Walking increases spontaneous fluctuations in the brain
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This would also be useful for city tours, outdoor dance parties, and churches with hard-of-hearing parishoners.
Seriously though, I think it's an under-explored area. Several years ago[^] I thought it could be a fun way to do an ephemeral social networking type thing on the tube; then something a bit similar ('YikYak'?) became briefly popular (in the UK at least) but just using GPS or whatever for location, still with a central server.
I think there's plenty of interesting things you could do ephemerally, P2P over Bluetooth or mobile WLAN.
([^] edit: that's not some weird claim to fame, I mean it in the sense of I've long thought this should be good, but then, I've not bothered to do anything about it, and neither it seems has anybody else, so...)
It's the implicit derision, that eg Twitter is inherently worthless because I could glue a few libraries together to a database over a weekend, and have a simplistic system where users who are able to broadcast short messages to other users, that is so odious about the "build it in a weekend" mindset. It denigrates the very real, but largely invisible effort it takes to scale a system up to that level. For any of us who have been involved with scaling a system up, it's invalidating to have your work invalidated like that. A Twitter or Dropbox clone built in 48 hours isn't going to handle the scale of actual Dropbox, nor will it be as resilient as actual Twitter in the face of eg a whole AWS region going down.
Build something awesome this weekend! (or even just something useful; it doesn't even have to be software) Just don't shit on someone else's hard work, even (especially!) if you don't get it. That Dropbox, reduced to it's basics is "just" a filesync client, and isn't actually the most technology fascinating project when described at that level, is an reflection of the oversimplification of the problem at hand, and not the inherent worthiness of solving that problem. The social aspects of what a program can be used for goes wholly underestimated and misunderstood a lot of the time. No one could deny the effect on the world that Twitter has had (though we don't have to agree on if the net effect was positive or negative), but many people still don't see the value of a product that isn't a revolutionary new technical product, like terabit wifi, but that's a reflection on their lack of imagination on their part, and not a poor reflection on Twitter as a business idea.
Then you could package it with a "creation studio" to create your own version for tourguides, museums, etc. Resell some hardware also as per requirements. You've got yourself a nice little business that seems useful for the business and client.
However, to my knowledge it does not support live synchronous audio.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.bloomberg....
Due to the pandemic they made an app where you can follow along and listen to different parts of the tour
It’s not very “smart” I.e. not location aware to start the next prompt but honestly much better than those clunky audio tour boxes
And latency will be constant and near-zero.
I suspect that's why a couple of the use cases you mentioned (city tours, dance parties) are usually addressed with FM radio and not apps.
Perhaps there's a way to do this with a modern bluetooth stack. But none of the offline messaging apps I've seen (Bridgefy, Meshenger) support group audio.
1. I sometimes participate in Zoom/Meet calls when walking around SF. Not often enough to have a representative sample, but I know I've had a non-zero number of 1-2 second drops.
2. Students are often on a budget, and may have data caps on their mobile plans. Running out of data towards the end of the month might be OK if you're mostly in your room or the library. But it might impede you from participating in a lecture if you're walking out of wifi range.
The fact that WiFi didn't originally ship with (and in many cases still does not support) simple P2P with nearby devices is just unbelievably stupid. Apple still insists on their own stupid standard instead of the actual standard too, at least on iOS devices. (I think Macs can be coaxed into the standard mode, but Macs are real computers.)
Distributing headsets is a lot more reliable
Many museums do this already for their self-guided audio tours, it's pretty old tech but it works super well.
An analog solution (e.g. "walkie talkie") would work well, though.
Random talkers certainly not.
Flawless at home/office. Useless on site
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27294649/i-want-ble-broa...
Certainly some drive-in theaters in North America worked like this. There would be signs telling you to tune your car radio to such-and-such frequency to hear the film audio. Here’s a picture of one: https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3186/2718300357_ec1b9f3f45_z.j...
Source: I drove all over a crowded metro in the early 2000s with one of those fm transmitters for playing audiobooks to my shitty car stereo. 3 station presets was enough for the whole area.
Im not an expert about neurological stuff, but did anyone discover any hardware in our brains that does something beyond 'induction'?
Is this notion of divergent/converged thinking based on anything objectively measurable? How do I make a machine that tells me if a given thought is convergent or divergent? Or is this all just cultural constructs similar to believe systems?
I'm especially tempted to be extra skeptical with anything that attributes a particular metaphysical superiority to human thinking over machines or animals. Is that skepsis an example of convergent or divergent thinking?
I'm sorry if my question make an actual expert cringe. But perhaps it can be an opportunity to enlighten simple minds like me further...
