error’.

Creating a top down prediction that is far from reality = delusion

For instance, while lower levels of your brain exposed to a tree leaf will model the greenness of it to great detail, higher layers will just use an abstract word and shut down the lower layers, limiting the activation of the lower level green ‘colour networks’.

Many improvisational techniques use exercises that overwhelm the ‘higher’ levels of the brain and split up the hierarchy allowing lower layers to be the ones explaining the input signals. For instance, try acting out an action but saying that you are doing something else or pointing at a familiar object but giving it a different name. These exercising force your brain to move away from ingrained prediction patterns confuse your higher verbal brain function that are used to predicting (describing) reality.

The lower layers react faster as the information doesn’t have to be carried all the way to the top and this added speed and fluidness is what improvisation is all about.

Why is that so much fun? Well, the dopamine reward system of your brain actually reacts much stronger to surprise rewards than to predictable ones. By not having these higher levels expectations, the brain can experience a higher degree of reward, and because of the higher refresh rate of the lower levels, your brain will be getting rewarded much more often.

A tiny part of the fun

The feeling of safety is also crucial for professional improvisers, the fear of messing up blocks the brain and puts actors, dancers, or musicians into ‘freeze’ mode.

The massive amounts of unpredictable information in Black Rock City combined with the safe structure are a controlled exercise in overwhelming higher levels of your brain. The addition of some chemicals that further reduce higher functions of the brain increase this affect even more. As many will testify, this is a city made for tripping. Tripping reduces the activity of these higher levels and takes your brain back to a more childlike state. It’s no surprise that one of the main themes of burning man is giant playgrounds and giant games (my camp was part of that too with human foosball and creating a giant billiard with balling balls). While our brain can be reduced to a childlike state our body stays the same, thus we need to increase the size of the playground to give us the same magical, almost overwhelming feeling, we had as children climbing the monkey bars reaching out to the sky.

hippies get some things right

There is a fine balance to be found – if the top-most layers expect too much they will ‘enslave’ the lower layers and try to force ‘reality’ do be something that it’s not. While totally getting rid of the higher layers isn’t a good thing either, it makes the brain incredibly susceptible to the current stimulus coming from the environment, which can be cold, dusty or dirty on the physical level or crushingly sad and depressing if you go into the temple. This sounds very zen, but you can get you brain into a state of knowing that “everything is going to be ok and even if it’s not ok it will still be ok.” This is just the right amount of higher layer biasing towards a positive prediction but still freeing the lower layers to react in an improvised way to whatever actually happens.

Mood badges! brainstorming with some pro artists and burners got me to this idea.

I found a cool way to slightly hack this system using ‘mood badges’. An LED lit badge that signals out to the world what type of interaction would be recharging. “Teach me stuff”, “Flirt with me” or “Tell me a secret”, became a setting for an improvised social interaction that was deeper and more satisfying than the usual small talk conversations. I’m seriously thinking of wearing them in my daily life, or maybe even making a cell phone app out of it. Anyone interested?

Anyway if you want to read more about predictive coding and the ‘sense of self’ you can read my neuro philosophy paper: 2015-07-13 Predictive Coding final5. Or read some of the papers in the references.

P.S Thank Brodi for the pics!

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138. http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787

Friston, K., & Kiebel, S. (2009). Predictive coding under the free-energy principle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1211–1221. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0300

Friston, K., Thornton, C., & Clark, A. (2012). Free-energy minimization and the dark-room problem. Frontiers in Psychology, 3(MAY), 1–7. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00130

Pre Burn

Posted on August 25, 2015 by admin

Burning man might be a week long social experiment/festival for some, but for other’s it’s a year-long hobby that increasingly takes over their life as the burn gets closer. Hanging out in San Francisco I got to meet some of the people who invest their time and money to create the magic that is Black Rock city. Read on

Where dreams are built

The first time I walked into Nimby (not in my back yard), a massive warehouse in Oakland, the cynical bastard in me went to sleep for a few hours. It was at the back stage where dreams were being set up, like some scenes in Niel Gaiman’s Sandman. All around me people were working on projects that they chose to work on, investing their time and money on something that had no practical use. “We just like building stuff,” most people would tell me when I asked why they were doing this.

Even Dr. Brainlove can’t escape bureaucracy of licencing and a license plate.

