A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires (activates) both when an animal/human acts and when the animal/human observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.

V.S. Ramachandran believes they might be very important in imitation and language acquisition.

The most astonishing discovery is that mirror neurons allows us to have empathy about other people’s actions, or even feel what other people are feeling.

A recent experiment shows that if we observe somebody else being touched, under certain conditions we will experiment the touch sensation as if we were being touched!!!. The mirror neurons “fire” or get excited when we see somebody else being touched. However, when this happens, the sensors in our skin send a signal to the brain alerting it that we are not the ones being touched. Nevertheless, if our arm gets anesthetized, the sensors in our skin cannot send the brain this signal. This translates into feeling the touch sensation in our own arm!!!

You can even try some of Ramachandran’s amazing experiments at home:

The Pinocchio experiment with body image

Find 2 willing (and good) friends

Sit on a chair blind-folded, and ask your friend to sit on a chair in front of you, with her back to you.

Ask your other friend to take your right hand and put it on your first friend’s nose

Tap and stroke her nose in a gentle random manner, making exactly identical movements with your other hand, on your own nose.

Continue this for 60 seconds.

About 50% of people will have the extremely odd sensation that their nose is 3 feet long, or somehow their nose is elsewhere!

Body image and a rubber arm

1 friend

1 fairly realistic rubber hand or arm

Put one of your arms behind a screen or box on the table, so you can’t see it.

Put the rubber arm on the table in a position that looks like it’s your arm. Look at this hand

Now get your friend to stroke both your real hand, and the fake hand.

They must stroke both identically, with the same timing and at the same part of your hand.

You’ll have the strange sensation the rubber hand actually belongs to you.

Imagine spending an entire day cataloguing every available number which has some sort of real world representation (meaning that they can’t just be random, made-up numbers – they actually have to have some sort of meaning). This means street addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, heights of various trees, lengths of rivers, numbers of gumballs in a jar, populations of various towns and cities, mathematical constants etc… the possible source of numbers is practically limitless. Now, take all of these numbers and sort them by their leading digit (that is, the number that comes first).

Benford’s law states that the number 1 occurs more frequently than any other number – making up nearly a third of all leading digits! Number 2 is far behind in second place, occurring only 17.6% of the time, then number 3 with 12.5% and so on, all the way to number 9, occurring only 4.6% of the time. The same holds true for many other areas that have almost nothing in common: the Dow Jones index history, size of files stored on a PC, the length of the world’s rivers, the numbers in newspapers’ front page headlines, and many more.

The law is called Benford’s law after its (second) founder, Frank Benford, who discovered it in 1935 as a physicist at General Electric.

The “first digit law” emerges in groups as disparate as populations, death rates, physical and chemical constants, baseball statistics, the half-lives of radioactive isotopes, answers in a physics book, prime numbers, and Fibonacci numbers. In other words, just about any group of data obtained by using measurements satisfies the law.

This pattern continues to hold true even if the units of measurement are changed (feet changed to yards, yards changed to kilometers, pounds changed to ounces, etc…) or even if the bases are changed entirely.

Benford’s law has been used as a method for spotting fraudulent accounting data by looking at the first significant digit of each data entry and comparing the actual frequency of occurrence with the predicted frequency. Most white collar criminals are unaware of Benford’s law and will use each digit about 10% of the time for the first significant digit in a number.

Benford’s law has been invoked as evidence of fraud in the 2009 Iranian elections.

Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford’s_law to know more about Benford’s Law.

Almost everybody has hared about the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation”. Today I want to talk about an even more interesting but related concept: “The Three Degrees of Influence”.

To recapitulate, people are all connected by an average of “Six Degrees of Separation” (your friend is one degree from you, your friend’s friend is two degrees, and so on). An experiment proved this in the 60’s by giving a few hundred people who  lived in Nebraska a letter addressed to a businessman in Boston, more than a thousand miles away. They were asked to send the letter to somebody the knew personally. The goal was to get it to someone they thought would be more likely than they to have a personal relationship with the Boston businessman. The number of hops were tracked. On average, six hops were required.

