Comments on: Morph your personality

By: Alex Fradera

Alex Fradera — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 11:14:35 +0000

Hmm… Is your point that it’s long been settled that personality can be reliably found in the face ? As far as I can see, that isn’t so and recent reviews of the area* suggest the same thing. The issue may be old hat, but it isn’t resolved. An awful lot of things are old hat (I understand that some of those greeks were quite interested in the mental world) but that doesn’t mean that they’re not of continued interest.
Perhaps you feel that the technology end of this is merely reinventing the wheel: the computation of a set of vectors along which faces can be transformed to have a psychophysical effect, delimited to a single personality factor. If so I’d be interested to hear of where it was done first.
If you want to compare dicks between psychologists and neuroscientists thats absolutely fine by me. It’s a common enough game we play down my way, between the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the psychology dept up the road. It tends to end with the agreement that neuroscience is the new kid in town, with lots of exciting toys. But no matter how sharp the cutting edge, you need to know where you need to put the knife to be any use. To continue the analogy, at present a good deal of neuroscience is more Michael Myers than skilled surgeon. That’s why people curious about the mind and brain welcome research from all domains.
Thanks for the link by the way. Unfortunately, I can’t find much details about any research in there, more a series of adverts for various products. It would be great to have some links to some published work on this.
* see e.g. here http://tinyurl.com/5mlc9

By: Ian Wilson

Ian Wilson — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:13:24 +0000

The personality research you mention above is very dated, it has been around (in simplified form) for over 50 years. Unfortuately some fields of science get stuck in their own “local minima” and fail to move on. That is not to say that a good deal of valuable work has not been done there, it has, its just that it is now very old.
The current state of the art is in neuroscience and computational neuroscience (as an analogy psychology is similar to looking at a server from the outside to determine how it works whereas neuroscience opens the lid and sticks measuring devices into the motherboard).
As a point of interest, the work Ian is planning to do (graphical model that can display personality, age and gender consistant facial gestures) has already been done although published in the Artificial Intelligence field. You can find more information at http://www.neon.ai . Disclaimer, this is my personal research.

By: Alex Fradera

Alex Fradera — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 12:39:18 +0000

It’s also the Hipster PDA according to some folk. Give it a few years for the technology to become established and the market will thin out, and we’ll just be left with the market leader. Until someone steps in with an anti-monopoly suit. They’ve got to stop bundling that pencil with the pad….

By: Echo Generation

Echo Generation — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:28:54 +0000

Cool Mind Hacks stories

Here is one about your brain acting on information, in this case sensing fear in eyes, with ultra-fast response times.
And this other story about stereotyping — making judgments about the personality of strangers based on their appearance. Apparen…

By: Cloetus

Cloetus — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:08:21 +0000

I believe the item you refer to as a PAA is more properly called a PAD, a Personal Analog Device. Please don’t make this mistake again…

By: tribe.net: www.mindhacks.com

tribe.net: www.mindhacks.com — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 17:49:21 +0000

Re: High School Stereotypes

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/01/morph_your_personali.html