I joined a group called Phage which exists for around 10 years trying to ‘infect the playa with science’, their art car called Dr. Brainlove models brain activity by using 400 meters of LED’s on a massive steel framework that can be climbed on.

After running around taking pictures and poking my nose around I asked to help and was put to work painting. I was delighted by the large percentage of women that were involved, many of them leading the project.

Build parties

Nimby might be where all the heavy duty work took place, but cutting of the LEDs, soldering and the programing mostly happened at the crazy house of two amazing technical artists (check out their web site called sustainable magic and their workshops and events). I have always used the technique of calling something a party + ordering pizza and beers to get people to build my garden, paint my walls, help me move to a new apartment. These people have taken it one step further with their ‘build parties’. I practiced being a Chinese factory worker for a few hours of cutting LEDs. My main contribution was probably finding a way to reduce the labor for that specific task by sliding the LEDs then cutting them just once instead of cutting them on both sides.

Chinese factory worker, just with music, friends and as many breaks as I want.

I also joined the sustainable magic crew in a last minute attempt to save the day by using their laser cutter to create thousands of plastic pieces that will hold in place the material used to defuse the LEDs light. The warehouse they work in was another small version of Nimby with amazing art created for burning man in previous years.

Another project I helped out with a little, mostly by giving massages, although I got to grind some of the rust away with this massive machine without killing myself, was the Tree of missed connections. A bunch of friends working in their back yard creating a LED-lit climbable tree, yes people like to climb on thing at burning man!

The Tree of missed connections

Both these projects were funded using crowd funding and let’s admit it, would probably not have come into being if the day jobs of a lot of the participants and their friends wasn’t the booming high tech industry in the area. This doesn’t lessen their accomplishment by one bit but shows that the freedom to create comes at a price that most people probably can’t afford.

Some amazing art from last year!

These people and thousands of others creating the art for burning man will be working right up to the burn (and after). They will reach the playa even more exhausted than most but at least for some the added value of creating something together as a group is enough to keep them going and send them raving into the night… well, some chemical assistance might help as well.

See you on playa!

Let’s Play

Posted on August 24, 2015 by admin

San Francisco is known for its luscious sex scene. Visiting the city I took the opportunity to explore some of the play parties here and came back with mixed feelings… read on

The info

There seem to be two main venues catering to different sections of the population. “mission control” parties, catering to the fetish oriented, sex positive, queer friendly community that like to play dress up; and “club kiss”, for the hetro-normative swinger population which requires ‘pre-approval’ by the organizers. Behind the scenes both parties are actually organized by the same people and I was slightly disappointed to discover that both parties used the same venue, a two floor strange building, with two play rooms on the bottom floor and a dance floor on top.

80’s porn influences?

The beginning

Both parties began with the thing I hate most in the world, small talk. There was a definite difference though. Mission control party was more like a community, there was a feeling that most people knew each other, while club kiss had more of an awkward feeling to it. Both parties did not serve alcohol due to licensing reasons but people were allowed to bring their own drinks to serve as a social lubricant.

The screaming clown- not sexy!!!

Mission control had half an hour of terrible amateurish performances. They showed non classic body types which was nice but the actual ‘stripping’ performances were terrible. At some point two half naked clowns began screaming and I actually had to leave the room because it was too awful. When I came back it didn’t get any better, they were in the middle of performing a cult-like ceremony. “Put you hand on somebody’s ass and repeat after me”, a woman on the stage was saying, “Ask first!” she reminded the crowd. I refused to take part and don’t even remember the words they were saying, something about a ‘sexual revolution’. If I wanted idiot brainwashing rituals I’d have stayed in my religious school.

In general the club kiss crowd seemed older, mostly in their 40s, while mission control party had a wider variety of ages. In both parties the participants ‘looks’ were probably slightly higher than average but again, there was a wide variety.

The negotiations

At mission control, most of the party was centered around the dance floor which was way too hot and crowded, people were catching up and some light ‘play’ was taking place. There was some action in the play rooms but they were never really packed. At club kiss at some point the dance floor was totally empty, people were there to have sex!

Well, how do you go about negotiating a ‘play date’? I guess things were mostly honest and open but also a little business like. The thing I disliked most was the fact that couples were dealt with as a single unit. Even though in mission control people didn’t have to come as couples, two guys could just come together, even if they weren’t gay (this somehow didn’t affect the men/women percentage too much) their playing was still totally couple oriented. The fact that I find most guys unattractive meant the partner I was there with was limited by the interactions he could have. I did feel very safe throughout the entire party, a lot more safe than normal dance parties.

