February 2020 – MarkCleaveland.org

Leap Day 2020

Leap Day!! Since this day only happens every four years, I can’t let it pass without a post. So how about something on games?

Last weekend, my buddy Matt drove down from Nashville for Con Nooga. Con Nooga is one of these alternative culture conventions: cos players, board gamers, fantasy & scifi fans, steam punk fans, comic book aficionados, roleplaying gamers… That kind of thing. I’ve always loved the idea of these sorts of gatherings. On one level it’s a big middle finger to the tut-tutting of puritanism. I consider myself a christian, but definitely more in the Matthew 7, verses 1 – 2 camp. Sure, what could be more “frivolous,” than writing fan fiction for Buffy the Vampire Slayer or spending months sewing and putting together a steam punk outfit or min/maxing the statistics of an imaginary character? None of that activity is going to put food on the table or get you ahead at work or mitigate global warming.

Someone decided that they needed to build this.

On the other hand, imagine a society in which everyone was passionate about something and those passions involved participating in creation. That’s what these Cons, at their best, remind me of. People doing things, not to make a buck or to exert dominance over someone else, but simply because they are excited about the opportunity to give voice to their imaginations. Sure, in the U.S. everything has been commoditized, and that goes for imagination. Disney is a company built on the commoditization of imagination. Also, some of the grossest displays of rampant consumerism I have ever seen take place at another con I’ve attended, GenCon. There, crowds of con-goers (many dressed up as elves, pirates, and Storm Troopers) stampede to buy things in a way that is no different from the worst Black Friday crowds. Walk the halls, and there are times when it feels like a scene from an opium den – individuals collapsed against the walls of a hallway in a sort of orgiastic bliss, surrounded by piles of purchased comics, games, figurines, and books.

That’s the stereotype, I suppose, and yet it’s apparently acceptable to get excited about the Super Bowl every year, and really, how is that any different? Talk about a monument to consumerism. And at least no one who is excited about Star Wars is rioting after a loss or running around beating up fans of other films.

Anyway, like I say, for me, being a fan of something – whether it be bread making, gardening, democracy, fantasy fiction, board games, being a dad – it’s all about the act of participating in creation. Imagining something, and then trying to turn elements of that imagination into reality. There’s something kind of glorious about that attitude.

As far as Con Nooga, though, Matt and I pretty much stuck to playing board games. We started out with Forbidden Desert. Forbidden Desert is a cooperative game, in which players have been marooned in desert. A sandstorm is raging, and the players need to discover the pieces of a flying machine, assemble it, and escape before dying of thirst / running out of time. The players either win together or all lose together. It’s a cute game. Each player has a special trait (e.g., clear sand faster, move diagonally, carry more water, etc), and as a team it’s important to make the most of each other’s strengths.

Southern Start Blue Plate special of the day.

After a meal at Southern Star with my folks, it was back to the con to play Quartermaster General. Quartermaster General is a WW II-themed game. Three axis countries (Germany, Japan, and Italy) take on three allied countries (UK, U.S.A, and the Soviet Union). There’s a board that pieces get played out onto, but mainly the game revolves around playing cards. Each country has a unique deck of cards that allows for units to be built, for units to attack, responses to be cued, and so forth. The trick is that only a single card can be played per a country’s turn. So the Soviets might have a response that they would like to cue up (e.g., “If an axis country attacks Ukraine, block the attack.”), but meanwhile they really need to send more troops into Russia which just lost all of its troops to a German attack. Also, once a card is played, it’s likely never coming back because a country’s deck is only gone through once. So, maybe it would be best to hold off playing a particular card, and to save it for later. If you are in to “battle”-type games, Quartermaster General is a very tight and compelling game. In Matt’s and my game the Axis countries ran out to a big lead in points, and the Allied countries only managed a last ditched victory on the final turn of the game with the last few cards of their decks.

Getting ready to start the “third age” of 7 Wonders Duel.

On Saturday, after the Chattanoogan Hotel failed to give Matt hot water (as it did for the entire weekend), we returned for more gaming. Con Nooga has a small but nice gaming library. Check out a game for free, and go play it. So, Matt and I checked out 7 Wonders Duel. Over on Boardgame Geek, I once wrote a review of 7 Wonders that you can read here. 7 Wonders Duel is a 2-player version of 7 Wonders that plays out in a quick 30 minutes. Basically, each player drafts cards into a tableau that represents their “city.” Some of the cards will produce resources (clay, stone, etc.). Some are “cultural” and give victory points, and some are “wonders” that provide a one-off or on-going benefit (e.g., take another turn, get a big influx of coins, etc). Like all games of this sort, there is a bit of learning about the iconography of the game. Symbols on the cards provide a sense of how the card can be used, and Matt and I got confused about this in our first game. But after that, man, this game is fast and enjoyable. I think we ended up rattling off three games in a row.

