Intuition Amplifiers 2

In 1984 while working on my Ph.D. thesis I became determined to understand what makes your average neighborhood barber so much more efficient compared to the most sophisticated computers. What are the brain mechanisms that enable us to process vast amounts of visual, tactile and other sensory information and rapidly assess variety of enormously complex situations without consciously realizing it? How can we access and utilize our built-in supercomputers? What do we need to do in order to further enhance our natural abilities to recognize patterns and how computers and other information technology devices could be used to develop a symbiosis between humans and machines thus creating a new class of decision makers that share the best abilities of both, humans and computers?
After almost 30 years of conducting thousands of experiments, researching, designing and creating hundreds computerized control system for pilots, telemetry analysts, electrical engineers, doctors and market traders it became fairly apparent to me that our subliminal, intuitive thinking and devices that allow us to efficiently interface with it is our only hope to stay in control of this run-away train that we call the technological progress. I call those devices, methods and algorithms “INTUITION AMPLIFIERS”.

 

The purpose of this thread is to discuss some of methods and devices that could be described as Intuition Amplifiers. I will try to present some results of my experiments that had involved many different people who kindly helped me to better understand such elusive subjects as subconscious decision making, subliminal thinking, perception formation and other hidden abilities of our brain.

 

Again, this thread is not about proving something. It is not about putting the “steak in the ground” either; it does not include rigorous formal logical proofs and does not use much of the math. It will not have any “proven track records” nor will it have any pounding on the chest. The purpose of this thread is to make you think and wonder about your capabilities as a human. It is about exciting you with the possibilities of accessing your untapped resources and developing devices that would enable us, humans, to interact and utilize our subliminal thinking reliably and efficiently. My hope is to introduce you to a few basic principles behind the Intuition Amplifiers and identify them as a new class of information technology devices that could potentially bridge the gap between humans and machines.

 

As a psychologist and a computer scientist I have been studying perceptional patterns observed in organized financial markets over the past 18 years. Like a starry night sky presents endless wealth of data to an astronomer, markets are the ultimate source of behavioral patterns, psychological observations and perceptual anomalies for a psychologist. They are one of the best documented areas of human activities with historical data records going back hundreds of years. It is hard to imagine a better application field for a scientist. There is also something else that is quite unique about the markets as a field of research: they do not just represent the wealth of data, they allow an instant verification of all sorts of hypotheses that a researcher might come up with. Through the mechanisms of trading stocks, futures, currencies, bonds, options etc. markets offer the ultimate test facility for instantly verifying all sorts of assumptions, theories and conjectures. Just like one of my colleagues bluntly put it: “If your theory is right – you will make money; if it’s wrong – your accountant will let you know about it in the same afternoon.”

 

In this thread we are going to use ideas, methods and tools that belong to mathematical and cognitive psychology. For the most people those areas of scientific research are, unfortunately, not very well-known. It is, however, understandable. With so many exciting things popping up everywhere most of us do not have time to establish a direct contact with those fields of research. After all, thinking about your intuition is not that exciting and satisfying as playing with your new iPhone. Aside of the occasional National Geographic or PBS programs on how can we “trick” our visual perception and how can some illusions play the “mind games” with us there are not that many common sense publications that are dedicated to the practical use of cognitive and mathematical psychology findings. There are, of course a few books that have been published in the past 5 to 10 years that talk about “brain bugs”, “subliminal thinking”, “invisible gorillas” and thinking in a “blink” (just Google those words and you will find the books I am talking about). However, majority of those books are all about those amusing tricks that one could play on a human brain (many of those tricks are the same in many different books and publications) and not about how to use those tricks to build practical tools to enhance our existence. Well, I hope this discussion will set a different course, excite you about the possibilities that mathematical and cognitive psychology has to offer and will encourage you to learn more about those wonderful sciences.

 

First I would like to give you a very short (and hopefully not very boring) overview of these areas of psychology. You, of course, are more than welcome to skip this portion of the thread if you have no interest in history of these scientific fields and, like many of my research subjects, have “ants in your pants”. I will definitely understand your impatience.

 

As I said earlier, mathematical psychology is, unfortunately, not a well-known area of psychological research. To some people it sounds almost like an oxymoron implying that mathematics and psychology could not be mixed. Well, let me assure you - it is a real science. It represents an unusual approach to psychological studies that is primarily focused on mathematical modeling of perceptual and cognitive activities of humans. The objectives of mathematical psychology include the establishment of logical descriptions and the mathematically formal functional analysis of human behavior. Cognitive psychology, on another hand, is the science that is mostly dedicated to the qualitative exploration of internal mental processes of people. Both of those branches have been formally established in the fairly recent years when the main-stream psychologists have begun to apply methods and instruments from fields of engineering, computer science, mathematics and biology to their psychological research. Below is a short history of these schools of psychology that is in my point of view explains their origins.

 

It has all started in the 19th century with Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner - the first psychologists who have successfully applied mathematical technique of functional equations to psychological processes. By doing so, they have established the fields of experimental psychology in general, and that of mathematical and cognitive psychology in particular.

 

With the rapid development of measuring tools in mechanics, astronomy, navigation and artillery 19th century researchers were faced with the necessity to map distances, denote the exact time of passing star or calculate the trajectory of a cannon ball by measuring the wind velocity. They did not, of course have the automatic registration instruments of the modern era thus they had to solely rely on their own responses and registration skills. However, it was soon noted that there were always slight differences between the measurements obtained by different observers. Those differences were systematically studied by German 19th century astronomer Friedrich Bessel. Bessel constructed personal equations from measurements of basic response speed that would cancel out individual differences from the astronomical calculations. Independently, physicist Hermann von Helmholtz measured the researchers’ reaction times while they were trying to establish the propagation speed of electrical signals through the nerve system of different animals.

 

Continuing this ground breaking work Dutch physiologist F. C. Donders and his student J. J. de Jaager have recognized the importance of reaction dynamics for objectively normalizing the amount of time different mental operations usually required. It was Donders who first identified the “mental chronometry” as a most basic element of complex cognitive activities. By simply measuring the reaction time of different test subjects to identical mental challenges he was able to construct the first mathematical psychology model to quantify the complexity of different mental tasks.