purple motes

A person known as K.C. has contributed significantly to understanding narrative and sense of presence of another. In 1981, at age 30, K.C. received a major head injury in a motorcycle accident. Despite his injury, K.C. retained normal human adult language skills. He also retained common knowledge about the world and knowledge about causal relations between actions and events. K.C.'s well-functioning memory of objective facts and procedural skills allowed him to continue, post-injury, with "effortless functioning in his everyday environment" in a way that is "comparable to most of his age mates."[1]

K.C., however, lost the ability to remember and construct personalized narratives. Persons who knew K.C. observed that he no longer remembered his personal interactions with them. K.C. has no first-person, emotional memory of his own experiences:

K.C.’s younger brother from whom he was once inseparable met accidental death a few years prior to his own head injury. K.C. remembers nothing of the circumstances in which he had learned of this shocking news, including where he was at the time, who told him of the event, and how he reacted emotionally. Likewise, the events of a potentially lethal chemical spill from a train derailment that forced him and his family to evacuate their home for over a week have been reduced to a dry fact of the world.[2]

For K.C., "details of personal occurrences continue to exist only in the present, vanishing from K.C.’s reality the moment his thoughts are directed elsewhere."[3] While K.C. understands objective causal reasoning, he cannot imagine himself in the future. In the language of biological science, K.C. lost the functioning of his episodic memory. In terms better understood within the humanities and within study of communication, K.C. lost the ability to remember and construct personalized narratives

K.C. shows that the world really isn't just constructed from narratives. In an influential 1983 law review article entitled "Nomos and Narrative," a prominent legal scholar declared:

No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. ... Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live.[4]

K.C. understands much about the world that others recognize. Persons who interact with him would not conclude that he is living in a different world from them. Narrative might be understood as causal reasoning, as recognizing that this leads to that, as understanding that this law implies that behavior or else that punishment. Personalized narrative is not necessary for understanding such a system of rules or for living in a common world. One also might suspect that eloquently telling an attractive tale, or endless repeating silly ones, doesn't make true, bountiful reality.

More significantly, at least for those not confined under non-scientific disciplines, K.C shows that making sense of presence of others doesn't required remembering and constructing personalized narratives. In laboratory tests, K.C. is not distinguishable from ordinary persons in ability to infer another person's mental state (known as Theory of Mind tests).[5] With respect to lower-level, more tightly synchronized processes for making sense of presence of another, K.C. also appears to be similar to ordinary persons. K.C. retains the ability to attune sensitively to others in real-time interaction. He's characterized as "always agreeable, courteous, and attentive," with an appreciation for sarcasm and humor. Although he has no personal emotional memory, his real-time experience of emotions is appropriate for someone with his memory: "Each time he is told of September 11, he expresses the same horror and disbelief as someone hearing of the news for the very first time."[6]

K.C.'s interactions with others suggests the importance of sub-conscious attunement to others. A psychologist who did research with K.C. observed that K.C.:

guesses that he has never met one of the authors (R.S.R.) who has, in fact, visited him at his home approximately eight times a year for the past 5 years, though there is a certain level of familiarity and comfort that he demonstrates, particularly in a greater willingness to initiate conversation and to ask questions.[7]

Familiarity and comfort suggest ease in diffuse, sub-conscious patterns of interaction. Just like teammates on a sporting team acquire skills of tacit knowing by playing together, so too do persons in communication.

Notes:

[1] Rosenbaum et. al. (2005) p. 994. This source provided the the quoted phrases and facts included in the paragraph.

[2] Id. p. 993-4.

[3] Id. p. 994.

[4] Cover (1982) p. 4. This work is at the sophisticated end of discourse about discourse, narrative analysis of narrative, the social construction of reality, pre-post-post-modernism, and (para)-en/thesis. Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) suggests that 6-month-old, preverbal infants engage in normative "social evaluation," evaluating other purposive, animate agents as appealing or aversive. "Social evaluation" suggests evaluation of peers. However, 12-month-old infants show relatively little interest in other infants. Infants, for good instrumental reasons, are mainly interested in adults. An alternate interpretation of Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) is that infants as young as 6-months-old engage in rudimentary, positive instrumental reasoning.

[5] Rosenbaum et. al. (2007). This article also documents that another test subject who also lost episodic memory from an injury also could not be statistically distinguished from control subjects on Theory of Mind tests. Descriptions of the Theory of Mind tests are available in online supporting material.

[6] Rosenbaum et. al. (2005) p. 993, 994.

[7] Id. p. 993.

References:

Cover, Robert M. (1983), "Nomos and Narrative," Harvard Law Review v. 97, pp. 4-68.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom (2007), "Social evaluation by preverbal infants," Nature v. 450 (22 November 2007).

Rosenbaum, R. Shayna, Stefan Köhler, Daniel L. Schacter, Morris Moscovitch,
Robyn Westmacott, Sandra E. Black, Fuqiang Gao, Endel Tulving (2005), "The case of K.C.: contributions of a memory-impaired person to memory theory," Neuropsychologia v. 43, n. 7. pp. 989-1021.

Rosenbaum, R. Shayna, Donald T. Stuss, Brian Levine, Endel Tulving (2007), "Theory of Mind is Independent of Episodic Memory," Science v. 318 (23 November 2007) p. 1257.

Offer Comments

The largest share of value in communications services is the value of presence. How can communication services providers measure their performance in capturing this value?

