Working in Movement

The sensory motor system and hacking are two subjects that aren't usually mentioned in the same breath. But the folks at O'Reilly, publishers of a series of books on hacking, might be about to change that. Blog posts by Matt Webb and Tom Stafford break the news of a book in progress under the O'reilly Hacks series banner, codenamed Brain Hacks. Webb says the book is about:

100 practical and understandable probes into the design quirks of the brain, concentrating on the sensory and motor functions and their coordination.

So there you go: sensory motor and hacking together. Looks like it will take a kind of subjective look at some brain functions from a design perspective, so it might be an entertaining read when it comes out.

But the thing that caught my attention in these guys' posts was the effects that writing about this sort of thing has had on their everyday experiences. Says Webb:

"From what I've learned, and the way it's changed how I look at the world - I can now follow the way my attention gets attached to the internal and external world, anticipate what's going to cause subliminal behaviour, and induce it in other people (but don't tell them I've been doing that) ...

And Stafford finds a slight madness in all this:

It's great fun putting together practical demonstrations of important computational and cog neuro principles, and it's even fun being driven slightly mad as I start to notice all the ways in which my experience of the world is constructed from the raw data available to my senses, and the ways my actions are delegated to different, intermeshed, subsystems.

I'm looking forward reading the book when it comes out.