The revolution is still couple oriented

The finish

The truth is I wasn’t horny at all in either of the playing situations I participated in. There was novelty and fun in them but it really was more like an ‘act’ for me. At the mission control we played a little with another experienced couple and I came up with ‘games’ style ‘who’s better at what?” The club kiss play room really looked like some massive porno movie site. And I found myself ‘fluffing’ some of the couple around me while one of them went to the bathroom or to get some lube. Towards the end the organizers kept walking in “10 minutes to lights on,” they shouted trying to get people to leave. “Honey, forget about your underwear just put your clothes on” someone said just before I left, and I cracked up trying to imagine if there was anywhere else I could ever hear that sentence.

Rail Meat

Posted on August 7, 2015 by admin

Boats have always been my nemesis. Last time, in Thailand, I threw up and swore I would never get on a boat again, the time before that, in Ireland, was even worse and my gastric fluids turned into fish bait! Somehow a sail boat competition I got invited to made me give boats another chance… read on for details…

It’s crowded out there!

Don’t worry, no one really let me drive

I’ll start with the end, and get the suspense over with. I didn’t throw up! I’m not sure if it was the relatively calm bay or the fact that I had to be physically active, but I was mostly fine. The physical activity was what convinced me to come along. Every person on a sail boat has to help with the sailing, even if it’s just being ‘rail meat’ like I was, having to crawl under the sail and switch sides every time the boat turns to help keep its balance and speed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because before you actually start sailing there is a lot of prepping to do. I usually complain about the hassle of lead climbing, having to go through the rope and clip on all the quick draws. Well sailing is sort of like that, just 100 times worse. You have to unpack the sail, thread lots of ropes in the right places, tie them and then recoil them so it doesn’t get too messy. The knots were mostly figure 8 knots I use in climbing so I had that down but the rest was totally new with the pro lingo being total gibberish to me. The only word I still remember is ‘head’ for the top part of the sail. Oh, and grinders, can’t forget that, they are these handles that are used to turn the ropes that controls the sail.

All those ropes!

Turns out sailing races are all about getting to the starting line on time and in the right position. These things are really hard to maneuver and never stand still. So if you accidently go over the start line ahead of time you disqualify. Also with so many boats so close together it was pretty hard to avoid crashing into others. Luckily, there were two pro sailors on board who directed the 5 others who didn’t know much of anything. I got the very important job of calling out the depth so we don’t get stuck in mud before the starting line. Then I was sent forward where my meager weight could be used as counter balance. It was pretty scary to duck under the sail and switch sides as the boat turned sometimes tilting sideways at crazy angles. It seemed very easy to slip and fall over board. I got a few bruises and screamed a few times but it was good fun.

Sailing races are also like judo, there are various categories based on length. In our category (over 30 ft) there was only one other boat, which we left in the dust! We even managed to catch up with some of the faster boats that started ahead of us, even without using the secret weapon of a spinnaker, an extra massive sail that is used to go upwind. The pros thought it would be too much for us to handle.

The most impressive part to watch was actually reversing the boat back into it’s docking place! Talk about some tight maneuvering. After that we had to fold all the gear, but it wasn’t as bad as expected. All I had to do was use my weight once more to keep the sail from flapping while others folded it. And we could do it while doing what sailing enthusiasts seem to like best, drinking beer!

Silicon smiles

Posted on July 28, 2015 by admin

A new Start-Up decided to celebrate its success in a fancy party, and on my first night in San Francisco I got an invite and decided to play dress-up. Read on.

Dress up time!

It’s probably been more than two years since I put on high heels and a pretty dress and tried to play normal. The dress, bought on a shopping spree with my sister was a great success, as for the normal I’ll leave it to you to judge.

It’s also been a long time since I was close to the start-up world, but after around the third or fourth conversation I got the point and remembered why I hated that world. No one was there to have fun, they were all selling something; their start-up, a friends’ start-up, office space for start-ups, you name it. Except for a few unlucky friends of friends that got sucked in by the promise of free alcohol and hors-d’oeuvres.

