Hi Edmund, > Rosalind Picard's book is also very good, if you are > interested in Affective Computing. Yes, I plan to read her book soon. I have spent many many hours investigating physiology, both as it may apply to HCI, and also for personal awareness of "what it means to be human". When I looked into various body/mind reactions like skin conductivity and temperature, muscle contraction, face and body gestures, heart and blood reactions, and brain activity, the one thing that I found most interesting is the human limbic system, which is the center of the emotions. There are three "types" of brains layered inside us, one is the archipallium or primitive (reptilian) brain, the next is the paleopallium or intermediate (old mammalian) brain which is the limbic (emotional system), and the last is the neopallium, also known as the superior or rational (new mammalian) brain. The more I looked into this, the more I saw the significance of the limbic (emotional) system. If you look closely at the world and the social systems, how they dictate things, it becomes clear that the rational brain is superior in creating things but is also limiting our ability to advance, because we place little or no emphasis on the limbic (emotional) systems that really drive us to do things. Looking into this further, I discovered that there is a new term called "emotional intelligence", and also that some people believe that this kind of intelligence is the true measure of human intelligence. Now I tend to agree. The neocortex (superior brain) can invent nuclear weaponry, but the limbic (emotional) brain will probably dictate whether we destroy ourselves and the planet. Rosalind Picard is very much into "emotional intelligence", and wants to bring this into "systems". The ironic thing is that most humans are trained not to follow their emotions. Males in particular are trained that emotions are "weakness", and females are often consider "weaker" because they are more in tune with their emotions (when in reality they are probably stronger). And scientists are so encapsulated in the "rational" that most are missing the areas where we truly need to advance. Here is some interesting research and reading on emotions and "emotional intelligence" ... http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/1995/951002/951002.cover.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/1995/950717/950717.cover.html http://emotion.salk.edu/emotion.html http://emotion.salk.edu/Emotion/Journals/Jgeneral.html http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/ http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/publications.html http://www.psy.ulaval.ca/~arvid/Arvid3e.html http://www.psy.ulaval.ca/~arvid/Arvid4e.html http://www.pitt.edu/~emotion/ http://www.pitt.edu/~emotion/AAGpubs_text2.html http://www.umich.edu/~psycdept/emotions/ http://www.hull.ac.uk/psychophysiology/arvid012.htm http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/Psychology/emotionlab/child.emotion.laboratory.htm http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.rolls.html http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~awy1/Welcome.html http://vismod.www.media.mit.edu/people/picard/ Before I can make a "system" emotionally intelligent, I need to make that leap myself ... > My buy on this is that it is about time we start having systems > that adapt to humans instead of the other way around. We have very rigid ideas on what computers are, what data is, how data flows, how data associates, etc etc. Most of these are based on ancient ideas like paper and file folder cabinets and index cards, etc. It is beyond time to press the reset button and think more on how to make these fancy boxes useful. The really wild thing is that people are already used to "failure" as a *normal* part of computing. "oh well, the system crashed, lost my document, well, that's just the way it is". The amount of time people spend on just system configuration/tweaking is mind boggling, and it's clear that the human interfaces are very crude. I'm glad to see that MIT and GaTech are doing some serious work on this. It is strange that it's only really touching mobile/wearable computing; these problems and opportnities are everwhere in computing. -- Doug -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail