Tickle's Original Inkblot Test

Things you find whilst cleaning out your bookmarks. Still this inkblot test was still a little bit of fun.

Your Unconscious Mind Is Most Driven by Love.

Your instinct to love and be loved is rooted very deeply in your subconscious and affects most of the decisions you make in life – whether you are aware of it or not. You inspire people to experience their true feelings of love and act kindly towards others. You also value your personal relationships more than most people.

Your unique capacity to love may be greater than those around you, which means you may have more to give in relationships than your friends or romantic partners do. Your psyche is very rich; the more you learn about it, the more you will understand who you really are...

Model train controlled via brain-machine interface

Ok, heres a great new way to switch your model train on and off using your brain.

Model train controlled via brain-machine interface ::: Pink Tentacle

Hitachi have developed a helmet that reads the blood concentration in the brain and detects changes in blood flow. This is useful to detect mental activity and then interpret these signals to control some external device. Users need to remember some sort of mental arithmetic or remember something to trigger the train to switch on and off.

The Hitachi site has a little bit more info as well.

Can you start using your brain to stop losing it?

All though I don't really like the reporting style of Channel 9's new show. What's good for you?, they did a story about improving your memory. The links provided in the attached article however are quite good.

Freemind taking off (sort of)

Another trip on sourceforge revealed that Freemind has a couple of wiki's that support its format along with some tools to extend its functionality.

My favourites from the above search are:

LiveMind: AJAX MindMap editor - "this is an on-line, html (AJAX) based editor & browser for FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/) mindmaps."

Mapp.it - "A web-spider, based on the availability of URL APIs to most web based databases, mapping web pages to two dimensional FreeMind mind-maps. "

Topographica and the NIMH Human Brain Project

Something interesting on the sourceforge homepage today. I found an application known as Topographica which is used to help researchers identify the functions of the brain related to sensory and motor functions.

From the webpage:

Topographica instead focuses on the large-scale structure and function that is visible only when many thousands of such neurons are connected into topographic maps containing millions of connections.

While I touched on the ideas expressed only very briefly when I studied Computational Neuroscience, I'm sure the future of this app looks promising and is something I'll come back to when I get more time.

Speed Reading Links

While searching Music Speed Reading to help my brother I came across a few pages:

Speed reading software, articles and tips (Ababasoft) - has lots of background info on speed reading plus flash games to help you develop your skills. There are lots of them, there is even a speed reading metronome. The site also has a lot of flash games to learn music theory. Great site.

RocketReader - An aussie product which is an end to end speed reading and comprehension tool. Looks good - a little pricey ($99 AUD).

There were other relevant tools (mainly screenreaders) at this site where I came across the above two links.

FreeMind: a very excellent and cheap mindmapping tool

Another thing I learnt at the Speed Reading course I took recently was the use of Mind Maps to help study and prepare notes.

The presenter showed off ActionOutline as their preferred tool to brainstorm and plan. I had already been using OneNote to do a similiar thing but OneNote is too bulky to have running in the background (and lacks any vector line drawing) and ActionOutline was too simple (I feel I could hobble together something similiar in VS2005 in a short space of time - FreeOutline anyone?).

FreeMind is the middle ground, it allows you to quickly create notes and text. You can embed html, text and images and you can export your maps as html & svg so others can access them. It has calendaring attached to notes (like ActionOutline) and you can attach icons to those items. You can also import from a variety of sources, handy if you're migrating from another mindmapping tool.

There are so many features so go and try it out. Best of all it's an open source project (ie IT'S FREE AND WILL STAY THAT WAY - I'll bloody develop the thing if the existing developers get bought out ;-) ) It also runs on Windows, Linux and Mac so you've got no excuse.

It's still a very young product (only up to version 0.8~). There can be some clumsiness in getting it to run initially. The documentation (yes, its a mindmap too), is easy to navigate and search, but obviously still needs a little more work

Here are some tips that can help you get accustomed to the product:

• The start menu shortcut (and corresponding .exe file) would not start the product for me in Windows. There is an included freemind.bat file in the program directory (C:\Program Files\FreeMind) that will launch it for you. You can change the start menu shortcut to use freemind.bat instead of freemind.exe.
• It's a java app. (suprisingly fast UI though!) You need Java 1.4 or up installed AND your java.exe for that version needs to be in your PATH variable. Some users have multiple versions of Java installed on their machines (some programs like Oracle database include an older version not compatible with FreeMind).  See here for more info on setting this up.
• When you add nodes to the root node, they take turns at appearing on the right side or left side.  If you want to move a child from one side of the root to the other, drag the node over the top of the root node. The node will be highlighted and you can drop it on the left or right side to dictate what side you want that branch on (the highlighting on the root node will reflect the choice you are about to make)
• You can use Anti-Aliased text if you have version 1.5 of Java installed.  Edit the Freemind.bat file and place a -Dswing.aatext=true before the last parameter.  It's not too flash though.

O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf - Artificial Intelligence - Mind Hacks
This is another book to add to my bookshelf (or virtual one for that matter.) A book focussing on the little things our brain observes that we aren't fully aware of and how to make the most of it.