Social Animals
It was a pleasure to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s article on Andy Clark’s theories about embodied intelligence and its relationship with A.I. and neuroscience (“Mind Expander,” April 2nd). Clark’s theories underemphasize the importance of other people as the primary embodiment of external representation, rather than our own bodies, machines, or objects in the world. The story of Clark’s collaborations—with his wife, Chalmers, Friston, and others—is a perfect example of the fact that humans are fundamentally social animals. This insures our survival: organisms working together can do so much more than organisms working apart or in parallel. The greatest challenge for A.I. is not the slow progress in top-down intelligence but the lack of attention to teaming intelligence that would allow the pairing of humans’ remarkable predictive powers with A.I.’s superior bottom-up analysis of data.
Alonso Vera
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, Calif.
Textured History
As D. T. Max indicates in his article on Chinese textile workers in Prato, Italy, the city has seen a proliferation of Chinese clothing workshops (“Made in Italy,” April 16th). Prato has a long history as an important textile town, going back to the twelfth century; today’s Prato must have seemed a logical place for a contemporary Chinese colony in Europe. A few blocks away from the centro storico, on the site of a former mill, is the Textile Museum, which, in 2010, had an exhibit of Tuscan textiles exported to Russia over the centuries. The most magnificent were Orthodox Church ecclesiastical vestments, onto which Russian artisans had sewn jewels, along with a letter from Tsar Boris Godunov himself, saying, “You Tuscans do splendid work and are welcome any time you want to come.”
Nicholas Clifford
Middlebury, Vt.
Trauma and the Mind
Like John Seabrook, I once spun out, on the narrow Northern State Parkway, and I, too, have a vivid recollection of the incidental details of those forty-five seconds (“Six Skittles,” April 9th). Seabrook explains how stress-induced hormonal responses “can produce extraordinary feats of perception.” In the past thirty years, we have begun to understand that our ability to turn perception into memory is greatly heightened by a highly emotional experience. Studies suggest that emotionally charged content enhances not only attention and arousal but also our ability to form stable memories. Accidents can result in a continuous mental replay of a traumatic event, strengthening and extending incidental associations with every replay. Physicians and scientists should look to vivid stories like Seabrook’s to help study how the mind’s ailments emerge from normal brain functions.
Alex Dranovsky, M.D.
New York State Psychiatric Institute
New York City
Finding Reality
What stood out to me about Joshua Rothman’s article on virtual embodiment was just how much of the virtual-reality experience can be inward-looking (“As Real as It Gets,” April 2nd). Most of us are familiar with V.R. as being intended for a wholly escapist experience, a plane in which to exercise both freedom and control over oneself. But Rothman’s V.R. experience, in which he acts both as Freud and a patient, offers an alternative. It also reveals the fragility of our self-perception and the limitations of attempts to “see another perspective.”
Sol Lee
Los Angeles, Calif.