Average Revenue Per User's Relation (ARPUR) is a practical measure of presence value. ARPUR is Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) divided by some measure of user's interaction with other users (relations). Such a measure might be the least number of users who account for in total at least 50% of the given user's communication sessions, time, or revenue. The higher the ARPUR, the more the communication service is creating value through presence.

Persons typically value most highly the presence of family and friends. Limitations of time and attention, which good communication services can help to relax, constrain the number of family and friends that a person can sustain in daily interaction. The value of communication with the family and friends that persons do sustain is typically high and enduring. A good business plan for communication service providers is to capture a large share of this value. ARPUR is a metric of success in doing this.

While not often recognized as such, telephone service is a quintessential presence business. A study in the U.S. in the 1970s found that 50% of residential calls go to a set of five numbers. I think this has been roughly true for personal telephone service in most places throughout the history of telephone service. Creating more value in these relations creates value in this kind of communication service. It's a presence business.

For contrast, consider an anti-presence communication service: telemarketing. Telemarketing involves mass distribution of information of interest only to a small number of persons. The telemarketer typically does not know any of the persons whom she contacts and does not typically repeatedly contact them. Moreover, most of her contacts probably wish that they did not know that she existed. A good communication service for telemarketing users might have a high ARPU. But its ARPUR would be near zero. It's not a presence business.

ARPUR might help a new communication service provider steer its business between the imperatives of viral marketing and the long-term value of presence. Viral marketing, like infectious diseases, propagates most rapidly with some highly promiscuous agents. A communication service that wants to succeed virally needs to enable promiscuous agents. On the other hand, promiscuity is inconsistent with large presence value. The business challenge might be to manage change from low initial ARPUR to strongly rising ARPUR.

Suggested analytical exercise: Consider ARPUR for portraiture over the past 500 years. Take the user relation to be the gift of a picture of oneself to another person. What has been the trend in ARPUR? What has been the trend in total portraiture industry revenue? For relevant information on the economic history of the photography business, see Photographs and Telephone Calls in Sense in Communication.

Take-away message for busy communications executives: Get out of the telecom toilet and get your business purring. Stop sniffing ARPU and start making ARPUR!

1 Comment

The idea that you are your brain has fascinated intellectuals at least since Descartes. Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA and a Nobel Laureate, described the "astonishing hypothesis":

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons."

That's obviously true. The whole of you by weight is mainly water, but you also include some hot air. You might leak out some tainted water, and subsequently be slightly lighter and happier. But lose your brain, and you're dead.

Neurons evocatively named "mirron neurons" have generated considerable excitement recently in neuroscience. Mirror neurons have the same pattern of discharge when an animal sees an action performed, and when the animal performs the action. V.S. Ramachandran, a leading neuroscientist and an important contributor to the controversial field of neuroesthetics, has declared that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology."

The film The Matrix popularized the idea of a person as a "brain in a vat". William Gibson's novel Neuromancer popularized the idea of "jacking in" -- connecting one's brain directly to an alternative reality. I've argued that these ideas obscures much of how a living body makes sense in interacting with things of the world, especially other persons. In a recent essay, Ramachandran seems to take a "brain in a vat" and "jacking in" quite seriously.

Well, at least for awhile. Towards the end of his essay, Ramachandran emphasizes relations between persons:

We are all merely many reflections in a hall of mirrors of a single cosmic reality (Brahman or "paramatman"). If you find all this too much to swallow just consider the that as you grow older and memories start to fade you may have less in common with, and be less "informationally coupled", to your own youthful self, the chap you once were, than with someone who is now your close personal friend.

So much for simulating a person with a brain in a vat. We're all in this vat together. Either simulate us all, or forget about it.

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Consider the new Kodak Photo Voice service. As described in a press release:

KODAK Photo Voice is a brand new way to relive memories, empowering two people to simultaneously view a customized slideshow, and to reminisce and react to each picture. Imagine if Grandma could see pictures from her grandson’s first day at school while he narrates every moment of the experience over Skype. Perhaps an old roommate could share detailed photos and recount stories of his new life in London, as his friend back home in California reacts to each picture.

Much of the value in communication comes from sense of presence. The human body naturally combines images and sound in making sense of presence. An external combination of images and sound reduces the bodily cost of making sense of presence.

Unfortunately, I don't think Kodak Photo Voice is a auspicious type of service for the production of presence. It supports low-production-value, pre-produced visual content (a narrative skeleton) that one person places at the other's attention. Offering to share one's photographs of a vacation, relatives, a holiday gathering, etc., is a delicate relational move. Being subject to another's narrative of their photographs can make one feel virtually non-existent. It can be a tedious, numbing experience where you feel that you are being simply controlled by the obligations of friendship or kin relation.

An auspicious "show-and-tell" communication device would put immediately into the stream of communication images that any participant spontaneously generates while moving about the world and interacting with things of the world. "Camera phones" don't do this. Neither does Kodak Photo Voice.

Update: For more business insight, see Carnival of Business #4 at Techie Day.

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Sense of presence has not been the central focus of much scientific study. The neuroscience of a single body cannot adequately understand sense of presence. Social psychology that does not recognize the biological constraints of separate human bodies cannot either.

Scientific interest in the connection between biological hardware and relations between organisms appears to be growing. Oxford University Press has just announced a new journal entitled Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This area of research points to better understanding of sense of presence.

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