After 7 Wonders Duel it was time to break out Pandemic Legacy. Matt’s son, Hank, had given him this as a gift, and given the coronavirus news, we had to play this. We played twice and basically got crushed both times (although a misunderstanding of the rules in the first game allowed us to win). Ominous? Pandemic Legacy is like Forbidden Desert in that it is a cooperative game. Players act as a team and essentially try to defeat the game. In this case, the game is a cruel god. Viruses sprout up around the world, outbreaks spiral out to nearby cities, and the players run around the board trying plug up an increasingly “leaky dike.” Since this is a “legacy” game, the rules and boards change from one game to the next, and the game tells a story over plays. For example, in the middle of the first game, we learned that one of the viruses was now impervious to all vaccines. And before the second game our characters formed relationships with one another that allowed for special in-game tactics.

Anyway, after getting kicked around by viruses for a few hours, our brains were hurting, and it was off to Community Pie for some pizza. We came back later for one more game – Memoir ’44. Memoir ’44 is another WW II “dudes on a map” game. As far as these types of games go, Memoir ’44 is pretty rules light. The game board has three zones, and each player draws a hand of “orders” from a common deck. On any given turn, a player puts down a single order (e.g., “move and attack with a single unit in each zone”), draws back up a full hand, and that’s basically it. What makes the game shine are the scenarios…that and the fact that a game never lasts for more than about an hour. The scenarios refer to a particular historical battle, but in game terms, present a tactical puzzle for each player. In Matt’s and my case, we played the Operation Cobra scenario. For the Allied player, the puzzle is all about dislodging the Axis units that are well covered in the hedgerows. There’s no easy approach that isn’t going to leave units out in the open, and armor’s strength is hard to bring to bear. For the Axis player it’s all about stalling the Allied units and managing covered retreats. In our game the Axis looked like it would achieve a quick victory, but ran out of crucial orders for the right flank. The Allies then managed a sudden (and lucky) break through on their own right flank that led to victory.

And that was Con Nooga. Matt stayed another night at the Chattanoogan (again with no hot water), and after a breakfast at Rembrandt’s café, he headed back up to Nashville. All in all, a really nice weekend, and what gaming is all about as far as I’m concerned – goofiness, thinking through things, and catching up with friends.

Chattanooga Sabbatical: start of winter

Maps, not modules

Among certain psychologists, there is a belief that the mind is composed of “modules” that have been designed by evolution to account for very specific tasks. This kind of thinking has also been linked to the assertion that the mind is a computer, resulting in the natural rhetorical extension that “modules” are essentially equivalent to the “apps” we have on our phones. Just as your digital device has apps for banking, socializing, navigating, and finding restaurants, your mind has “modules” for tracking resources, socializing, and foraging, or so the argument goes. My own approach to and training in psychology is highly comparative and mechanistic. So, I am sympathetic to the “brain = computer, mind as modules” approach to psychology. I don’t think it is correct, though.

Let’s think this through – and not in an overly academic way. First of all, the brain is not a computer. Both might be machines that deal with inputs and outputs, but many systems deal with inputs and outputs. The solar system, is a collection of matter that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. A hammer is a system that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. This does not make the solar system or a hammer computational systems, at least not in any profound way. Similarly, sure, brains and computers share some descriptive features. Both make use of “memory,” both are energy intensive and need a regular replenishment of resources, and both transform information in particular ways. But this does not make brains and computers the same thing. Brains are not computers, even if the brain computes. Ultimately, computers are tools designed by humans for particular tasks. Brains are tools for… well, we’ll get to that.

Secondly, the brain is not composed of modules, even if it is modular. Sure, as we learned in the last post, perception is assembled from “products” that have been created in different areas of the brain. In other words, perception is a distributed process. However, it is a distributed process of shared networks. Just as we discussed with reference to supply chains, different visual “products” do not come from isolated modules. There is no “face” module or “chair” module. Instead, there is a system of shared networks that assemble faces or chairs.

