Right Brain Left Brain

I've been reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind lately, and, besides being a really good read, I've also been thinking about the 'difficulties' that Riya will always have ever achieving 100% recognition.

At this point, anyway, computers can only replicate left-brain thinking. As Pink points out these are the defining characteristics of these (symbiotic) hemispheres:

Left Hemisphere	Right Hemisphere
Sequential	Simultaneous
Specializes in Text	Specializes in Contex
Analyzes the Details	Synthesizes the Big Picture

This makes the right hemisphere the more apt of the two to 'recognize faces'. As Pink writes:

...the right hemisphere doesn't march in the single-file formation of A-B-C-D-E. Its special talent is the ability to interpret things simultaneously. This side of our brains is "specialized in seeing many things at once: in seeing all the parts of a geometric shape and grasping its form, or in seeing all the elements of a situation and understanding what they mean." This makes the right hemisphere particularly useful in interpreting faces...the iMac computer on which I'm typing this sentence can perform a million calculations per second, far more than the fastest left hemisphere on the planet. But even the most powerful computers in the world can't recognize a face with anywhere close to the speed and accuracy of my toddler son...the right hemisphere is the picture, the left hemisphere is the thousand words.

Until we can teach computers context (think about it, that's the barrier to some real Artificial Intelligence, folks), achieving really fantastic recognition is nearly impossible. Comparing pixels doesn't even come close to examining context - and I believe that photos are about 40% pixels and 60% context.

technorati tags: riya, photosearch, danielpink, awholenewmind, artificialintelligence, leftbrain, rightbrain