The world in miniature

Okay, bear with me here, because when I first saw this, I thought it was about how to take photographs of miniature model landscapes - something I'd much rather leave to the more arts-and-crafty among us. But that's not what this is about.

This is about taking an ordinary photo, say of a real city or landscape, and making it look like it's depicting miniature models. Like the photo below... Toy boats on a miniature lake, right?


Nope, it's actually just a doctored image of a real life coastal landscape.

Trivial? Useless? Maybe, but check out how it's done.

TiltShiftMaker is a site that does just that, and it does it very simply, by just reducing the depth of field of the photo: the portion of the photo that looks sharp and in-focus. Turns out, the shallower the depth of field, the smaller and closer the objects in a photo look, to the point of making real landscapes and buildings look like nothing more than miniature models.

The reason this works is that when we look at something small and close to our eyes, the portion of our field of vision that is in focus is very small. Conversely when we look at something very large and far away, the potion that is in focus is actually much greater. So when we notice a shallow depth of field, regardless of what we're really looking at, our brain signals SMALL and CLOSE (rather than BIG and FAR) and we use this to make a determination as to what we might be looking at - for example, tiny model boats as opposed to a life-size coastal landscape.

What fascinates me about this is that we do this entirely unconsciously. I didn't know anything about photography or depths of field before looking into this -- in fact I had to wiki depth of field to make sure I was talking about the right concept. But on some level, my brain did know. It's just one thing among a huge quantity of information that we unconsciously process in order to make deductions about the world around us from what is essentially a pretty limited set of sensory perceptions.

Here's other related example - it's a pretty common optical illusion.
Look at the image below... Concave or convex?


To virtually everyone the left side looks like buttons, while the right side looks like shallow holes. The interesting question, however, is why.

The answer is that we make the determination based on how the disks are shaded, interpreting the colors as light and shadow. If there is one thing we know intuitively (though perhaps not fully consciously) about light is that it tends to come from above - from the sun or from lamps. So a disk that is lighter on top we interpret as a protruding button catching light from above, whereas a disk that is darker on top we interpret as a hole shaded from above and catching light on the bottom.

In a way our minds are incredibly ingenious at noticing patterns in our perceptions and using them as clues to navigate the world around us, basically making educated guesses along the way.

But know enough about how the mind works, and you can easily trick it!

Via Apartment Therapy.

Robots, Love, Babies

Kenji, a third-generation humanoid robot, was originally programmed to emulate the human emotion of love, but ended up emulating dependence and fear of abandonment instead.

"After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time... Researchers attributed this behavior to his programmed qualities of devotion and empathy and called the experiment a success.

...

"The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly."

Nope, looks like Kenji wasn't displaying devotion and empathy at all.

Interestingly, his behavior is surprisingly similar to the first steps of social-emotional development in babies. At around 8-10 months, babies begin to show signs of human attachment, mostly in the form of separation anxiety, and only later do they acquire the capacity of empathy and an understanding of social rules.

So maybe Kenji just needs to grow up?

The story gets funnier:

"The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji."

Would have loved to see that. You can read more about Kenji here.

The Spotless Mind

Believe it or not, Dutch scientists have conducted a research study suggesting that a common heart medicine, beta-blockers, might actually help people banish painful memories.

The researchers induced negative memories on a group of subjects by exposing them to images of spiders accompanied by mild electric shocks. The next day half of the subjects were given a dose of beta-blockers while the others received a placebo pill. When exposed once again to the same spider-shock combo, those subjects who had taken the beta-blockers showed less fear than the control group, even after the effects of the meds had worn off.

They had not forgotten the spiders or electric shocks of the previous day, but somehow the negative aspects of their memories had diminished.

How is this possible? One hypothesis rests on the intricate process by which we recall memories:

"Each time a memory is recalled it changes a little, and the new version is recorded in the long-term memory stash via brain chemical fluctuations in a process called reconsolidation. The beta-blockers could interfere with [certain other] brain chemicals, blocking reconsolidation of the emotional component of the memory, but leaving the rest of the memory intact."

So, in a sense, no memory is truly being erased -- though sensationalism sells, as do parallels to Gondry movies starring Kate Winslet. But then again, what's left when we erase the content of our memories? A bunch of empty facts that, stripped of their emotional relevance, will likely be truly forgotten soon after.

For more on these experiments, check out these articles from BBC News and Discovery Magazine.