Still, one strength of taking a modular approach to psychology is that it emphasizes the adapted qualities of our psyches. There are indeed deep currents given to our psyches by natural selection. We do seem predisposed to detect cheaters, learn languages, use tools (at least more so than other animals), see and hear a particular range of frequencies, have a sensitized disgust response during the first trimester of pregnancy, and on, and on, and on. Even the most religiously inclined must come to terms with the animal in which each soul resides. Through natural selection, our bodies and minds have been designed to encounter and assemble their worlds in particular ways. This is where the utility of thinking in terms of modules comes in. It allows mind scientists to cleanly carve up their subject matter into the traits and adaptations that allow for research. Every science needs its units, after all.

But let’s not forget that the assembly that is done by our minds is done for a particular reason. Fundamentally the psyche is designed to locate the organism within a problem space. Where am I within this space, and what do I need to do? These are the questions that the psyche faces at every moment of its limited existence. And to answer these questions, the psyche is composed not of modules, but of maps. Perception is essentially a means of creating landmarks, directions, and layers of information on maps. Yes, the supply chains of our perception assemble “percepts,” but on some level, all supply chains, themselves, are mappings of inputs onto outputs. We are not “modules all the way down;” we are maps all the way down. It is not a collection of goods that give our psyches meaning, but directions. Our psyches are composed of, and designed to assemble maps, and in doing so, our psyches search for and achieve meaning.

Our minds are composed of maps, not modules, even if those maps show modularity. Maps locate the organism in problem space, and it it through this that we define meaning.

Perception and Supply Chains

Neurons as supply chains. This image shows somatosensory neurons of a mouse that have been imbued with a a green flourescent protein. The bright blobs at the bottom are cell bodies, and the rising strands are apical dendritic bundles. In neurons, dendrites are the cell structures that receive inputs from other neurons.
“new_20x” by Robert Cudmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Since it’s been a while, I’m going to rehash some ideas and then weave in few more concepts: supply chains and maps. We’re still dealing with perceptions and beliefs in all of this.

So, in a recent post, I introduced the idea that emotions and motivations might be more accurately thought of as “visceral beliefs” – a category of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. We call these things “feelings” (I feel angry. I feel hungry. I feel curious. I feel tired…). In each case there is no such thing, really, as say anger. Rather there is a perception originating in our body that we term “anger.” One thing to realize, though, is that even if “you are not feeling it,” this does not mean that your emotional machinery isn’t nonetheless whirring away and influencing your behavior. Not all perception reaches our awareness, just as not all perception is universal. The logic is the same as what is applied to “normal perception” – sight, taste, touch, and so on. So let’s remind ourselves of some of the principles underpinning “normal perception.”

Shipping as neurons, and yes, I’d like you to associate this image with the first image of the post. Paths of shipping in the San Francisco bay. The solid, dark grey areas are land, while the lavender / purple areas are ocean. See this post at Mapbox.Com in order to learn more about how this visualization was created.

Perceptual Machinery

Psychologists long-ago established that perception isn’t a passive transcription of external sensations, but rather involves both a direct construction and an active interpretation. The result of these bottom up and top down processes gives us many of the furnishings and rooms of our psyches. The direct construction is done by the machinery at hand. We have been imbued by evolution with machinery such as rods, cones, chemical receptors, and hair cells that react to a particular range of environmental energies and that turn those inputs into patterns of neural firing. Do all animals, or individuals for that matter, use the same machinery? Of course not. Some birds possess machinery that allows them to “see” the earth’s magnetic fields. Some fish possess machinery that responds to electric fields, and honeybees can see patterns of polarized light that can be used to navigate. As Hamlet would say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The dimensions of our perception are but a sliver of all possible dimensions, and humility (and wonder and a certain arrogance) goes hand-in-hand with doing good psychological science.

Further, even within a common assembly line of perception, e.g., vision, different tools allow organisms to handle different ranges of resources. Our own visual system cannot “handle” electromagnetic spectra from the ultraviolet bands, but honeybees would respond to management’s request to process UV light with “bring it on.” For honeybees ultraviolet inputs are part of their normal experience, while longer wavelengths (i.e., the color “red”) are not (see page 138 of provided link).

To use a crude metaphor, the machinery of perception is like a supply chain that assembles the lived-in environment of the psyche. Depending on the desired product, different supply chains make use of different resources. The supply chain for a rocking chair is quite different from the supply chain for an iPhone. Similarly, the supply chain for a melody will differ from one that produces the smell of cinnamon.

Supply Chains and Perception

Let’s go ahead and push this analogy between supply chains and perception because it will allow us to intuit some general principles of perception.

