Why is Time-lapse Photography Cool?

Time-lapse photography is a particular way to capture an event that is unlike any other photographic method.  With time-lapse, you get to see things that you would never see with your own eye unless you were the Buddha himself.  For example, you do not have the attention span to sit and watch a piece of ice melt into water.  You wouldn't be able to stare up at the stars long enough to see that they move around a fixed point in the sky or sit long enough to watch a seed grow into a plant.  The human brain is too easily distracted to watch this stuff happen, but it does happen and it's beautiful.

Here's a rainbow.

 

One thing that I like about time lapse photography that makes it different from other forms of photography is the ability of the photographer to actually enjoy the scenery he is shooting.  When I do my time lapse shots, I set up the camera and then walk away.  I take the time to look at whatever it is I am shooting, like the ocean, or stars, and just enjoy it for what it is.  With regular photography, this is difficult to do because you have to constantly carry around your camera and make sure you get just the right angle and when you sit to relax with normal photography you're stressed because you don't feel like you're getting anything done!  With time lapse you can sit and relax and know that you're getting some sick shots while enjoying the very thing you are shooting.  It's a win, win, win.

Here's an ocean.

Another thing I like about time lapse photography is that a good time lapse video always has good music.  I am a half-assed musician, but I like listening and playing music.  Time lapse allows me to not only make videos of cool shit like the stars and clouds but also make music to go with it.

If you keep following me, you'll find my future videos will include original music.  I can't promise that it will be any good.  I can, however, promise that it will be made with love.

Here's a bunch of stuff. 

keep it real

Hypoxia-Ischemia: What the heck is it? What's it got to do with me?

I just realized that I work in a Neuroscience lab which means I have a whole ton of material to write about. 

First thing's first, what am I studying?

I (the lab) am studying the effects of an inter-alpha-inhibitor-protein in a neonatal rodent model of hypoxia-ischemia to see if working memory is improved by the treatment. 

That's a whole lot of bla, bla, bla.  Here's what's going on in simple terms:

The medical field is getting better and better at keeping babies alive.  They have the ability to, for example, give life to a 3 pound baby that would have died a hundred years ago.  This is a good thing.  KEEPING BABIES ALIVE IS A GOOD THING!  But, unfortunately, these babies are at a high risk of brain injury.  Hypoxia-ischemia is simply a fancy term for 'brain injury caused by lack of blood to the brain,' and it's often found in very low birth weight babies. 

This injury is not only very dangerous immediately after it happens, but it can also have long term negative effects.  Cerebral palsy, ADHD, mental retardation, language learning defects, and a slew of other bad stuff can happen to those affected by it. 

What are the effective treatments for Hypoxia-Ischemia? 

Right now, the only effective treatment is to essentially 'freeze' the baby (i.e. induce hypothermia) to prevent any further damage after the initial injury.  Parents really don't want to hear their doctor say, "Well Mr. and Mrs. Smith, your baby just received a brain injury and to make sure that it doesn't get any worse, we're going to put it in the freezer."

So my lab is testing a protein that will help reduce damage that is caused by the initial injury, and because it may be a bit unethical to take a bunch of human babies into the lab and subject them to tests, we are using rodents who are very similar anatomically to humans. 

Stay tuned!!!

Much Needed Update

Hey Blogger Friends!

I hope all is well... haven't been around in a while.  Here's a wicked brief update.

My psychology/neuroscience research is (happily) consuming my life.  I've also been on many late-night/early-morning escapades with my camera doing time-lapse photography, and I began filming a time-lapse movie of Rhode Island College with my good friend Hayden.  I like to stay busy.  Stagnation is bad.

My goal is to start blogging again, which might be difficult for me now because my 700 dollar super-wicked-awesome Acer ultra-book is toast! (I spilled water all over it. It crackled, smoked, then died!)  Regardless, there are plenty of computers around that I can use until I'm up and running with my own again.

Be sure to check back soon.  Lots of updates to come!

Below is a short "Psychology Themed" time-lapse video.

Enjoy!

One more thing... My friend Kyle made me this logo for my blog.  It smushes two of my favorite symbols together.  The phi symbol ϕ and the psi symbol  Ψ.  

Was God Trying to Tell Me Something?

I had a interesting experience a while ago, and I'd like to know what you think about it.

It was last winter when I met a wicked cool girl.

We started dating, and I fell in love.