I tried getting some people to dance but it didn’t work. The music was pretty shitty but I spent some time on the dance floor, twirling alone, looking around, at all the masks, all the people who cared too much about how they presented themselves to actually make a connection or have fun. The real rich ones were mostly older investors; there was this slight distance around them. The entrepreneurs would sometimes ‘disrespect’ the venue and came with flip-flops and short. ‘We don’t play this game’ their game face was saying.

Empty dance floor

There were a lot of women, I’d guess around half were from the actual industry and not just girlfriends. There was a really annoying affect that I noticed. If I was talking to a guy or in a group anyone who wanted to join the conversation would make eye contact, smile, and wait to be invited. But if I was talking to another women they would just barge in and introduce themselves, positioning themselves at the top of the social hierarchy.

Free booz = drunk men = me almost punching some of them

It was only in the after party in another club that things reverted to usual, business hours were over and sexual frustrated was in. I can’t even remember how many guys hit on me each in an idiotic and more annoying way then the other. I practiced being assertive and not my violent crazy self. “If you respect me you will respect my space and take your hand off my knee,” I told an Indian man who apologized and excused his behavior as culture differences. “I’ve been to India, so don’t bullshit me,” I said with a death stare.

Most men ended up going to a strip club, probably woke up with a killer hangover the next day, ubered to work and sat in front of the computer all day feeling empty inside. It’s a sad world out there folks, filled with silicon smiles and bubble dreams just waiting to burst.

What are you?

Posted on May 25, 2015 by admin

A collection of information processing units designed through millennia of evolutionary trial and error to effectively model the environment and simulate interactions between the environment and these units.

Effectively?

Receptive fields of V1 neurons. These basic structures are the most effective way to encode natural images.

Receptive fields of V1 neurons. Combining these basic structures is the most effective way to encode complex natural images.

Yes, one buzz word would be ‘sparse coding’. Only a minority of units are needed to encode a typical stimulus. This is well documented in the low level V1 visual system in the brain. The receptive fields (the stimulaus that causes the neurons to fire) of V1 neurons that create a basis for all images are optimized for ‘natural images’.

It seems plausible that the rest of the units work in the same manner. Take emotions for instance. Wouldn’t they just be ‘sparse coding’ efficiently encoding interactions with the environment?

Fear, love, hate, disgust…they are all just a basis set, optimized to encode ‘naturalistic’ interaction.

To what end?

To perform actions on the environment that will ensure survival. Any complex pattern requires a local decrease in entropy in order to different between inside and out, between environment and organism. In life forms the whole metabolic system couples exothermic reactions, that is, energy producing processes with endothermic processed that need that energy. Most life on earth arises from the energy delivered from the sun’s photons exciting electrons to a higher level, or as the biologist Albert Szent Györgyi put it “Life is interposed between two energy levels of the electron” (Although some life depends on deep sea thermal outlets or volcanos). The survival of life depends on slowing the downwards cascade of this energy; maintain this local minimization of entropy. Any interaction with the environment is very costly although some interaction is needed to obtain more energy/food. This is why the the end goal of these units is to simulate possible action outcomes with the environment and choose which of them will minimize the loss of entropy/maximize survive chances. Another buzz word in this context would be, minimizing ‘free-energy’, or surprisal which is the information theory equivalent of entropy. The free energy principle tries to explain how (biological) systems maintain their order (non-equilibrium steady-state) by restricting themselves to a limited number of states. So if you are one of those who is constantly searching for a ‘goal’, minimization of entropy/free-energy seems to be as good as it gets. Striving for complex knowledge structures and creating just about anything and minimizing waste fit well with this idea but so does bringing more life into this world and cleaning my room.

Is that all that you are?

Me chronologically

me chronologically inverted

me, least information on top

‘I’ am a model within a model, projected out into the world allowing others with a similar algorithm to effectively model me. Or perhaps one could turn the tables. The effective modeling others conduct when encountering ‘me’ is mirrored back into these units as a simplified singular version of itself.

One could postulate that there are as many ‘I’ as the people who know me, although they too are probably composed of an effective sparse basis.