Part of the supply chain map for Jansport’s Big Student Backpack. Click through to the original interactive supply chain here. The site provides a very cool set of interactive maps for the supply chains of different products.

Here is a map of the supply chain for the Jansport Big Student Backpack. Be sure to click through to the original site, because each of the nodes can be clicked on for further information about the specific factories. Among other things, in this visualization we learn that there is a thread supplier in Malaysia, a yarn manufacturer in India, dying facilities in Thailand, rubber, zipper and yarn facilities in China and Taiwan, and an assembly facility in Indonesia that puts together the final backpack (along with many other products such as shoes, windbreakers, umbrellas, etc.) before shipping it to a primary distribution center in California. This distribution center then introduces the backpack into consumer awareness by placing it on the racks of a store or in the pages of a catalog. The consumer “sees” the final backpack, not the undergirding supply chain that makes the backpack possible.

Our own perception works according to similar principles. Dedicated areas of the brain specialize in “producing” vertical lines, horizontal lines, colors, visual movement… , and yet other areas receive these inputs and assemble them into larger products. At some point these perceptual products enter our awareness, but there is a considerable amount of assembly and processing that has already happened prior to this point. Below, for example, is a crude diagram showing the “supply chain” for visual information in Homo sapiens. Interrupt that supply chain at different locations and particular visual goods will no longer be available.

A map representing the supply chain of vision in humans. It is an adaption of Figure 4 from Behnke’s *Hiearchical Neural Networks for Image Interpretation*. Notice that visual supply chains classically separate into two crude pathways: one that assembles WHAT something is, and one that assembles WHERE something is. For our purposes, prosopagnosia could be thought of as involving disruptions to the WHAT supply chain. Blindsight, on the other hand, involves damage to the V1 area of the supply chain…a critical choke point for conscious perception of visual information. Nonetheless, in many blindsight patients visual factories are still hard at work in the SC, pulvinar, and from the inter laminar portions of the LGN. Additions to Behnke’s diagram are based on a number of readings, but anyone interested could start with Cowey 2010 and Fulton’s *21’st Century Paradigm Describing the Neural System* (p. 129). The latter is kind of eccentric, but for this post you only need to worry about the visual circuitry diagram on page 129. Basically, we now have a better understanding of the pathways from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and pulvinar nucleus that by-pass the V1 area of visual processing. Also, this diagram is still extremely crude. Not shown, for example, are the many feedback pathways that are known to exist among the different cortical areas.

Prosopagnosia, for example, is a phenomenon in which individuals lose the ability to “see” faces (click here to read an article about potential treatments). prósōpon = face, a = not, and gnosis = knowledge. Prosopagnosia usually results from damage or congenital alterations to a brain region known as the fusiform gyrus. Individuals with prosopagnosia might be able to describe the components of a face just fine: the nose is bulbous, the eyes are brown, the hair is curly and black. However, despite possessing the components of a face, they simply don’t possess the ability assemble those components into a face.

The condition known as blindsight also illustrates how disruptions in the visual “supply chain” are not an all-or-nothing thing. Blindsight is characterized by a functional blindness in which individuals nonetheless possess abilities that are dependent on vision. (If you have access to online articles, here is one that provides a nice overview and here is another.) An individual with blindsight might not be able to see a baseball, but could potentially catch one tossed their way. They might not consciously know that an object is present, but nonetheless could correctly guess as to the direction of its movement. In general the reason for the blindness of blindsight involves damage to area V1 of the visual cortex. This is an area at the back of the brain that receives the bulk of input from our retinas. However, as the figure above shows, several inputs from our retinas are sent in parallel to other brain regions (the superior colliculus and the lateral geniculate). It is thought that these inputs allow for the “sight” of blindsight. Conceptually, though, we can think of this with reference to our supply chain analogy. If we lose our “distribution center” or our “assembly factory” certain types of perception might never reach our awareness. Nonetheless, this does not stop the thread, zipper, or fabric dying factories from producing their goods – goods that can be used in other supply chains, as needed.

Figure from “To See, But Not to See.” A nice representation that uses the supply chain analogy to describe how disruptions along one pathway still allow for “deliveries” to take place along other pathways. It just so happens that only one of these pathways involves conscious awareness (the one indicated in blue).

