Peter Watts - Blindsight

The maternal-response opioids that Helen Keeton used to kickstart mother-love in her damaged son was inspired by recent work on attachment-deficit disorders in mice. [129] Moles, A., Keiffer, B.L., and F.R. D’Amato. 2004. Deficit in attachment behavior in mice lacking the m-Opioid receptor gene. Science 304: 1983-1986. The iron-scavenging clouds that appear in the wake of the Firefall are based on those reported by Plane et al . [130] Plane, J.M.C., et al. 2004. Removal of meteoric iron on polar mesospheric clouds. Science 304: 426-428. I trawled The Gang of Four’s linguistic jargon from a variety of sources. [81] Hauser, M.D., N. Chomsky, and W.T. Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298: 1569-1579. , [131] Fitch, W.T., and M.D. Hauser. 2004. Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate. Science 303:377-380. , [132] Premack, D. 2004. Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence? Science 303: 318-320. , [133] Holden, C. 2004. The origin of speech. Science 303: 1316-1319. The multilingual speech patterns of Theseus ’ crew (described but never quoted, thank God) were inspired by the musings of Graddol, [134] Graddol, D. 2004. The future of language. Science 303: 1329-1331. who suggests that science must remain conversant in multiple grammars because language leads thought, and a single “universal” scientific language would constrain the ways in which we view the world.

The antecedent of Szpindel’s and Cunningham’s extended phenotypes exists today, in the form of one Matthew Nagel. [135] BBC News. 2005. Brain chip reads man’s thoughts. March 31. Story online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/4396387.stm . The spliced prosthetics that allow them to synesthetically perceive output from their lab equipment hails from the remarkable plasticity of the brain’s sensory cortices: you can turn an auditory cortex into a visual one by simply splicing the optic nerve into the auditory pathways (if you do it early enough). [136] Weng, J. et al. 2001. Autonomous Mental Development by Robots and Animals. Science 291: 599-600. , [137] Von Melchner, L, et al. 2000. Visual behaviour mediated by retinal projections directed to the auditory pathway. Nature 404: 871-876. Bates’ carboplatinum augments have their roots in the recent development of metal musculature. [138] Baughman, R.H. 2003. Muscles made from metal. Science 300: 268-269. , [139] Weissmüller, J., et al. 2003. Change-induced reversible strain in a metal. Science 300: 312-315. Sascha’s ironic denigration of TwenCen psychiatry hails not only from (limited) personal experience, but from a pair of papers [140] Piper, A., and Merskey, H. 2004. The Persistence of Folly: A Critical Examination of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Part I. The Excesses of an Improbable Concept. Can. J. Psychiatry 49: 592-600. , [141] Piper, A., and Merskey, H. 2004. The Persistence of Folly: A Critical Examination of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Part II. The Defence and Decline of Multiple Personality or Dissociative Identity Disorder. Can. J. Psychiatry 49: 678-683. that strip away the mystique from cases of so-called multiple personality disorder . (Not that there’s anything wrong with the concept; merely with its diagnosis.) The fibrodysplasia variant that kills Chelsea was based on symptoms described by Kaplan et al .. [142] Kaplan, F.S., et al. 1998. The Molecules of Immobility: Searching for the Skeleton Key. Univ. Pennsylvania Orthopaedic J. 11: 59-66. Available online at http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ortho/oj/1998/oj11sp98p59.html .

And believe it or not, those screaming faces Sarasti used near the end of the book represent a very real form of statistical analysis: Chernoff Faces, [143] Chernoff, H. 1973. Using faces to represent points in k-dimensional space graphically. Journal of the Americal Statistical Association 68:361-368. which are more effective than the usual graphs and statistical tables at conveying the essential characteristics of a data set. [144] Wilkinson, L. 1982. An experimental evaluation of multivariate graphical point representations. Human Factors in Computer Systems: Proceedings . Gaithersberg, MD, 202-209.

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