For more reading:

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(03), 181–204. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477

Cook, N. D., Carvalho, G. B., & Damasio, A. (2014). From membrane excitability to metazoan psychology. Trends in Neurosciences, 37(12), 698–705. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2014.07.011

Friston, K., & Kiebel, S. (2009). Predictive coding under the free-energy principle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1211–1221. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0300

Friston, K., Thornton, C., & Clark, A. (2012). Free-energy minimization and the dark-room problem. Frontiers in Psychology, 3(MAY), 1–7. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00130

Olshausen, B., & Field, D. (1996). Emergence of simple-cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for natural images Nature, 381(6583), 607-609 DOI: 10.1038/381607a0

My Dutch Week

Posted on November 16, 2014 by admin

I’m still trying not to get run over by bicycles every day and feeling ridiculous being the only one standing on their feet at a traffic light. But I’m hoping to get a bicycle next week. Still contemplating whether I should get a bicycle helmet and be ridiculed.

no words!

Yummy!

I’ve also stood in a long line to eat the “best” pancake in Amsterdam. It was good but not worth the wait. On the way back I encountered one of the strangest festivals ever. It’s called Black Pete parade and it’s this strange take off on Santa. But in the Dutch version Santa comes from Spain and his elf is a black guy called Pete. Some say Pete is black because he comes through the chimney but I’m not sure that would explain his frizzy hair. It’s more likely to do with the Dutch history of imperialism and slavery. So basically you have a bunch of white people getting dressed up as black people and running around carrying presents and giving away sweets while a white Santa is riding on a horse towering over all of them. Sounds racist? Well some people think so and there is a big debate including heated demonstrations for and against Black Pete.

I think I was expecting a little more from the public transportation here. It’s frequently late and only a few lines work throughout the night on the weekend. I’m still trying to figure out the garbage disposal system. It seems very complex and I’ve even met a girl who keeps her wet garbage in the freezer because you can only throw out the garbage once a week.

I miss burning man!

I was at the Dutch decompression party which is a continuation of the burning man culture. It was pretty good with and definitely gives you some flashbacks from the burn. Cool art, some naked people and a healthy dose of mayhem.

In between all of this I also managed to find an apartment. I knew Amsterdam housing was crazy but turns out my little university city is pretty tough too. I saw some rooms that were totally unlivable (even in my living standards) for 500 euro.Finally I found a small room in a very nice house with 2 flatmates that have the potential of becoming good friends. Wish me luck.

Just to show you I have soaked in some of the culture, let’s talk about the weather. So far it has been better than expected. I got a few hours of sun on most days and when it rains it’s this drizzle which isn’t too bad and it isn’t that cold yet. But as the saying goes, winter is coming 🙂

It Is What It Is

Posted on September 7, 2014 by admin

This amorphic title is probably the smartest thing I can say about my experiences in the massive (70,000 people) social experiment called Burning Man. But since stupidity has never stopped me before, I guess it won’t stop me know… read on for some personal accounts of this mayhem.

The Way

First of the RV breakdowns. A total of two flats, two tires came off, the propane pipe teared, step broke, roof leaked and the headlight burned out !!

The adventure began when I joined Cinco, an old friend, who was kind enough and connected enough to find me a last minute ticket. I joined the two Lords, who were to become my guides and close friends in the days to come. We traveled in an RV manufactured on the year of my birth, which made me feel really old, especially as it started to disintegrate. The first explosion of a tire happened close to civilization, at the outskirts of Reno. We waited 6 hours until a truck big enough to lift the RV and put on the spare tire arrived. When the second spare tire exploded we were in the middle of nowhere and ended up spending the night camping on the side of the road with the beautiful starlit sky above us.

The city started out empty

The rest of the way to the town of Gerlach we drove at 5 miles per hour with one wheel missing. We got a taxi from Reno to deliver two new tires to the local car shop and we were finally on our way to the famed Black Rock City, or so we thought… Passing the line at the entrance only took us an hour and a half, almost a miracle as people sometimes wait 12 hours. But the adventure wasn’t over. We got pulled over by the Police because one of the RV’s headlights had died. Dogs were running around the RV and sniffing it searching for drugs. We were saved, (once again) by Liz, a bubbling green braided master of flirtation who had been traveling behind us since the first flat tire. She had spent the day in Gerlach talking to the cops and knew the guy who had stopped us. She told him about the horrible two days we had and we were let off without even getting a fine for the busted head light, just a citation, the policeman said ‘you can smoke because it means nothing’.

Work Hard Play Hard

Building our camp!

