Somebody should make purposefully educational dubstep songs. "Time to get a better feel for 2^x. Wub wub, wub wub, wubwub wubwub, wubwub wubwub...."
You know, this concept fits rather well with the idea I'm playing with right now of educational games that try to implicitly teach useful kinds of synesthesia.
*steals*
In chess move notation "?!" indicates an interesting but probably dubious move whereas "!?" indicates an interesting and probably fruitful move (more or less). It'd be cool if we could import this into LW lingo somehow.
It's like the difference between "Huh! Eh..." and "Huh! Um, hm; hmmm...".
Also, ! is a good move, ? is a poor move, !! is a brilliant move and ?? is a straight-up blunder (which doesn't necessarily mean it's an obvious blunder; non-pros make at least a few moves in most games that pros would consider to be blunders, especially in the endgame). It's a good language for quickly talking about differences of opinion about the motivatedness of an idea or conceptual attack. Someone might think one of your moves is ? where you think it's !?, or ?? instead of ?!, or !! instead of !?. It's not uncommon for moves you initially think are ?! to end up being ? or ?? upon further examination. Initially !?-seeming moves tend both ways.
I'm basically starting from the assumption that it's possible for at least some small fraction of the population to acquire new synesthesthesia modes - that seems plausible to me, though I've never seen it addressed directly in the literature. (Which may be a failure of the technical definition of synesthesia, which seems to define it as something that a synesthete has always experienced.) As to actual methods, it depends on what exactly is being taught, but I expect it will mostly boil down to presenting the concepts and the qualia together repeatedly, and then slowly phasing out the concepts while expecting the user to keep reacting as if the concepts were being presented. (E.g. if a circle this size is '2', and you're shown two 2-sized circles and a plus sign, return '4'.) I'd like to really push the envelope on that count - I actually have concept -> shape/color and relationship -> color/movement synesthesia, which are both very useful and would be incredible to be able to teach, but something a bit more modest, like number -> sound or number -> beat speed, might be a better starting point, especially for proof-of-concept purposes.
O.O
I had not previously encountered information about the serotonin connection. This may explain why I reacted so very poorly when I was put on antidepressants. (Also possibly why melatonin makes me feel like I've been hit by a bus the next day.)
LSD is unlikely to be useful for this purpose, but the melatonin information might be. Thank you!
I have no idea what you're saying about dubstep videos training your intuitions. Those interested in experimental studies relevant to training one's intuitions may wish to read Hogarth (2008).
Making yourself OCD would probably also help. (I'm too lazy to dig up the references, and individual papers aren't worth much in neuroscience.) Assuming you're already near an edge of an OCD attractor.
As a side note, I now have a tumblr blog at least half about rationality and electronic music at willnewsome.com. I'd like it if more people promoted themselves and their blogs via one-off LW discussion posts every few months or so even if they're not directly rationality-related. I fear I'm missing out on some interesting stuff due to silly social dynamics resulting from potentially-maladaptive psychology.
What about a "Where LWers talk about their blogs" thread, so people can link to their own blogs and describe them?
Edit: Did I break some norm with this suggestion or is it just a plain bad idea?
I think just at least partially implicitly agreeing with me about anything is enough to get an immediate downvote from someone these days. Sorry.
I used to listen to Digitally Imported with Windows Media Player (it might do this with other players, I don't know) and found their visualization system fascinating (especially since tracks would often have a vocal solo, or introduce parts one by one, leading to very different classes of waves that you could watch morph into one another).
A similar idea but taken a little farther.
(Tutorial: How to make hip hop hits by boyinaband)
Right, literally noisy metaphorical (cellular) automata. You can read more into it but I think reading just that much into it isn't being overly syncretic. Hard to tell with these things.
There are subtle things where it folds in and then out on itself... I feel like that corresponds to something interesting for some reason but I don't remember what... I should probably sleep.
In a similar vein but harder to see the connections: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg31MqrurkQ&feature=channel_video_title (please watch at 720p, it makes it brighter which is important; also fullscreen it).
I think this visualization by YouTube entity dubzophrenia is a decent introduction to some intuitions driving algorithmic information theory, at least for people who like dubstep:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwkcY8spx_g&feature=channel_video_title
(Please watch in 720p; audio quality is also higher. Fullscreening it is also kind of necessary.)
At least I notice that this is how I tend to think about things like statistical mechanics, quantum information theory, that kinda thing, insofar as I think about them rather than just read lots of abstracts and pretend like that counts. I suspect that liking dubstep is correlated with schizotypality is correlated with having your procedural learning set up such that watching videos like this actually improves your math intuitions (depending on the type of math I think; stat mech more than linear algebra). But that's a lot of speculation. Upvote or downvote as you intuit.
As a side note, I now have a tumblr blog at least half about rationality and electronic music at willnewsome.com. I'd like it if more people promoted themselves and their blogs via one-off LW discussion posts every few months or so even if they're not directly rationality-related. I fear I'm missing out on some interesting stuff due to silly social dynamics resulting from potentially-maladaptive psychology.