Inside Andrew Hsu's Brain @andrewdhsu-blog - Tumblr Blog

One small step for man...

I know I have been quite negligent recently about my blog. Finally, here's an update on what we've been working on!

Around 6pm Pacific time on Sunday, September 4, 2011, we submitted Mini Painters to the App Store.

As Airy Labs is in the earliest stages, it is a historical moment. This game is our first offering in what is going to be a long history of fantastic games with educational and learning value.

This is a firm first step on our path to becoming the largest gaming company in the world and bringing the world the best learning tools that have ever existed.

We want to thank everyone in Airy Labs, especially our engineers and artists, who worked tirelessly day and night to create, iterate, and polish Mini Painters to make it an extremely fun learning game.

Excitingly, we have more great games to come in the next couple of days and weeks.

We would like to think that what we are doing is creating great gifts to the world, and Mini Painters is the first. There are many more to come.

Let's continue to dazzle the world! :)

Job Candidate Interviews

Hey guys,

If you have interviewed or talked to any possible candidates, please write your comments into "Job Candidates" right away after interview. It's important I have written input from everybody when thinking about the candidates and making these very important decisions, so please don't forget. Thanks!

Best,

Andrew

#interviews

I'm speaking here tonight

http://ertmobiletalk1.eventbrite.com/

A recent interview about me

Check it out!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818816

http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/07/28/19-year-old-stanford-ph-d-dropo...

Hack the Future!

I was at the first Hack the Future event earlier today. Alex Peake of Primer Labs invited me. I was volunteering and mentoring kids there. I think it is an awesome idea to create a "hackerspace" for kids. Get them started young.

Movie processing

Jon Boorstin's book "The Hollywood Eye" had a great way to describe 3 levels of processing movies - visceral, vicarious, and voyeur

Visceral is how movies affect us at the gut - gore, terror, etc. Vicarious is immersing viewers in the narrative and story, voyeur is higher-level intellectual processing of whether everything makes sense.

Same thing works for games too - think about it

#games #movies

Life In The Long Haul

There are a lot of parallels between great trading/stock picking and a proper world view. What springs to mind is the difference, as discussed in the investment classic “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” between a speculator and an investor.

Speculators are risk-takers and "buy the trend" whereas true investors pick carefully and are in for the long haul. The financial markets are in so much trouble today because of the very human tendency to look to the short-term and panic whenever things go wrong or stock prices go down. There's strong herd pressure to follow the trend and rush to the current area of excitation.

The book's protagonist, Livingston, is a self-admitted speculator, but his savvy sets him apart and allows him to be a great stock picker. Among these qualities are a more austere, less emotionally-attached mindset for the market. The ticker tape is impartial - it doesn't care how you feel. That's his genius - he could look within himself and understand his mistakes, rather than blame the market.

This is also a good way of approaching life and of becoming a fountain of innovation. Try to resist the siren of the masses - market psychology - and come up with fundamental insights into how the world works. That's what leads to breakthroughs. Don't be a short-term thinker, and don't "fight the tape" - become more self-aware and a better person. Keep the confidence in your long-term plan and vision, and enjoy the journey along the way.

#investment #life

Intrinsic Motivation Studies

This is in some ways a follow-up to my earlier post about gamification and the value of intrinsic motivation. One of the chief aspects of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation is that in the intrinsic case, one's experience is "almost spiritual," as the psychologist Edward Deci said. Intrinsically motivated experiences are infused with life, vitality, and intensity. They're what the painter Robert Henri called "more than ordinary moments of existence."

Unfortunately, many aspects of today's society have evolved to be very ends-focused, efficient, and cast under the eye of instrumental rationality, a form of rationality focusing on the most effective way to achieve a certain end, with no understanding of the intrinsic value. As philosopher Charles Taylor said, society has fallen under a malaise of instrumental reason.

There have been many very interesting studies showing that intrinsic motivation in fact creates better learning experiences, more long-lasting understanding of material, and greater creativity. In the educational system, grades are the primary external motivator to get students to learn. It was found that the use of controls (in this case the looming tests) actually decrease motivation and reduce the level of understanding compared to students that were told to learn for its own sake, and to put that knowledge to use by teaching others.

Students who learn material with external controls also forget much more quickly - even though they have superior rote memorization in the short-term, their brains don't retain the information and perform a "core dump."

So telling kids they will be tested on the material is likely to be detrimental for deep learning and real understanding. It pays to consciously create fundamentally engrossing learning experiences rather than just focusing on the bottom line.

#education #intrinsic motivation #learning #motivation

You Make Me Sick!

In 2010, the National STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) video game challenge was created as part of President Obama's initiatives on STEM education. The $50,000 grand prize was taken by a Flash game called "You Make Me Sick!" created by Dan Norton and Dan White of Filament Games.

I was pretty impressed with the game and though it's short (not that much gameplay), it's much more in line with how educational games should be done.

