From "The User Illusion" to "Enriching the Brain"

"What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me." -- James Clerk Maxwell

I took advantage of the long weekend to polish off Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion, and what a book it was. I bogged down for a while mid-week, but got my second wind Monday, and after re-reading a couple of passages that I'd spaced out on, was able forge all the way to the end. Ahh, the finish line!

This book is far more than a neuroscience tome. Among the variegated science topics covered and called upon are Information Theory (Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver), the limits of science and knowledge (Zeno of Elea and Kurt Godel), physics, entropy (James Clerk Maxwell), computer science (Alan Turing), the Big Bang theory, cosmology, the Gaia hypothesis, evolution, emergence, complexity, chaos, fractals, gestalt theory, religion, endosymbiosis, genetics, consciousness, the bicameral mind, and more. Fortunately, I'd already read much about many of these topics. What an accomplishment by Norretranders to attempt to tie it all together. Bravo!

One of the main themes is that our consciousness operates by using a compressed amount of information bits (exformation), and thus our view of reality is actually an expected simulation based on much, much larger numbers of information bits experienced (and discarded) by the senses. This conscious "I" is only a very small part of the entire body's "me" and it requires a half-a-second delay (Benjamin Libet) to produce its unconscious simulation.


Now, just in time for the start of the school year, it's on to:

Enriching the Brain: How to Maximize Every Learner's Potential by Eric Jensen 

"Eric Jensen—a leading expert in the translation of brain research into education, argues in Enriching the Brain that we greatly underestimate students’ achievement capacity. Drawing from a wide range of neuroscience research as well as related studies, Jensen reveals that the human brain is far more dynamic and malleable than we earlier believed. He offers us a powerful new understanding of how the brain can be “enriched,” across the board to maximize learning, memory, behavior and overall function. The bottom line is we have far more to do with how our children’s brains turn out than we previously thought. Enriching the Brain shows that lasting brain enrichment doesn’t occur randomly through routine or ordinary learning. It requires a specific, and persistent experiences that amount to a “formula” for maximizing brain potential. Parents, teachers and policy-makers would do well to memorize this formula. In fact, the lifelong potential of all school age kids depends on whether or not we use it. Offering an inspiring and innovative set of practices for promoting enrichment in the home, the school, and the classroom, this book is a clarion call. All of us, from teachers to parents to policymakers must take their role as ‘brain shapers’ much more seriously and this book gives the tools with which to do it."

"The User Illusion" - Exformation



Tor Norretranders is an acclaimed science writer who found an international readership with his landmark study of consciousness, The User Illusion.


From yee Wiki, " Exformation (originally spelt eksformation in Danish) is a term coined by Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders in his book The User Illusion published in English 1998. It is meant to mean explicitly discarded information. However the term has also been used for other meanings related to information, for instance “useful and relevant information” or a specific kind of information explosion.

Meaning as proposed by Nørretranders

Effective communication depends on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating. In using words, sounds, and gestures, the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied. This shared context is called exformation.

Exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all - whereas information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with.

If someone is talking about computers, what is said will have more meaning if the person listening has some prior idea what a computer is, what it is good for, and in what contexts one might encounter one. From the information content of a message alone, there is no way of measuring how much exformation it contains.

In 1862 the author Victor Hugo wrote to his publisher asking how his most recent book, Les Misérables, was getting on. Hugo just wrote “?” in his message, to which his publisher replied “!”, to indicate it was selling well. This exchange of messages would have no meaning to a third party because the shared context is unique to those taking part in it. The amount of information (a single character) was extremely small, and yet because of exformation a meaning is clearly conveyed.

Thought, argues Nørretranders, is in fact a process of chucking away information, and it is this detritus (happily labelled exformation) that is crucially involved in automatic behaviours of expertise (riding a bicycle, playing the piano), and which is therefore the most precious to us as people.
—The Guardian, September 1998"

"The User Illusion": The Low Bandwidth of Conciousness

Brains, brains, brains. I just can't seem to get enough data about the convoluted feedback systems at work in our complex brain networks. While still working on the sleep book The Head Trip, I've also been reading Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion. This is a fascinating blend of Information Theory and neuroscience. I'd already read much on the genius information scientist Claude Shannon in William Poundstone's Fortune's Formula and James Gleick's The Information, and the unification of these recent favorite themes of neuroscience and Information Theory is very appealing for me. Two thumbs up, but I still have to finish the book. Maybe tonight!

From Amazon, "The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders.  As John Casti wrote, "Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness." This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the "Me" that the "I" draws on for most of our actions -- fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life."

Amazon review

The "user illusion" in computing is the desktop graphical user interface (GUI): the friendly, comprehensible illusion presented to the user to conceal all the bouncing bits and bytes that do the actual work. Tor Nørretranders writes that "our consciousness is a user illusion for ourselves and the world ... one's very own map of oneself and one's possibilities of intervening in the world." Much of Nørretranders' evidence comes from comparing the wide bandwidth of experience to the narrow bandwidth of consciousness, and from examining how much of our brain function is never consciously acknowledged. Although slightly out of date (the book was written in 1991; it was a bestseller in Europe), The User Illusion has been well translated and gives a refreshing take on a problem that is not likely to go away anytime soon.

From Library Journal

Nirretranders declares: "Consciousness is a fraud." The realm of the subconscious "Me" is infinitely richer and must be cultivated if we are to experience the full sensation of reality. A best seller in the author's native Denmark, this book weaves together concepts from mathematics, computer science, neurology, and psychology.