Cinco, who organizes the couchburners camp (based on couch surfing ideas), had gotten us early entrée tickets and from the night we arrived we began working. We marked the camp territory, built shade structures, organized hangout spaces, a kitchen and a makeshift shower; in essence we made a home for us and the people that would shortly join.

Seeing the city slowly build up and getting to experience it while it was still quite empty was a real privilege. Once the official gates opened an influx of people arrived and the mayhem began.

The Rules

Radical self reliance. Prepared for everything 🙂

Despite what one might expect, there are many rules to burning man and much bureaucracy; there is even a DMV office to register art cars and a media office you have to get permission from if you want to use photos for commercial use. The first few days, my rebellious self felt annoyed by these rules but throughout the burn I had come to look at the rules differently. First I thought they were a great way to create some common ground for a community, then I felt that the rules were an anchor designed to help me create some structure in the mayhem. Finally one of the Lords corrected my way of thinking, making me look at things from the view point of the burning man meme itself. The burn is an idea that has been evolving for 30 years and these rules were the evolution needed for the burn’s survival, any symbiosis with the human population, was because the burn needed humans. If too many people died or got injured the burn would be canceled. The same went with the no Mooping (matter out of place) rule. One had to pick up all the garbage because it was federal land and that was the rule they put forth. It wasn’t there to help me not lose my stuff (although it did as I devised a philosophy of MacGyvering everything to my body with carabineers and duct tape!) It also did not mean burning man was a community based on ‘green’ ideas as the carbon footprint of burning everything was massive.

The Radical self-reliance rule was much the same. A festival insisting on keeping its own freedom from any cooperation or endorsement, especially in the harsh environment of the Nevada desert, had to depend on participants’ self-reliance. The fact this rule created abundance which allowed for a gift economy and from my subjective point of view made me feel that the playa ‘provided’ me with help whenever I needed, or that by giving to the system I felt immediate benefit because I was part of the system, did not mean I was actually of any importance. It was a byproduct of the meme’s survival.

For me, self-reliance also meant that as usual, I came expecting the worse. Perhaps that was the reason the harsh conditions (a hail storm on one day and a sand storm on another) almost did not interfere with my experience. It might even be the opposite; they became part of the adventure.

The city filled up! Room for everyone and anyone… with a ticket 🙂

Inclusion is another one of the burn rules, you do need to have money for your ticket and food and water but except for that the burn accepts everyone and anyone – this rule gives the burn an extremely robust survival trait. The byproduct of this is that there is something for everyone. From hippy new age ceremonies, to alternative energy lectures to 24 hour raves, a roller disco, opera, endless art, things to climb, games to play and more and more and more! Even an orgy dome I tried to enter, but the line was too long. Personally I found the burn was a great place to taste new things like trying to play with Aerial silk for the first time, but it was not a place to deepen skills to a higher level. Martial arts and contact improve classes were present in the burn but at a surprisingly amateurish level.

The Candy

A picture that is worth one word!

There are many different candies present at the burn, some legal everywhere, some legal in certain states and some that should be legal. Experiencing the city in different states of consciousness made me think of the burn as an amusement park specifically designed for taking psychedelics. It’s probably the safest place in the world to experiment with your brain, not only because the community tolerates it but the city’s design itself, with the man and temple at its center, surrounded by the circular streets provide order and structure and safety. Crossing every main intersection in a straight line is almost impossible as something random will pull you towards it. So you wander around bouncing like a particle in strange magnetic fields using your momentum to explore and move randomly but still being pulled back to safety and close to assistance.

The truth is the only times I got injured or felt things were dangerous and didn’t make sense were when I was totally sober. I injured myself while climbing, crashed my bike and got totally lost, my attention kept being distracted by whatever craziness was going around me leaving me vulnerable.

An infinity mirror from our neighbors, the Thumper music camp, who played amazing music day and night (pic from their Facebook https://www.facebook.com/thumpercamp)

Tasting different candies with different people was an amazing experience and experiment I have yet to fully digest. It allowed me to experience the circles within circles of social holons, there was me, there were us, there were others, closer and further, disco balls reflecting each other bouncing our signals, creating an infinity mirror. The multiplexing of the input channels I perceived changed based on the distance to others, how well I knew them, and the candy.

The famous pulpo mecanico art car. It shoots fire at night.