In “You Make Me Sick!”, my mission as a disease was to try to infect an elderly man (key characteristics: he’s a mouth-breather with many vaccines). I decided to create an airborne bacterium - airborne because his mouth-breathing would be an easy entry vector for my disease, and bacterium because viruses would have a harder time due to the vaccines my target had.

Mission #1 was to plan my attack. I had my bacteria blow in from the open window, and had to play a little minigame to guide myself into my target's mouth while he was breathing in and out. I succeeded after a few minutes of frenetic clicking and encountered another minigame involving infecting the target's lungs, hopping from alveolus to alveolus.

The game ended afterward (hence my complaint about it being too short), but it was definitely engrossing and was a great way to teach kids how an infection actually happens.

This sort of game, that's fun for its own sake and has real learning value, is what the educational game field should strive for.

#education #games #learning

Godiva Chocolates

Before 1999, Godiva chocolates were seen as the leading gourmet chocolate brand. However, they decided to expand their business and push into Barnes & Noble bookstores, which had the consequence of reducing the perception of their brand as a premium boutique. For the first time, their chocolates contained preservatives and then started facing stiff competition from ultra-premium brands that contained such fanciful ingredients as violets and black sea salt.

To fix this, Godiva started development of a new product with the mission of creating a popular, lustful chocolate experience for young women. They created a blended chocolate drink exclusively available within Godiva stores, marketed as an almost sinfully decadent and seductive beverage.

The beverage design attempted to leverage many senses - the on-the-spot creation of the drink involved blending Belgian chocolate chunks, fresh raspberries, and cream (mouth watering yet?). Think about it - it involves sight, hearing (the blending), smell, taste, and touch (texture of the drink).

The name given to this product was Chocolixir - it spread to 152 Godiva shops around the world by 2008. It restored Godiva store foot traffic and harnessed all 5 senses of customers to encourage them to indulge. Again, multisensory integration!

#chocolate #godiva #multisensory integration

Sensory integration

A friend asked me recently about whether and how using all the senses leads to better and more effective learning. The field of sensory integration is really interesting. There's a perceptual phenomenon called the McGurk effect, which is often used by scientists as an example showing that perceiving speech from others involves multiple senses.

It's very simple - you watch a video of somebody pronouncing a phoneme, like /ga/. The audio, though, is /ba/. The brains of most people can't properly reconcile the shape of the lips and the audio, so they hear something in between - usually /da/. This happens even if you know about it!

The effect is really strong even if you know all about it. To experience it for yourself, check out this video featuring Professor Lawrence Rosenblum from UC Riverside:

That's the sensory integration happening in your brain.

On the learning side, there's convincing evidence showing that multisensory environments give rise to much better learning than do unisensory environments. Studies done by cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer have shown that compared to a group that gets information through only hearing, a group that gets information through both sight and hearing have over 50% improved problem solving ability, as well as better recall even 20 years later.

There's plenty of other evidence, and all of us should be thinking about learning environments and classrooms that go beyond just sight and hearing - what about pairing distinctive smells with lessons and using them to facilitate recall (e.g. associate the smell of lemons with math class)? Or allowing students to experience a wide variety of novel textures when learning subjects that lend themselves to that?

#neuroscience #sensory integration

Gamification: Like Too Much Chocolate?

Gamification is familiar, and probably cliche by now, to everyone inside the game industry. It's already spilling to outside of the formal game industry, and you can see this in the rise of check-ins and location-based awards, as well as the point, badge, and leaderboard systems that are increasingly common. Some of these mechanics have been well-known for a long-time, such as the punchcards you get that promise a free 6th meal if you come 5 times to the restaurant - or coffee shop, or hairdresser, or amusement park.

The way it's going, in five years, pretty much everything in the world is going to be gamified. Is this a force for good though? This is something I was discussing with Dr. Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD (multi-user dungeon, which some of you may remember as ascii text-based virtual worlds from the 80s and 90s).

Gamification is the use of game design for non-game purposes, but Bartle argues that it's not the same at all as a game because in gamification you get rewards and you can't really lose. There's no play.

This brings us back to the debate between intrinsic rewards and external rewards. Where gamification, in the form it takes today, increasingly goes wrong is that it's all about external rewards - in essence bribing players to do something by giving them points, badges, and so on.

Continuing on this path, which seems to be almost a certainty because many people working on gamification aren't game designers, is dangerous because given enough time, people will eventually recognize "extrinsic operant conditioning tropes," avoid them, and the house of cards will crash down.

So when you're gamifying something, make sure there's intrinsically fun play and give rewards that are really inherently valuable, such as fun content - not just worthless points and empty badges.

#games #gamification #reward

Distractors and Attentional Capacity

Besides attentional blink, there are many more very interesting effects of videogames on the brain. Again, imagine yourself looking at a screen. There is a circle on the screen, and various shapes can appear on it like numbers around a clock.

Your task is to hunt for a diamond that appears on the circle. Sometimes, the diamond is the only thing that appears, in which case the task is trivial, and sometimes there are other shapes that appear around the circle to make it harder. In addition to this, there is sometimes an additional distractor shape that shows up either inside or outside of the circle.

