Filling Holes Part II: Anti-social Behavior

My brother called me to mention some of his favorite examples of filling in the holes. Sometimes it can be cool, like when you are driving by a picket fence with a horse behind it, you actually see the full horse. Your brain puts all the pieces together. Interestingly enough, you can toggle on and off, seeing the fence, then the horse, and then the fence again. But sometimes, we all have trouble turning it off, leading to some anti-social behavoir.

The brain is especially good at facial recognition. Its ability to assimilate an entire face from portions of it (like a nose and one eye) are unmatched by even the most powerful computers. Facial recognition is extremely important for your survival, so it is a core function. Of course, that is also why your brain fixates when it is wrong. Sometimes you can't help but stare at someone with a deformity, because your brain is trying to assimilate why it went so wrong and improve it's model. It's not your fault; it's human nature. Tell that to your mom.

I have always had trouble listening to slow speakers, because I know the next words. This often leads me to interrupt them by filling in the words myself. I remember Liz Topp describing once how annoying that was, and I actively worked on it. Now I just fill them in in my head. Then again this skill is useful. My brother describes a friend with ALS, who's speech degraded so that my brother couldn't understand a single word his friend said. But at the end of the sentence he could put all the pieces together to figure out the whole sentence.

For me, the most anti-social of behaviors is staring at the TV. Part of it is the motion, but a lot of it is the fact that you have blind spots in your peripheral vision, ie it can't process the image, especially one so detailed with motion. As a result your brain actively turns your eyes towards it. I can barely talk to my sister if there is a TV on in the room; she just stares at it. I have trouble focusing at meetings with video, which is tough when you are pitching Internet TV services. In the morning at my office building, it amazes me how every single elevator rider stares at the embedded TV screen. The name of the service? "Captivate Network."

Sometimes your brain captivates you with it's background job of filling in the holes. But be careful, because of the anti-social consequence you may find yourself in a hole of your own.

Filling in the Holes and Creating Them

One of the most interesting points in my recent foray into neurophysiology is the way in which the brain fills in patterns before they are actually received. As you read this right now, there is a gaping blind spot in each eye, a hole in the center of your field of vision. Close one eye. Can you see it? No, no you can't. Your eye moves a little every tenth of a second to compensate. Even then there still is a hole in the center, as well as general blindness in the far reaches of your peripheral vision. But if I look really closely with one eye open, I do detect something is going on.

The same is true for sounds. You actually process the notes of your favorite song before you hear them. If I hummed your favorite song, you would hear the next note, even if I stopped. If I said "he was a legend in his own ..." your brain actually processed the word "time" or my favorite alternative "mind." But I didn't have to write it for you to think it, and many times, you wouldn't even know.

Here is the interesting part: your brain fills in ambiguous information (like the blind spots, or gargled words) with known patterns, things it has learned. To be clear, you are not really seeing or hearing the real world. You hear what your brain thinks the real world is, based upon partial information and learned patterns that then deceive you into having a full view.

Now the ways in which your brain fools you into thinking you have a complete view are tremendously interesting. Sometimes it fills the holes in, sometimes it creates holes and pushes you in.

The subject of this week's posts will be exactly that: Filling in the Holes and Creating Them.

Where in the World is Trevor Sumner?

The last 2 weeks have been a whirlwind tour in Los Angeles and London causing the longest post lapse in this blog. I know you all miss me terribly. I guess all I can recite is a quote that made me smile:

"Time is the thing that prevents everything from happening all at once. Lately, time hasn't been working."

My company is in an interesting state of transition with a new management team, and aggressive agenda, and I have recently been empowered to make some serious changes and build some cool technologies. And I have jumped right in.

Last night I pondered why I have poured so much of my heart and time into work. It isn't for the money, although I do hope that will come with time. And it isn't for the people because I have only just begun to build relationships with them, though that is an increasing part of it.

Instead, it's because I feel empowered to change this company and to produce new technologies that I can point to as mine. I am building a payment system that will process 10s of millions of dollars, designing a business information platform that will hopefully help define how media companies track their business in a new Internet world, and I am creating a YouTube like service that will be the basis of a content marketplace to come. And it is nucking futz how much has changed in a month and a half, for me and us.

And I wonder how much of this is me being a leader in search of a problem and an organization and how much of this is that there was a problem and organization in search of a leader. In the end, this is a question of fate and determinism, which I won't address now, but I do know this: I feel exhilirated about the opportunity ahead of me.

Thou Shalt Not Be a False God or a Mean One

Pat Robertson continues to give Christians a bad name, as if the Church needed more help. He announced this week that "God told him" there would be a terrorist attack possibly killing millions. I want more info. Was it a burning bush, Pat? Voices in your head? Someone needs to lock this guy up in a padded room. What's scary is that there are millions of people who believe his every word. I remember something in the 10 commandments about false idols and bearing false witness. How can I know the Bible better? Then again, I think there must have been a commandment about thou shalt not steal. The NY Times this week reported that 87% of Catholic churches reported embezzlement in the past 5 years. Holy petty larsony, Batman.

So Pat Robertson is an idiot. No new news there. And Catholic priests aren't so holy. Again, not the biggest revelation, just ask Sen. Foley. But the 10 commandments. When is the last time you looked at them? I read the piece on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments) and I have to say, they sound a lot nicer in the simplified form than the actual scripture. The Exodus version is quite harsh, not exactly the God I was hoping for:

"I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me."

Gotcha. No wonder why many religions don't have humility (http://trevorsumner.blogspot.com/2006/09/its-time-for-little-humility.html). And if you don't like my take, I will strike you down, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your ... aww forget it. I am not that mean.

BTW, here is my favorite coverage of Wacky Pat: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=3&entry_id=12278

Thou Shalt Not Be a False God or a Mean One

Pat Robertson continues to give Christians a bad name, as if the Church needed more help. He announced this week that "God told him" there would be a terrorist attack possibly killing millions. I want more info. Was it a burning bush, Pat? Voices in your head? Someone needs to lock this guy up in a padded room. What's scary is that there are millions of people who believe his every word. I remember something in the 10 commandments about false idols and bearing false witness. How can I know the Bible better? Then again, I think there must have been a commandment about thou shalt not steal. The NY Times this week reported that 87% of Catholic churches reported embezzlement in the past 5 years. Holy petty larsony, Batman.

So Pat Robertson is an idiot. No new news there. And Catholic priests aren't so holy. Again, not the biggest revelation, just ask Sen. Foley. But the 10 commandments. When is the last time you looked at them? I read the piece on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments) and I have to say, they sound a lot nicer in the simplified form than the actual scripture. The Exodus version is quite harsh, not exactly the God I was hoping for:

"I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me."

Gotcha. No wonder why many religions don't have humility (http://trevorsumner.blogspot.com/2006/09/its-time-for-little-humility.html). And if you don't like my take, I will strike you down, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your ... aww forget it. I am not that mean.

BTW, here is my favorite coverage of Wacky Pat: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=3&entry_id=12278

New Years Eve is

Throwing together a New Year's party with one week's notice ...

Constructing a 600 square foot tent 7 stories above the ground to combat the wind and rain ...

Ordering an obscene amount of champagne and liquor ...

Inviting 500 people and getting 250 to come ...

and most importantly ... having 18 of your friends and family holed up in your small 10x12 bedroom, drinking, telling stories, and belting Bon Jovi.

Now that I am 30, maybe I am halfway there ...