Issues in supply chains don’t only have to do with the loss of resources such as we “see” in individuals with blindsight or prosopagnosia. For example, what would happen if a supply chain began to include inputs of colored fabric to an assembly factory that normally only received black fabric? We might end up with rainbow colored backpacks! Synthesia resembles just such an outcome. This syndrome refers to a phenomenon in which some individuals experience the stimulation of multiple sensory pathways when only a single pathway is objectively stimulated. Numbers and sounds might be “seen” to have particular colors; observing another individual’s hand being touched, might produce a sensation of touch in the observer. It should be noted that synesthesia is not an imagined or arbitrarily conjured sensation. Rather, the synesthete simply and consistently perceives a mixed sensory experience relative to what others experience.

I don’t want to push the analogy between the machinery of perception and supply chains too far. After all, it’s just an analogy. Computers aren’t the same things as brains and supply chains are not the same thing as perception. However, there’s one more point I’d like to squeeze out of the supply chain / perception analogy, and that’s the concern with balancing resilience and efficiency.

When will these goods enter consumer awareness? When does a face become recognized as a face?
“Distribution centre” by Nick Saltmarsh is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Efficiency, blooming and pruning

A central issue faced by the management of supply chains involves balancing efficiency and resilience. For example, the coronavirus outbreak has made news for disrupting supply chains through China, and many green technologies currently face vulnerabilities in their supply chains that might affect their ability to scale up. In order to handle these issues capable managers need constantly to grow and prune their supply chains in ways that minimize costs while maximizing resilience. Extra supplies need to be maintained, backup factories need to be kept at the ready, and of course all of these contingency plans impose costs. If the world were perfectly predictable, these costs would be unnecessary. But the world is not predictable. Storms, viruses, political unrest, new technologies and competitors all impose costs. Such is life.

Supply chain or brains? In this case it’s neural networks, but conceptually the figure originates from work that seeks to emulate the synaptic pruning observed in brains. Taken from Singh (2019). Pruning deep neural networks.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the machinery of perception deals with similar demands for resilience and efficiency, and the way that our brains manage these demands shapes the environs of our individual psyches. For example, the development of our brains is characterized by an overproduction of connections, followed by a pruning of these connections. This “blooming and pruning” occurs in different areas of the brain at different times in our lives. Below, for example, is a figure showing the approximate developmental time course for several brain regions along with their hypothesized functions. What it shows is that our visual and auditory “supply chains” are crudely mapped out with a hodgepodge of connections that are then tightened up over the first three years of life. Areas involved in speech production, on the other hand, have a later “blooming” that is followed up by a pruning that occurs until approximately age 7. [Remember: these are averages and say nothing about what is happening in the brain for any single individual.]

Figure 1 from Thompson and Nelson (2001). Developmental science and the media: early brain development. *American Psychologist*, 56, 5 – 15. The curves estimate the number of synapses in different brain regions at different times in an individual’s life. The central point is that waves of “blooming and pruning” are a regular part of brain development across (at least) the first 20-odd years of life.

The pruning of pathways in our brains is crudely guided by a “use it, or lose it” maxim. Connections that are repeatedly stimulated are strengthened and maintained, while those that are rarely stimulated are deleted. The result is that our perceptual supply chains are made more efficient at delivering the products that we apparently need. If you do not need to distinguish between “l” and “r” sounds, then your brain will eliminate the wasted circuitry that produces the perception of these two distinct sounds. Simultaneously we become worse / better at associating particular lip movements with particular sounds. Similarly, as I brought up in another blog post, if you do not need to distinguish between faces that have particular racial characteristics, then your brain will eliminate the “wasted” circuitry that produces the perception of these differences. In extreme cases, experimenters have even been able to create environments in which animals lose the ability to perceive horizontal or vertical lines. Again, use it or lose it. If the world does not need you to “see” vertical lines, then your brain is not going to waste the supply lines necessary to create a perception of vertical lines. In psychology this phenomemon is termed perceptual narrowing and it is the result of synaptic pruning , but conceptually perceptual narrowing and synaptic pruning are no different from what supply chain managers do every day.

Summing up the Supply Chain / Perception Analogy

All right, the main principles to draw from our analogy between supply chains and perception are:

Just as supply chains construct products by integrating and orchestrating a network or factories, the machinery of perception constructs our psychological world from many distributed areas in the brain.

Just as a zipper or yarn factory can help in the assembly of many different goods, perceptual “factories” can provide outputs that are used for many different types of percepts (e.g., faces, objects, animals, etc.).

Just as much of a supply chain is invisible to the consumer, much of the machinery of perception is invisible to our consciousness.

Just as supply chains are molded by concerns for efficiency and resilience, our brains mold the machinery of perception by balancing physiological costs and environmental demands.