On my first night out with the two Lords I felt (or imagined) what I can only describe as the ‘collective’ consciousness of the playa. I was pulled towards these massive music breathing mechanical beasts lined up, shining, moving twirling in a line. I was the first to realize it was the art cars, waiting for the DMV to give them a license. We danced in front of them and I noticed how each art car sucked in different people based on their musical preference. We finally moved past them and entered a ‘hotel’. It might be moving but not because it has wheels. The Lords laughed as I was sure the hotel was moving. We walked on a two story high plank (safety third!) into what I perceived as endless looping corridors (next day I realized it was just two rooms with a window connected between them). Most of the time I didn’t know if I was in a dreaming or not, it was a reverse function of a lucid dream, a dream reality, a rabbit hole. I collected Chewy bar wrappers I ate as a ‘reality check’ to test the time passage and consistency of this world.

That night I learnt the importance of being well lit at night. Providing light to the playa at night is a gift for everyone. Besides, having a special light signature means people will find you and you won’t have to search for them. Luckily, the two Lords were priests in this light religion creating their own led lit clothing and ‘pimping’ my outfit for the next nights out.

The city at night, so many lights!

There was so much information, so much noise; the easiest way to stand out, to be something your brain could focus on was to increase the volume. More light, louder sound! This is probably what leads to the burn philosophy of ‘if you can do something you might as well over do it!’ An interesting ‘Dan Arieli’ phenomenon I became aware of was how comparison is an important factor of my brain function. Music or no music my brain was always attracted to music, even if when I got to the sound system I didn’t actually like it! The expectation, the need for it was almost more enjoyable. It’s an important bias to remember, something or nothing (relationship, work or whatever), your brain will always tilt towards the something, even if it’s not what ‘you’ really want.

I also realized how awful this ‘body bureaucracy’ is. Drink, pee, drink, pee, eat! my body kept signaling and pulling me away from all the wonders around me. Peeing is one of the hardest things on the Playa, you can only pee in designated bathrooms that are hard to find and each visit to them is terribly magnificent. It also offers a ‘time out’ from the others, just you and the melting, breathing toilet walls.

That night l got the playa name ‘Ninja’. Cinco gave it to me while we were talking quantum physics on the couch on top of the school bus. I love the name, and it’s a great excuse for me not to hug people which is one part of the burning man religion I choose to be very selective with. ‘Sorry I’m Ninja, I don’t hug people I kick them’. As for the rest of the ‘religion’, I was only too happy to convert. The burning man is something to believe in, something bigger than me. It has no god, it does not presume to make sense but if every one believes in it, the power of belief makes it real. When I realized that, I joined in doing things I wouldn’t usually do like drinking some alcohol and enjoying the collectivization of it.

Another night there were four of us roaming the playa as if in a computer game charging up from heat or music, laughter or comfy cushions, creating our own unique space, attuned to each other’s needs and feelings in a way I could not have ever imagined. “Someone needs to pee but it’s not me,” I remember saying and someone would admit it was them. I got sucked into Monica’s white laughter managing to escape only because I remembered Lord’s instructions, “That empathy, you have to learn how to put up borders, how to realize if something is coming from you or if is the being imposed by something outside of you. It’s all about suggestibility; your brain can be convinced of anything. Try to realize how other people or groups affect you and change the environment and the dynamics of the moment. That’s why tripping with someone is the truest mirror.”

My failed reaction time experiment. The first hour or two after taking candy there is a slight improvement but later, when the ruler looked like it was leaking and moving results get worse with time.

There were moments I literally could not identify my own hand and for the first time nail polish did not seem totally idiotic, it could be used as a personal identifier for body parts. I played with this suggestibility convincing myself and others that I was never cold and could be used as the group’s radiator. A later experiment proved that this suggestibility has its limits. I was unable to convince my brain my reaction time experiment was important. I was however able to ride a bicycle 10 times better in these altered states, even through a dust storm which blinded me. My current hypothesis is that my brain recognized bicycling as a survival need while catching a ruler on cue was not deemed important enough to allocate resources to. The limbic system has much more power over the organism in these altered states – it doesn’t help to ‘tell’ your brain what to do, you have to ‘feel’ it.

I found myself unable to enter someplace (the embrace massive statue which felt so ‘heavy’ and depressing) while physically being stuck to others (an art structure called the bee hive). In my two visits to the temple I was totally brought back to real reality. The temple is a place where people mourn, cry and release whatever is in them that needs letting go of. They write on the walls and leave notes and pictures and at the end of the week the temple is burnt down in silence. I understood the need for such a place but felt it was not for me, the most I could do was offer my support to those who needed it.