She was a Pentecostal Christian.  I had never heard about people like her.

She told me her story about her conversion.

One day after a long month of loneliness and sadness, she lay on the floor in her room looking up at the ceiling when it struck her.  She realized that God existed!  From then on, her life was good.

I was an atheist, but I found her story so compelling that I wanted to learn more.

While I was trying to figure out what I believed, something very odd happened.

I became severely depressed.  I hated school, feared people, and didn't think my life had any meaning.

On top of that, I couldn't communicate with God.  I prayed.  I read the bible.  I asked others to pray for me, but nothing happened.

One night, I prayed in my truck.  I said, "God, please give me a sign.  Show me that you're real."  I thought the rain dripping down on the windshield was an appropriate symbolic expression of the inner sadness I felt.

But again, nothing happened.

The next day, I was sitting outside of class at school.  I had a Bible I rented from the library in my hand and was reading it when a lady approached me.

"Is that The Good Book?" she said.

"Yeah," I responded.

"What version?"

"I don't know.  It's not mine.  I got it from the library," I said.

She looked at the book, then into my face.  She walked over to her purse and grabbed her bible and brought it over to me.

"Here, have this."

"Really?"  I said.

"Take it.  It's the best thing you'll ever read."

"God speaks to us in strange ways," she said. "My daughter passed away two years ago, and I don't know where I'd be without this.  You look like you could use it."

We talked for a bit more, then she went off.

I walked down to the basement of the building and began to cry.  I couldn't understand what was going on.

Did God really speak to me?  Is this him returning my prayers? Or was it all just wishful thinking? 

Why me?  Why would she give it to me?

She loved this bible.  She used it often.  There were flowers, feathers, notes, and underlines in it.

I am so appreciative to this woman for giving me this book.

I still have it.  It's sitting on my bureau.

Now, my question for the reader is this: How should I interpret what happened?

First Star Photo Shoot

With some help from my friend Kurt.  I made these pictures.  

Stay Tuned!!!

Death

I was at work the other day, and my friend and I were talking when all of a sudden his jaw dropped, and he said, "What is that!?"

He pointed to the top of my head.

"What?" I said.

"You have a grey hair!"

We went under some good lighting and another friend came over to see.

"Pull it out," I said.

My friend then grabbed the hair and plucked it from my head and gave it to me.  I stood there with it in my hand and looked at it.

Grey already, I thought.

"You should write a blog post about the ephemeral nature of life," my friend said looking at my astonishment.

So here it is:

We are all going to die.  Every human ever to walk the face of this earth has died or will die.  All life dies.  Bees die. Plants and trees die.  Elephants, mushrooms, and dogs and cats all die.  I am going to die, and one day you will too.  That's a pretty intense thing to think about.

How do we cope with that thought?

Some of us keep ourselves busy with hobbies, work, and friends.  Others, the majority, think that our bodies will die, but our soul will live on in heaven.  Others think that when we die our spirit is transmitted to another physical body.  Maybe when I die I will become a frog or a prince or a frog-prince.

I take the skeptic perspective: I simply just don't know what happens when we die.

Many people think differently.  I'd be interested to hear what you think about what happens after death.

Your body may be gone, I'm gonnna carry you in. 
In my head, in my heart, in my soul.
And maybe we'll get lucky and we'll both live again.
Well I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Don't think so.  

-T

Natural Selection: Grilled Chicken with a Side of T-Rex

I went to the museum with my friend Lianne and learned something wicked cool.

That's Lianne

Dinosaurs are still alive!  They're not walking around like the big flesh-eating, lizard-monsters that they once were.  Rather, they're flying around in the sky, building nests, and laying eggs for human consumption. That's right, birds are the descendants of the great dinos!

You might say, "Travis, there is no way that my tasty grilled-chicken sandwich is the great, great....granddaughter of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park."  I'm here to tell you that this is the case!

When Dinosaurs first came on the scene some 230 million years ago, they were very different from other species.  They had holes in their hip bones that allowed their legs to extend under their bodies, not out to the side like crocodiles.  

Birds inherited this characteristic hip bone and other anatomical features from the Dinos, placing them in the same evolutionary family-tree.

In 1859, Darwin wrote a book called, On the Origin of Species, in which he outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection.  This theory explains how we get from a massive Godzilla-type creature to a Rhode Island Red.

