Working in Movement

If you regularly gorge yourself on dill pickles and hard boiled eggs, take heart. A pair of experiments in California suggests people can avoid some foods by associating that food with negative memories. Not too surprising, but what is novel is the memories can be false ones. (This was in The Proceeding of National Academy of Science. There's a summary at False Memory May Block Unhealthy Eating for more, but you may have to register to read it there.)

One experiment focused on strawberry ice cream, where about a fifth of the participants came to believe they'd had a "bad" strawberry ice cream experience in childhood. One experimental outcome had these participants stating they were less likely to desire the stuff at a hypothetical party. (I'd rather go to a real party myself.)

But that's about as far as it goes. The experiments didn't actually challenge the participants with the actual foods, and researchers didn't have an idea how long the effect would last.

But even in the context of the experiment with the idea of a food, they couldn't expand the false memories to chocolate chip cookies or potato chips. Some habits, after all, are hard to break.

What used to drive marketing of stuff was the idea of total popularity; the more popular something was, the bigger the potential market and profit to be made from selling that stuff to that market. If your interests ran to something less popular or even a bit obscure, lots of luck finding it. Boring.

I first got a glimpse that it could be different from Steward Brand's book The Media Lab way back in the 1980's. One thing from that books sticks in my head -- the MIT Media Lab was devoted to challenging the idea of total popularity and giving all of us access to the stuff we really wanted instead.

The rest, as they say, is history. Today we have The Long Tail. (Also, The Long Tail blog for daily updates.) The internet frees sellers from the constraints of geography, time and shelf space. So we can buy stuff that would never get shelf space at a bricks and mortar store, and the seller can make some money in the process. You may not be able to find an obscure film at your local Blockbuster, but Netflix probably has it. And, it doesn't just sit around on the shelf at Netflix, either; the service turns over virtually its entire inventory in any given month.

The Long Tail lets you fill those rare tastes in music, books or whatever in any podunk around the world. But, even so, you're not likely to be able to share your interests in person as much in a small place as in a large city. Large cities, for all their problems, support diversity of all sorts.

So how do you go about finding these folks in the big town? Steven Johnson gives us a clue us in Friends 2005: Hooking Up. Johnson talks a little about the long tail as it applies to cities, bringing in a little of the subject matter of his earllier book, Emergence. But he also kind of stands the idea on its head at the same time. The Long Tail frees you from total popularity and the need to live in a big city to get your hands on cool stuff. But, as Johnson points out, all isn't equal in catering to specialized tastes:

If you’re downloading the latest album from an obscure Scandinavian doo-wop group, geography doesn’t matter: It’s just as easy to get the bits delivered to you in the middle of Wyoming as it is in the middle of Manhattan. But if you’re trying to meet up with other fans of Scandinavian doo-wop, you’ll have more luck in Manhattan.

The article describes a Dodgeball, a new service that innovatively helps people find other people interested in the same thing. That's find as in proximity to physically interact:

As the technology increasingly allows us to satisfy more eclectic needs, any time those needs require a physical presence—whether it’s sipping your cold soup or meeting your crush in a bar—the logic of the long tail will favor urban environments over less densely populated ones.

Total Popularity is still with us, of course; there's always a big market for what passes as the coolest must-have stuff or must see entertainment. But the niches are being served. Thanks to ideas like Dodgeball, those niches aren't restricted to recordings of Scandinavian doo-wop.

I've posted more stuff in the last few days than I have in quite a while. Not because I've suddenly become virtuous; house painters have largely taken over my schedule. Not a bad thing, but the term "necessary evil" keeps coming to mind. Gotta be here for the whole thing, so there's lots of time for finding stuff and posting. The downside, though, are the distractions from ladders bouncing off the outside wall of the room I'm inside trying to focus on writing. Still, it's better than me climbing around on 40-foot ladders or letting the wood rot because it's unprotected.

Grasp something nearby; the mouse attached to your computer or maybe a pencil or maybe the person next to you. Pretty easy movement, huh? Well, it might feel easy, almost effortless, but a newly published review on the neuroscience of grasping tells us that there's a really complex bit of nervous system activity behind it.

Getting to Grips with Grasping nicely summarizes the review by Umberto Castiello has published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. One of the interesting things to me here is the idea that the meaning an object has for the grasper strongly influences what happens (or doesn't happen) in the brain of the grasper:

Castiello describes one patient, A.T., with extensive damage to the parietal lobe and secondary visual areas, who had problems grasping neutral, laboratory objects but was okay at grasping familiar items such as a lipstick. This suggests that, in humans at least, brain areas involved in interpreting the meaning of an object also influence the brain’s grasping circuit.