HBO's hit "Westworld" was born out of the 1973 film of the same name. As an excellent science fiction drama, its plot twists and turns, its breathtaking level of technology, and the chaotic, barbaric, layered conspiracy of the story atmosphere to form a strong contrast. The classic plot of "Robots Against Humans" has been reinterpreted, without the slightest suspicion of fried cold rice, but has injected a new sense of horror into this classic plot.
The man I'm going to talk about today is Westworld's scientific advisor, David Igman.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > David Igman</h1>
Scientific advisor to Westworld
Professor of Brain Science at Stanford University
As a scientific advisor, Igman guaranteed the series' hardcore and rigor. He and the main creators discussed the brain and consciousness, whether it was possible for robots to have consciousness, what it would be like if they had consciousness, what the consequences would be, and so on.
In addition, Igman also "took bootlegs" and added a product of his own invention to the plot - Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer.
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The above clip is from Westworld.
In the play, the ability and principle of the tactile vest are not explained in detail, and it is a small Easter egg for people who already know it.
Regarding its ability, the play describes it as "letting them have eyes in the dark" - it can transform the orientation of the enemy into a complex vibration pattern on the vest, and the wearer can intuitively perceive the direction of any enemy in the dark: someone is behind, someone is crouching behind the box, one is a hundred meters to the left, another person is approaching, and so on. In contrast, the night vision goggles are simply weak.
This sci-fi-looking invention is not a drawing idea, but a product developed by Igman's team and officially put on the market by his company, NoeSensory, that will serve people with visual impairments. In laboratory tests, blind people do not need special training to accurately orient others based on changes in vibration patterns.
Who is this David Igman?
Compared to his colorful life story, serving as a scientific consultant for Westworld is arguably his most boring and unworthy experience.
Born in 1971, David Igman studied English and American literature at Rice University; after graduation, he switched majors to study biology; in 1998, he received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor School of Medicine; and is currently an adjunct professor in stanford's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
He is at the forefront of his research, with research published in top journals, including Science and Nature; his main research interests are sensory substitution, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Time Distortion in Rapid Eye Movement, by David Eagleman, published in Nature Neuroscience
After graduating from the Department of Literature, he never gave up literature from his life. In addition to his research, his career as a writer has also been breathtaking, writing for the New York Times, Discovery, Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Wired and other magazines. Igman's novel Sum (the Chinese translation of the title "Life List: 40 Scenes on the Afterlife") became an international bestseller, translated into 33 languages, and has been selected in the amazon's top 100 bestsellers several times over the past decade.
In addition to fiction, he also devotes himself to writing popular science books
To describe David Igman seriously, you can't say, "This is a scientist with a writer's temperament" or "This is a neuroscientist who loves to write"—the identity of the writer and the scientist construct his essence equally, without priority or inferiority. In Igerman's own words, literature and science are two different ways of exploring the question of what it means to be human. On this complex and grand philosophical problem, each of them illuminates a different side.
He relied on literature and science, like a star-obsessed child clutching a telescope.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > fall: fall into the "rabbit hole" and come to the world of science</h1>
One day many years ago, eight-year-old David Igman fell from the roof.
Descending in mid-air, he was surprised to find that time was frozen. It only took an instant to fall to the ground, but in his feelings, it took him a long, long time to fall to the ground.
During the fall, he wondered: When Alice fell down the rabbit hole and fell in the dark passage, was it what he felt at the moment? He felt like he had been thinking about it for a long time, and the time in the world had only passed in a moment.
He remembered the special feeling of this dangerous moment—being stretched for an incomparably long time.
Fall down the rabbit hole
In the tenth grade, he had no interest in biology and even thought biology classes were "disgusting." As an undergraduate at Rice University, he dabbled in space physics, engineering, and biology, and his interest in brain science was suddenly awakened.
After studying neuroscience, he turned childhood confusion into a formal scientific question: the brain's perception of time.
Igman's research suggests that the brain's perception of time is often distorted. For example, when we experience dangerous moments like car accidents, robberies, and falling from the roof, we feel that "time slows down."
Let's do an experiment: stand in front of a mirror and stare at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye. You will find that the time you move the eyeball seems to be "deleted": when you move the eyeball, you do not feel that time is interrupted.