That's The Guy 

Darwin's basic idea is this:

Creatures need to reproduce. When a creature reproduces, it passes along traits to its offspring.  (I've got blue eyes from my dad.) Traits that help the creature find a mate and copulate are passed along to the next generation.  Traits that make it difficult to  'get jiggy with it' are less likely to be passed along.

Over time traits change from one clearly distinguishable thing into something completely different.  There is an impressive body of evidence suggesting a link between the scale-like skin of the ancient dinos and the feathers of modern birds.

This means that feathers evolved from scales! It's as if one thing magically turned into an other.

Now, what's this got to do with "Mind, self, and belief..."?

The tree in your backyard, the squirrel climbing on the tree, the termites within the dead wood of the tree; your dog, your cat, your hamster, walruses and humpback wales were all shaped by natural selection.  Each living creature on this planet is the distant relative of every other living thing, and we all have one great, great....grandmother who lived over four billion years ago. The trick for us humans is to realize our place in the grand scheme of things and understand what the heck life is all about.    

The word Psychology means 'study of the soul.'  The best way to study the soul is to look at the soul's origin, look at the mind's origin.   There wasn't any mind 3 billion years ago, when life was just bacteria in a swamp, but now there is.  Why?

Attacking Psychological problems from an Evolutionary standpoint bears great fruit.  This is the bedrock perspective that I adopt in my research.  

In the next episode, I will talk about the Psychologist's Fallacy and tell you two stories about my life.  I am telling these stories because I need advice.  I need to know whether or not a significant life event that I had was caused by God, fate, chance, or something else.

In the episode after that, I will present the reader with a outline of my research project.

Keep it real, Everyone

Sources

This video is inappropriate.  Viewers beware.

Zap!

Went to the museum   Took some pictures.  Here's one.

How Would You Like to Become World Famous?

Hi Everyone.

I hope you've enjoyed the stuff on my blog.  I'm having so much fun writing for everybody, and now I'm asking you to be apart of the fun too!

I've got lots of friends and lots of stuff to write about, so why not include my friends in the stuff I write about?

My good friend Kelvin appeared in my first blog post, and that was a success.  I got at least three more views than I normally would have gotten.

So, here's the deal.  Shoot me a message, or leave me a comment below, and you may very well appear in an upcoming entry.  I will use your name, a picture (of your choosing), and something about you that makes you unique to either explain a tough idea or simply make a funny joke.  I am also open to suggestions about how to format my page.  All friendly critiques about writing, grammar, content, etc. are welcome.  I want to get good.  In order to do that, I need to get good advice.  

Best wishes!


Facebook: Travis Nelson Dumais

Email: tdumais3@gmail.com


ps. I should have a separate page up soon dedicated to my photography.  Stay tuned!

Image

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/fight-club/images/13119094/title/want-fight-club-fanart

Theory of Mind: What the Heck is it?

I went on a run today and figured out how to explain this idea to everybody.  I will ask you three questions that will force you to use your own Theory of Mind (ToM), and then I will explain what ToM is.

(1) When you see your best friend crying, what emotion are they feeling?

(2) When you give someone you love a red heart-shaped box, what types of things would they expect to find inside?

(3) When Shaquille O'Neal stands at the free throw line with a basketball in his hands, what does he intend to do?

These are not trick questions!  Your gut response to each one was right.

For the first one, perhaps you said that your crying friend was sad.  Or, if you have a friend who cries often -as I myself am prone to do- then maybe he was experiencing something sublime.

For the second question, someone you love would most likely think that there were chocolate candies inside the heart shaped box.

And, for the third question, we would guess that Shaquille intended to shoot the ball into the hoop so that he could get a point for his team.

When we think about other people's feelings (Question #1), we use our ToM. When we think about other people's beliefs (Q #2), we use ToM.  And, you guessed it, when we predict the next thing someone is going to do (Q #3), we use ToM!

We use ToM all the time, but we barely notice that we're doing it.  We don't notice it because our brains were designed to detect minds with ease in the same way that our brains were designed to easily detect the difference between blue and green.

See that little circled part?  That's called the Temporal-Parietal Junction, and it is the part of the brain that  'turns on' when we think about other people's mental states.*

In the next installment, I will explain how Mother Nature endowed us with this mind-reading ability. Down the road, I hope to address a wicked big question using Theory of Mind.