Your brain can't help but pay attention to this distractor, and interestingly, if the distractor is a diamond, it actually will help you find the diamond on the circle more quickly. If the distractor is not a diamond (e.g. a square or a circle), it will slow you down.

When the task becomes difficult (many other objects on the circle along with distractors), the diamond-shaped "helpful distractor" actually loses its effectiveness. Interestingly, this only happens in nongamers. Videogame players are still sped up by same-shape distractors and this happens no matter how hard the task is.

A reasonable explanation for this is that videogame players have higher attentional capacity. It seems that there’s less of an attentional bottleneck.

#attention #games #neuroscience

Why the Obese Overeat

Are obese people obese because they eat too much, metabolize slowly, or both? Most studies show that overeating is the major factor, but what is the neuroscientific basis for this?

One of the leading hypotheses comes from studies on rats, and claims that blunted pleasure circuits in the brain result in overeating. Obesity-prone rats have a significantly lowered baseline level of dopamine and level of dopamine release. The practical result is that obesity-prone rats have to eat more to achieve the same pleasure from food as obesity-resistant rats can.

What about humans though? Do obese people have less dopamine release in their brain in response to food than thin people do? A study from the Oregon Research Institute conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging studies (brain scans) on young women, scanning their brains while they received chocolate milkshakes through syringe pumps. They found that the obese women showed blunted dorsal striatum responses to the food reward, likely prompting them to compensate for the blunted reward by overeating.

This sort of basic research into the pleasure circuits of the brain provides hope for conquering this enormous health problem that’s sweeping over the world, especially the United States.

#dopamine #food #neuroscience #pleasure

Attentional Blink

Attentional blink is an interesting phenomenon first described in 1992. Generally, it's about spotting salient and important items in a rapid sequence of other objects. The specific task that's used in an experiment would be where the subject is looking at a screen, where a bunch of black letters pop up and disappear in sequence. Once in a while, a white letter pops up, and a certain (short) amount of time after the white letter, an X may or may not pop up as well.

So the white letter notifies you that the X might pop up soon. If the X pops up immediately after the white letter does, your percentage of seeing it will be higher than average. This is due to an aspect of attentional blink called "lag one sparing." There's no super conclusive explanation for this, though it's thought that the brain releases a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine after the meaningful stimulus (the white letter), the effects of which last for around 100ms and allow the X to be processed together with the white letter.

However, if the X appears between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds after the white letter, many people miss it. The visual system "blinks" after the relevant white letter stimulus and is blind to the X popping up.

A real-world example of attentional blink would be if you're driving outside, with many objects whizzing past you, and you have to respond quickly to a ball rolling onto the street. As you shift your attention and bring the ball to your conscious awareness, there's a half-second gap in which you might miss a child running out after that ball.

Studies, chiefly those done by Shawn Green during his graduate studies in Daphne Bavelier's lab, have shown that video game players have a much shorter attentional blink than nongame players. This is really interesting because it suggests that these fundamental phenomena are trainable and changeable by playing fast-paced computer games.

Now this is sort of the reciprocal of what people traditionally think of as educational games. Instead of learning material from games, we’re playing games to train our own visual skill, attention, enumeration skill, and so on. So it goes both ways - neuroscience can be used to design better games, and games can also be used to affect our own brains.

#attention #games #neuroscience

Why do we smile?

If a dog smiles at you, it’s a bad sign. In the animal kingdom, retracting the lips and exposing the teeth signals aggression, dominance, and even imminent attack. The dog above isn’t smiling for the camera - he’s defending his bone.

Why is it so different in humans, where a smile conveys happiness, amusement, and appeasement? This was an unsolved puzzle for hundreds of years, until in 1980, Professor John Ohala in the Department of Linguistics at Berkeley found that what’s actually important is how smiling makes our voices sound. Smiling pulls your cheeks back, reducing the size of your mouth cavity and producing higher vocal tract resonances. This mimics infantile vocalizations that originate from smaller vocal tracts and raises the pitch of your voice.

This is seen in other parts of nature, where low pitched sounds are more threatening and dominant and high pitched ones are submissive. A large dog’s growl is a deep and threatening vibration, while a small dog with a high pitch isn’t a threat at all. If you’ve ever been in a serious argument, you may have consciously deepened your voice to appear larger, more dominant, and intimidating.

So smiles aren’t just pleasing visually - they are vital to relationships with others and shaping positive emotions. They change the sound of your voice for the better: Smile and talk next time you’re on the phone, and the person on the other end will feel your voice lighten. It’s great for customer service too!

(Image source: David Shankbone)

#happiness #smile

Looking for Technical Partners

I'm looking for technical partners to work with me on making social (competitive and collaborative) learning games for young kids. There's huge potential for educational games that are actually fun, and children need to see that learning doesn't have to be boring. Games are absolutely the best way to transform that perception, and that's our dream. I'd love to work with people who are very strong technically and interested in crafting beautiful playing and learning experiences.

If you have the passion to change the world with games and education, come join me! Drop me a line at http://andrewhsu.com/contact/

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