Why is time distorted?
Igman concluded that time and memory are intimately linked. In a critical situation, the amygdala in the brain will run at high speed, controlling the resources of the rest of the brain and forcing all resources to deal with the current situation. So in a terrible situation, your brain might store it in a way that makes it more "solid." When memory is replayed, the denser the data, the longer the duration of the event is considered.
This is probably why time seems to accelerate as you get older: you are too familiar with the world to absorb all the information of the world as you did in your childhood, and your memories are poor and low-data. And when I was a child, everything was novel, and the rich memory stretched time. That's why we feel that a summer vacation in childhood was so long.
Distorted time
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > your brain and can see the world with your skin</h1>
David Igman was by no means a conformist scholar.
He is a doer, social practitioner and adventurer, and has been working tirelessly to transform research results into products, put them into application, and use professional knowledge to solve social problems, and participate in policy formulation to make them more scientific.
In 2013, David Igman and his student, Doctoral student Scott Novich, set out to create a "sensory replacement" device: a tactile vest. In 2015, Igman and Scott co-founded NeoSensory, an experiment that officially became a company.
This technology has attracted a lot of attention, and there is no doubt that it will bring great changes. Its principle is to transform the different senses into tactile forms, which eventually form a data stream that is communicated to the brain. In Westworld mentioned at the beginning of this article, the tactile vest that can sense the direction of the enemy in the dark is a product launched by NeoSensory.
Tactile vest
In addition to helping blind people "see" the world through touch, NeoSensory's other product helps deaf people "hear" sounds through vibrations.
Sounds too subversive to common sense.
David Eagleman took to the stage of the TED Talk to present the vest and explain the technical principles behind it:
First, it is necessary to understand the premise that the brain is a device that processes all signals, and it does not care where the signals come from; the brain is very intelligent and flexible, and can naturally process a variety of data, and can quickly adapt to unfamiliar data that has never been seen before. Our eyes, ears, nose, skin, etc., are equivalent to "peripherals", which are responsible for receiving information from the outside world and converting it into data to circulate to the brain.
So, in theory, we can send new data streams to the brain by adding our "peripherals." For the brain, there is no need for training, and only a little adaptation can understand these data streams. New senses were born.
Therefore, two purposes can be achieved by increasing human "peripherals". The first is to transmit the lost senses of the disabled to the brain in another form through the vibration of different frequencies, positions, and intensities on the peripherals. NeoSensory's products (including vests, bracelets, etc.) are equivalent to new peripherals. Their principle is that a tablet or mobile phone collects information from the outside world and transmits it to a vest or bracelet with a vibrating motor, and the external information is converted into a vibration mode and becomes a data stream to the brain.
A product that converts sound into vibration: BUZZ
In the case of hearing-impaired people, with the help of equipment, they can perceive music and dance to the rhythm; they can perceive the most delicate sounds, even the subtle sound of running water, the hum of air conditioners.
Because of the brain's astonishing flexibility, users do not need to "translate" complex vibration patterns, but rely on the brain to adapt on its own until a direct auditory experience is obtained.
Hearing-impaired people share their experiences in sign language
The second goal is that humans can add entirely new senses. For example, it has a 360-degree viewing angle, such as seeing infrared rays and ultraviolet rays, and feeling the changes in blood glucose and microbial status in the human body. This perceptual process is also very intuitive, without mobilizing energy to "translate" and "view", which greatly reduces the cost of reading and analyzing data.
The well-being that this technology brings to humanity is enormous. For example, for the hearing impaired, a cochlear implant is 40 times more expensive than a tactile vest. It not only benefits developed regions, but also brings light to poor countries.
On January 9, 2019, NeoSensory completed a $10 million Series A funding round led by DigiTx Partners and Excel Venture Management.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > "Humans are real storytellers."</h1>
Neil Gaiman, a writer of British fantasy literature, once said, "I think everything must be like a story."
