W o r l d
T r e n d s
&
F o r e c a s t s
Technology
Video Games and Behavioral Modification
New technological methods help foster self-esteem.
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8
THE FUTURIST
January-February 2009
nyone who’s ever been
snapped at by someone having
a bad day knows that feelings
of insecurity lead people to behave
in ways that might be deemed aggressive. Psychologist Mark Baldwin
of McGill University says that insecurity, bullying behavior, and so on
are emotional reactions that happen
“automatically — extremely quickly,
and without you wanting them or
being able to control them.” He and
his students have come up with a
surprising answer to help people develop “more positive automatic patterns of thought,” namely video
games.
Through what he’s calling the SelfEsteem Initiative, Baldwin and his
students have created a series of
video games that aim to trick the human brain into forming more positive mental images and encouraging
a healthier emotional state. The
research hinges on neuroscience and
fMRI brain scanning breakthroughs
that show the effects of isolation, rejection, and despair on the physical
brain.
“Some researchers are beginning
to use fMRI to examine the neural
correlates of social events,” he says.
“One study, for example, found that
the pain of social rejection seems to
activate the same area of the brain as
does physical pain. … Other researchers have developed a laboratory paradigm to measure aggressiveness.
The participant is insulted by a confederate of the experimenter, and
later is given the chance to blast the
confederate with a loud noise, supposedly during a learning task. The
question to measure aggressiveness
is, How loud and how long would
you like to make the noise blast? In
www.wfs.org
our study, we simply asked participants to imagine being in this kind
of situation, and to then answer the
same question about how noxious a
blast of noise they would like to administer to the person who had insulted and rejected them.”
So, if rejection and insecurity stemming from common experiences — being treated rudely in a
waiting room, being denied entry
into art school, or being called
short — can cause a person to blast a
loud noise at someone or wage a
land war in Europe, what can science
do to fix this? Aren’t rejection and insecurity unavoidable aspects of life?
Baldwin acknowledges that no one
can avoid bad feelings or social rejection forever, but people can lessen
the effects that these experiences
have on the brain through systematic
self-reprogramming. He calls this
“psychological practice” and says
that the idea came to him one day
while he was playing Tetris.
Tetris famously calls on the player
to assemble falling shapes into solid
blocks before too many of them stack
up. Baldwin is something of an avid
player but says he was terrible at
first. Before long, the game came to
feel automatic, so much so that, even
after he put the game down, his
mind would see the world in terms
of rotating shapes he had to piece together. He started looking at parking
spaces differently. He reorganized
his closets. He realized that, if a video
game could program his brain to be
more spatially aware, other people
might be able to use video games to
meliorate feelings of rejection, isolation, or insecurity.
So far, the Self-Esteem Initiative is
offering three games on its Web site:
Source: Mark Baldwin interview. To play
the Self-Esteem Initiative games, go to
http://selfesteemgames.mcgill.ca/games/index
.htm.
Be Your Own Big Brother
C
all it Web-based personal fitness, or maybe Vanity 2.0: In
January 2009, a Silicon Valley
start-up called Fitbit will release a
wireless system that allows people to
track and monitor intimate physical
information about themselves and
then upload that info to a publicly
viewable Web site. The system consists of a hair-clip sized wearable de-
COURTESY OF FITBIT
vice, the Fitbit Tracker,
which monitors its owner’s steps, exercise levels, calories, and sleep
patterns.
“The Tracker uses
motion-sensing technology to precisely capture
all moment-to-moment
physical activity
throughout the day and
night. It also measures
sleep quality to provide
a holistic view of a 24hour period,” according
to a statement.
The Fitbit Tracker, available for sale in January 2009, is
a clip device that can be attached to clothes to sense
At the click of a butand monitor its wearer’s exercise and sleep patterns.
ton, calories, steps, and
The device then automatically uploads that material to a
distance are illuminated
Web site.
and displayed on the
Tracker. “In addition to
these numerical measurements, the knowledge gleaned from the device
Tracker also displays a user’s prog- to make healthier choices. Says
ress toward [his or her] goals in the Friedman, “We feel that anything we
form of an avatar that changes as a can do to get people to live healthier
user advances toward or falls behind helps the world be a better place.”
— Patrick Tucker
[his or her] goals,” reads the statement. The biggest difference between Source: Fitbit, www.fitbit.com, personal interthe Fitbit and a standard pedometer views.
is that the Fitbit allows people to
track their own fitness progress online with friends, family, and coworkers, or even strangers. Users
can also input nutrition, weight, and
other data onto the Web site to gain a
“compelte picture of their health.”
“The present urgency is to begin
The device itself is little more than
thinking within the context of the
a 2.4 GHz radio-frequency identificawhole planet, the integral earth
tion tag, similar to the tags found on
community with all its human
store merchandise to prevent steal& other-than-human components”
ing. Instead of sending digital data
Thomas Berry, The Great Work, p 105
to a security system in a store, the
device simply transmits the data
wirelessly to a web of receivers or
base stations without the user having to lift an extremely fit finger.
“We know that direct action to upload data to a site can turn into a
chore,” says Fitbit chief technical officer Eric Friedman.
A machine that watches its owner
may ring of ­Orwell, but many techwatchers, such as Tim O’Reilly, forecast that the most interesting computer applications in the years ahead
will involve sensors. Industry exA DVD for broad educational
perts forecast more sensing devices
and motivational use.
to hit the market in the next decade.
Available through
www.Earth-Community.org
The Fitbit’s makers are also optimistic that people will use the
THOMAS BERRY & THE EARTH COMMUNITY
Grow Your Chi!, EyeSpy: The Matrix,
and WHAM! Self-Esteem Conditioning. All of them “lead players to
practice specific mental operations
over and over. These operations are
designed to foster positive mental
habits to give an automatic sense of
security,” Baldwin explains. “Pairing
any two experiences together over
and over can — as with Pavlov’s
dog — create an association between
them so that thinking about one
tends to activate thoughts about the
other.”
For instance, in WHAM! the player
clicks on words that appear in different parts of the computer screen.
Sometimes the word is the player’s
own name. Whenever the player
clicks on his or her name, a smiling,
accepting face appears for a half a
second. “Theoretically, this should
create an automatic association between ‘myself ’ and ‘acceptance,’
leading to a mental habit whereby
thinking of oneself automatically
brings to mind images of warm social acceptance,” Baldwin says.
Does it work? Baldwin’s research
has found a measurable improvement in self-esteem among subjects
who played the game for about five
minutes. “We also asked them to
imagine a situation in which someone insulted and rejected them, and
then to say how much they would
want to hurt that person: Those participants who had played the self-­
acceptance conditioning game were
less aggressive, compared to a control condition.”
— Patrick Tucker
THE FUTURIST
January-February 2009
www.wfs.org
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