The wicked big question is this: how do we think about what God is thinking about?

*It's more like a network of neurons that 'fire' in a specific, globalized pattern; but to keep the explanation simple, I refer to the TPj as a 'part' rather than a complex neural network.

What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?

This post requires participation.  It will be brief, and I promise you won't get hurt.  Ok.  Ready?  Look at your hand.  Make sure it's your left hand.  Close it into a fist.  Open your fist and clap your two hands together.  I am not kidding. Seriously, do it.

Now, what if I told you that the sound you just heard was a phantom that didn't actually happen, and that your arm has been paralyzed for five days now?  You would of course say, Travis, you're crazy!  Although I would be obliged to thank you for such a thoughtful diagnosis, I would nonetheless tell you that for some people, this is actually the case.

Anosognosia for hemiplegia (what a mouthful, here's a wiki link) is an ailment of the mind found in stroke patients who, after getting struck by a stroke, can only use one side of their body.  The strange thing about these patients after they recover from the initial injury is that they deny their condition. Even more odd is that, when asked to preform tasks such as the one you just did (my lovely audience of one billion), patients saw their hands clapping and heard the appropriate sound!

I'll leave you with this question: what is 2+2?

Sources

Mind-Body Problem

I want to study the mind, but I keep bumping into a problem that seems somewhat comical at first glance.  What's the problem, you ask?  The problem is this: I don't know where the mind is located!  Perhaps I should explain myself in order to make things clear.

Most people agree that the mind is located somewhere inside the person; namely, behind the eyes.  Containing hundreds of billions of cells, the three-pound mass of jelly called the brain is considered the place within which the mind resides.

We should then be inclined to say that the mind is the brain.  But let me, with the permission of my good friend Kelvin, tell you a story that might challenge this notion.

If I were to take Kelvin's brain out of his head and put it on the table in front of him, he would be dead!  But instead, because I am a good friend, I will painstakingly attach each neuron through a system of special extension chords in such a way that allows me to place Kelvin's brain safely on the table in front of him without him dying.  (You're welcome buddy.)  I am the best surgeon alive in my hypothetical world, so I make sure Kelvin is still awake, ready to answer questions, and in no pain whatsoever after the operation. Where would we now say his mind is?  Where would he say it is?

Before going further, I need to introduce a term (real quick) in order to talk about this problem.  The term is qualia.  Qualia are those things a person experiences from their subjective point of view.  The young philosopher will ask the question, "How can we ever know the difference between the Red I see and the red you see?"  This very thoughtful question captures the enigma of qualia, for it is the stuff that we experience every moment of our conscious lives (even in dreams).  Yet nobody else can ever experience it, and we can never know for certain if other's are experiencing qualia of their own.

Each qualia is correlated with patterned firing of regionally specific neurons in the brain.  Put simply, when you smell apple pie in autumn, there are specific locations within your brain dedicated to processing olfactory (smell) inputs like the aroma of cinnamon.  The brain organizes and integrates the manifold of sensory experience from the outside world in order to make a cohesive, continuous experience within.  Even memories can (theoretically) be traced to patterns of neuronal firings and synaptic pathways within the brain, which is the basic premise of this Jim Carry film. (For the record, I did not cry seven times while watching this movie with my girlfriend and if anybody tells you this happened the're lying).

Ok, now we're ready to ask Kelvin some questions.

"Kelvin, where's your mind located? Is it on the table?"

"No, it's not on the table."

I laugh and say, "Yes it is, I can see it right there," pointing to the brain in front of him.

He pauses for a moment, pensively.  Then says, "No, no, no, Travis.  You've got it all wrong.  My brain is on the table, but my mind is all around me."

I laughed again at my friend's explanation.  But after meditating on this for a few days, I realize he might have a point.  According to him, qualia is the mind, where as brain is the body.  Thus, the mind is all that we experience at any given point in the day, and these experiences can be traced to a three pound sponge in our heads.  To him, the two are separate.  Though, I still don't think I quite understand, or perhaps I just don't want to.  Because, according to this train of reasoning, the conclusion that I'd come to concerning the nature of mind sounds more like a Zen koan than a scientific proposition: the mind is everywhere and yet, nowhere.

This problem is one of blazing concern in the philosophy of mind and there is no 'general consensus' among philosophers about how to tackle it, which makes it one of the most difficult and fascinating problems that humans have ever faced.

Sources