Another life changing experience was feeling a funktion one audio system, the crisp clean waves of sound engulfing me creating coherence even if I didn’t like the music itself, an audiophile was born!

I do not know if these candies are ‘only’ a magnifying glass of all the tinny cues and inputs that usually do not reach the higher cortex functions or if it really is an ‘extra’ sense, I have yet to be convinced that there is a practical difference.

The temple

Anyway, this crazy night ended with watching the sunrise outside the temple. It was nothing like any sunrise I had seen, the colors were changing in super slow motion, the mountains were emerging, vibrating into reality, bringing a new day. I had this intense epiphany, realizing the world was like the playa, it my playground, to explore, to experiment, to enjoy. A few nights later trying to survive a dust storm as the man burnt (What’s the big deal? It was just like sex for the first time, too many expectations!) I felt the exact opposite ‘I was the world’s playground’; being pulled and pushed by so many forces that were totally out of my control.

The sensor Hamsa! Part of Pulse And Bloom by Saba Ghole

That’s when Lord noticed what I thought was the most amazing art piece on the Playa (Photos HERE). We were sitting on comfy cushions below fake led lighten palm trees. There were two ‘hamsa’ shapes marking hand prints on each side of the tree. “There is a sensor here,” he said as I looked at him, thinking he had finally flipped. “It measures your heart beat”. As he touched the sensor the led colors changed and began pulsing at the rhythm of his heartbeat. When I touched the other sensor my heart beat was added in a different color. A biofeedback loop was created slowly causing us to merge our heart beats, ultimately syncing them into mesmerizing pulses of light. I melted, loving this world, where someone will create such beauty, such genius, even though so few will actually notice it. It is what it is, I thought for the millionth time that week, letting it all pass through me.

Mexican Tidbits

Posted on August 18, 2014 by admin

Food, culture and climbing, my experiences of Mexico are all here, read on!

Fold it yourself Taco!

Everyone knows Mexico is the land of Taco’s, or is it Burrito’s or Tortillas? What is the difference? I asked the same thing. Tortilla is the wrap itself. As for Taco or Burrito, it would seem size is what matters. Anyway the big surprise is that no one wraps them for you. They are served flat on the plate and need to somehow be folded and shoved into the mouth. This was fun because I like eating with my hands but much harder than you might think!

Lemony beer!

In general I could only deal with the ‘not spicy’ food which was obviously spicy! Most of the dishes were tasty but what even I found disgusting was a favorite dish here called ‘Chicharron’– pig skin! I noticed that if you want to do it like a Mexican you better squeeze some fresh lime on top of it, Taco’s, salad, soup, even beer, basically whatever you put in your mouth! My veterinarian friend claims it helps kill some of the bacteria. He also fed me with anti-worm pills he claimed will save my stomach, and wouldn’t let me eat almost anything because I have a gringo stomach!

Sweet version of avocado

The good news was I found new tasty fruit I hadn’t yet seen on any of my travels!

The clocks in the metro. Is this why Mexicans are late? The actual time was 17:46

Moving out of the food department, it seems time has little importance here in Mexico. Every time I met up with a local they were late, on average about 25 minutes late. Maybe this has to do with the terrible traffic or just the laid back attitude. It also seemed the culture was not as Christian dominated as Colombia. I base this analysis on the people selling stuff in the metro trains (thankfully not on the buses like South America!) they never evoke Jesus when trying to sell you some candy.

Glad I survived.

Except for eating and failing to surf, I did some climbing around Mexico City. Nature is beautiful and the climbers are super nice. The only qualm I have would be safety issues. Much like the laid back attitude towards time, climbers tend to be laid back when it comes to safety. I found myself climbing on a rout which has a well-known massive slab that shakes! I shook as much as the slab when I climbed that part. For cleaning routs people tend to use just one quick draw from the anchor for a safety and the belaying is too relaxed for my liking. It seems to work for them, as climbers here are at a very good level (not much of anything to climb below 6b) but for me it was an added fear factor (as if I need reasons to be afraid when I climb!). All in all it was great fun and I’m glad I survived!

Still In The Trees

anthropological experiences from the fringe frontier