Our Cyborg selves

When we look around a room we scan-and-zoom, scan-and-zoom. The scanning is called “saccading” and the zooming is called “foveating”. If a scene changes during a saccade we usually don’t notice. In a famous experiment the subject’s saccades were monitored by a computer. Changes were made to the scene during his saccades. These changes were obvious to the experimenters, who were standing behind him chuckling, but he couldn’t see them at all. This is called “change blindness”, and it can be demonstrated in various ways.

Dan Simons and Dan Levin set up a slapstick scenario on Cornell University campus. Somebody would pretend to be lost and would approach someone and ask for instructions. At that moment two people carrying a door would walk in between them. During this time the person who was “lost” would be replaced by somebody else - someone with different height, voice, clothing, and so on. Only 50 per cent of the people who were asked for instructions noticed the change.

We get a similar result with the so-called “flicker paradigm”. Click here, then click on “click here to start the Change Blindness demonstration.” You will see two different images that blink alternately. Can you see what keeps changing? It will be very obvious when you see it.

Clicking the right hand button on the mouse gives you a menu of other demonstrations. Try the next one … the boat.

These flickering figures illustrate change blindness. If we are not paying attention to just the right part of the picture we don’t notice the change. Once we have noticed it we find it hard to believe that we didn’t see it before, because now we can focus on the part of the picture that is changing.

What has this got to do with exploiting the world? Research shows that when we saccade around a room our eyes return to the same place time and again. We do this because that is where the information is. We don’t need rich inner models. We need a broad idea of what’s out there, plus the ability to zoom in and retrieve information when we need it. This is less demanding on memory and enables us to command a rich database - that is out there in the world.

From Bioborgs to Cyborgs

Our bioborg nature has operated in consort with our opportunistic brains to create out there cognitive technologies that complement our basic cognitive abilities. These technologies give us symbolic data stores in the world that we can manipulate and modify, and subsystems in the world that perform operations and processes by themselves - subsystems that are not in our heads but in the world.

Suppose you have to multiply large numbers, such as 777 x 77, with pencil and paper. You know that 7 x 7 = 49. You repeatedly perform this operation until you have finished the sum. Your mind loops out into the world, operating in consort with pencil and paper.

Now suppose you are doing your tax returns with a pocket calculator. This is similar to the previous case, but now we have a device in the world that performs operations for us. Your mind loops out into the world, operating in consort with the pocket calculator.

The next stage is the computer. Suppose you have to write a paper or a talk. You scribble some ideas, cross some out and add new ones. You throw them into a Word document. There was something you wrote a few months ago that might be relevant, but you can’t find the file. You click on Search and the computer finds it for you. You paste it across and print out the document. You get coffee, look at the document, scribble on it, and go back to the computer. You are engaged in a complex, creative loop with the computer.

These cases only tell part of the story, because they assume you already have language. And language is a technology in itself …

Language

Clark thinks that language was the first cognitive technology. Language gives us a “cognitive short-cut”. Research on chimpanzees shows that the use of plastic tokens enables them to reduce high-order abstract problems to lower-order problems their brains can handle.