However, just because we are connected to everyone else by six degrees of separation, doesn’t mean that all these people affect us in the same manner. The spread of influence in social networks obey what is call the Three Degree of Influence Rule.

From Christakis and Fowler Book Connected (p. 28)

“Everything we do or say tends to ripple through our network, having an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees). Our influence gradually dissipates and ceases to have noticeable effect on people beyond the social frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. Likewise, we are influenced by friends within three degrees of separation but generally not by those beyond.”

This interesting rule applies to wide range of attitudes, behaviors, feelings, etc; and it applies to the spread of phenomena as diverse as political views, weight gain, and happiness.

Among inventors, innovative ideas obey the rule, so that an inventor’s creativity influences his colleagues, his colleagues’ colleagues, and so on.

Word-of-mouth recommendations for everyday concerns (like how to find a good piano teacher or how to find a home or pet) tends to spread three degrees too.

The rule stops at three degrees since, on average, we may not have stable ties to people at four degrees of separation or more.

This rule is so powerful that shapes our everyday behavior and relationships. For example, each happy friend a person has increases that person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. Each unhappy friend decreases it by 7%. Therefore, you want to be closer to happy people. The same applies to obesity or even richness.

People who have obese friends have more chance of being obese since these friends set the expectations of what is acceptable. You are not out of the rule. You can gain weight if your friends do so, since they (and you) set the expectations of what is acceptable and what is not. If you are a man, does this sound familiar “Don’t worry, you’re over 30…”. And it’s worse if your are already married.

Choose not only who your friends are, but also your friends’ friends and so on. That is, choose your network. It will shape your life.

La Ola “The Wave” first gained worldwide notice during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. In this phenomenon, sequential groups of spectators leap to their feet and raise their arms, then quickly drop back to a seated position. Interestingly, the massive wave usually rolls in a clockwise direction and consistently moves at a speed of twenty (20) “seats per second”.

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have a 50% of chance of remembering that sequence perfectly (if you speak Spanish you have even less chance, I’ll explain later). If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

This is the reason why telephone numbers are separated by dashes 617-407-2394. You would never be able to remember a phone number by remembering all the digits at once.

Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (4 is “si” and 7 is “qi”). Their English equivalents -“four”, “seven” -are longer. In Spanish is even worse, they are even longer “siete” and “cuatro”. The longer the word, the less time one has to remember the other digits.

The numbering system is also different. Asian countries have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on. Asian children lear to count much faster than any other children.

The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily.  English-speaking children have to convert words to numbers to do the math. For Asian children, the mathematical operation is embedded in the sentence. For example: 37 + 22. Thirty seven plus twenty two. English speaker have to do 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. However, to do that mentally, you have to convert the words to numbers, and keep the words AND numbers in memory -which is difficult to do because they are long. For Asian children is directly three-tens-seven and two-tens-two. The addition is right there embedded: It’s five-tens-nine.

Extracts taken from Malcom Gladwell Outliers Book (p. 227-228)

Let’s start learning Chinese. Grab your fortune cookies!!!

I’ll start my blog with this great idea. It’s been said many times but it is definitely worth sharing.

The ONLY way you could become a world expert at something, is by practicing 10,000 hours. From piano experts to professional sport players and Nobel Prize writers. There is innate talent; however all have practiced at least 10,000 hours to achieve their level of expertize.

I quote from Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers Book (p. 40)

“…researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert -in anything says neurologist Daniel Levin. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes again and again…. One has not yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery”

If you want to become an expert at something, start practicing now. It would take you at least 3.5 years to get to 10,000 hours if you practice EVERY DAY for 8 hours. If you skip weekends, and only practice 4 hours a day, it would take you about 10 years.

Start teaching your kids an instrument or to get into new hobbies since it will take them a while to become good at them.