One way humans are rational is when they "reason on paper". We write down most of the initial conditions and then use an algorithm (that's also written down) on them to get to the next step. We write down the result we got. Then we use an algorithm again on this result to get to the next step etc. This is how mathematics and science works. Obviously this is cultural - we learn to do this by learning to write, to do mathematics etc. It's not something ingrained to us.
I think humans can do something similar in their head, but it is greatly limited. The limiting factor is memory - an even remotely complex algorithm will eat up all your memory and you will forget about the results you had already got.
Eg adding 419875 + 87458284 uses the same algorithm as 356 + 472. We can easily do both on paper, but the former is difficult to do in your head, whereas the latter is fairly easy. You give someone an external memory (eg notes) and they both become easy again.
An external memory keeps our reasoning rational.
Your answer would suggest rational thinking does not come natural to us. That it requires a lot of discipline, external tools and culture.
That would suggest that the rational thinking itself does not take place in the brain, even when humans contribute to it.
For the most part, spontaneous brain fluctuations are studied in the context of fMRI. Since you can't walk in an fMRI, I'd like to know how they actually measured anything.
Dr. Huberman mentions 'Optic flow', likely the same concept:
>When you move through space, whether walking, running, or driving, you’re in what’s called optic flow. Things are moving past your retina at varying speed, depending on how fast you’re moving, but your brain has knowledge of how fast you’re moving. It cancels out the movement in a way that says, okay, these objects aren’t moving past me. I’m moving past them. All of this boils down to a set of circuits in the brain and body that make it so that when we’re moving through space, it has this property of relaxing us and giving us a sensation that is somewhat rewarding. And so what this translates to is at least once a day, get out and move. Optic flow doesn’t have to be fast. It can be at slow speeds. Ideally, it’s variable speeds, but this, I believe, underlies the sensation, the both calming and invigorating and kind of replenishing feelings that we get from taking a bike ride or a long run or swimming, for that matter.
> When researchers studied the spontaneous activity of more than 10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of mice, they were surprised to find it to be rich with information about the animals’ seemingly irrelevant movements.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-ar...
https://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
To be a bit flippant, isn't this obvious? Who thinks that mind-wandering is a bad thing? Teachers, I guess. How is it possible to be a philosopher without mind-wandering?
> In 2014, a new study showed that walking decreased rational and linear thinking and increased divergent thinking and imaginative mind-wandering
The only thing problematic here is the decrease in "rational" thinking. I think in context it means something closer to rigid, concentrated, and well-defined (ie - uninspired).
I imagine it's because reading is a much "quieter" brain activity than what I do the rest of the time, which is spending time on dynamic, interactive systems: i.e. my phone and computer, so the background "noise" has a chance to surface without being dismissed by something more dynamic and interesting.
I will literally get a shower if I'm working on a hard problem (and a walk is not convenient). So many times I solve the problem, sometimes after having sat at the computer for hours trying to solve it.
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
It's kind of aggravating that this is not considered to be "work" by most people. I'd say those are some of the highest value parts of my day.
(1) The fact that engaging in one task distracts attention from another task is obvious. People derive inspiration from taking a shower, swimming, biking, playing music and yes, walking. All these tasks have something in common, they are different from whatever task one was doing beforehand, and they require less cognitive focus than many of the things that we do for work.
(2) The fact that noise in the brain is 1/f is not particularly interesting. Many natural systems have 1/f amplitude spectra. This pattern occurs commonly in multi-scale systems (the brain being one example).
(3) The fact that many aspects of brain activity (both signal and noise) are affected by aging, consciousness, mental experiences, memory and so on is not particularly interesting. Assuming that one is not a dualist, every distinct mental state must be reflected by some unique pattern of brain activity.
(4) Scientists know quite a bit about where these “spontaneous fluctuations” come from. Many of them are a consequence of changes in blood pressure, which varies substantially and randomly over time (within some finite band, of course). Others are caused by mental states that are difficult to measure and model, and so are unknown to the experimenter. But just because something is noise from the perspective of the experimenter doesn’t mean that it is noise from the perspective of the brain.
P.S. a) It's easier to dawdle when you walk, to enjoy the particulars of the places you pass; biking is so fast by default that you have less time to savor details. b) Biking tends to be higher intensity exercise, which may actually take necessary energy away from mind-wandering; in fact, my mind wanders much less while biking than walking, so I'd guess this is the case, but maybe this isn't true for everyone. Moreover, biking forces external attention more regularly as you encounter pedestrians and traffic at a higher rate