This seems to coincide with David Igman's ideas. "Humans are real storytellers, and most of our lives are in the form of narratives," he said. ”
The world of science laid a wedge in his heart with a dreamlike experience, while the world of literature did nothing—he was born in the world of literature. When he was a child, he observed his parents use a typewriter and put it into a snow-white piece of paper, and in a few moments, the white paper was filled with dense words. He felt extremely excited--the process of the white paper gradually being filled with words, the content of the words, was full of magic. When he grew up, he naturally stepped into this world made of white paper and pencils, and became the master of this magical world.
In addition to writing novels, his other fanatical interest is to do popular science. The PBS series The Brain with David Eagleman, written and hosted by Igman, was nominated for an Emmy Award. The series consists of a series of short films of several minutes, each introducing a point of knowledge about brain science, intuitive, popular and humorous.
PBS系列片The Brain with David Eagleman
He idolized Carl Sagan (Note 1) and continued his spirit and career in his own way: "I grew up watching his Universe and marveling at his ability to put the most beautiful ideas in the field of science before the eyes of the world. His popular science expression makes it understandable to eight-year-olds, while adults will cry when they see it. ”
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > possibilitists: the fourth belief in addition to theism, atheism, and agnosticism</h1>
David Eagleman describes himself as a staunch "Possibilianis." He argues that humanity knows so much about the universe that it is difficult to stand on the side of theism; but at the same time, the understanding of the universe is far from enough to firmly support atheism. The third position is agnosticism, which is very boring and merely questions the deity of religious stories about whether he exists or not.
So he chooses a fourth position: to embrace multiple hypotheses without data to support one position, and not to walk into either one, and not to give up on finding evidence to support any of them.
It is a gentle middle ground that frees the mind from the dogma of certainty, explores all possibilities equally, and embraces a sensitivity and passion for exploring all things.
His novel Sum is a reflection of his "probability" beliefs, or rather, a manifesto he makes as a possibilitist. That's why, he explains, is that he's a collection of 40 logically incompatible afterlife stories, each offering a different setting that explains questions about who God is, why he chose to create us, how we are arranged after we die, and so on. Most of these ideas are very wonderful, with a strong sense of absurdity, which has caused human beings to suffer all kinds of humiliation, disappointment and accidents.
On the big stage of the universe, all possibilities have room for survival. This is what "possibilitists" like Igman fought for.
"In the next life, you will re-experience all the experiences of your life, but this time, everything is rearranged into a new order: all the moments of the same nature are combined. You spend two months driving down the street in front of your home and seven months having sex. You slept for thirty years without opening your eyes. Sitting on the toilet for five consecutive months flipping through magazines. ”
"She will give everyone, a place in heaven. After all, there's something beautiful in everyone's heart: it's part of the design code. ...... She shut down her operations in hell, expelled the devil, and brought everyone to heaven. ...... The elites are ashamed that they are trapped in a system with no incentives and only a bunch of leftists, and they can never leave. The Conservatives have no minor figures to belittle; the Liberals have no oppressed people to be promoted. So God sat by her bedside at night and wept, because the only thing everyone could agree on was that they were all in hell. ”
- Excerpt from Sum
exegesis:
Carl Edward Sagan: American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, science fiction writer, known worldwide for writing many excellent popular science books and TV series "The Universe". The 1980 television series Universe: Personal Travels was viewed by more than 600 million people in more than 60 countries and was one of the most popular shows in the history of PBS. The popular science book The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence won the Pulitzer Prize. Throughout his lifetime, Sagan had more than 600 scientific papers and articles, and was the author and editor of more than 20 books.
Not long ago, Chuang Invited David Igman for an in-depth interview.
We are very curious, what is his motivation for insisting on scientific research? What is the fuel that supports his "sensitivity and passion for exploring all things"?
Here's David Eagleman's answer:
"Why do we do scientific research? Even if we face failure every day, even if the idea proposed by a scientist is mostly wrong. But there's always the right thing to do, and the reason we do scientific research is that when you find that right idea, it feels very magical, because you're the first person in human history to stand in that position. Throughout history, no one knows the facts you know now, which is why we do scientific research. ”
Tomorrow, we'll be releasing a full interview with David Igman, so stay tuned!
Text | Cheng Rui; Proofreading | Ichigo, Lily
Video | Eddie; Layout | Yin Huanhuan
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > create | theatre-style speeches and discover creativity</h1>
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