Your Brain, Your Content, and the Site Visitor's Brain

Your Brain, Your Content, and the Site Visitor's Brain

David Amerland connecting the dots among brain activity, content creation, and site structure.

A great read. 

#seofornow   #sitestructure  

Originally shared by David Amerland

Metadata, Semantic Connections and the Brain

Increasingly, the divide that’s being blurred is not just between the online and offline worlds but also between the stuff inside our heads (let’s call that the “inner space”) and the things that happen outside it. If you think about it, the world we see, interact with and feel a part of is a 3D mental image of our understanding of sensory input (in the first instance) and factored abstractions which act as an operating system of sorts. 

Studying the brain we know that from a structural point of view each brain is different and the same brain is different from moment to moment. Thoughts and ideas, experiences and memories destroy and remake parts of the brain every moment. More destruction and reconstruction takes place when we sleep. 

The Human Conectome Project (http://goo.gl/RsPnWY) is the brain-scanning equivalent of the Human Genome Project that mapped our DNA. The aim is to use enough eyes, brains and manhours to map the human brain. It may sound like we’re trying to map shifting sands but that, apparently, is not the case. Patterns in the brain’s flow that reveal its wiring are distinct enough, even at a resting phase to present a stable, unique fingerprint that can now be used to identify individuals: http://goo.gl/2zczkh. 

There are a few strands being pulled together here at once so it’s worth to take the time to unpack them. First, consider the value of metadata (the same stuff National Surveillance teams tell us does not matter because “it’s safe” to collect). A person who on a Wednesday night takes the dog out for a walk at 8.00pm, talks to the street vendor two blocks away for about 10 minutes and stops by the duck pond to throw some bread there for the ducks to find in the morning, does all of this because of distinct mental impressions deep inside the brain that reflect how that person models the world and his place in it. 

By studying the patterns of his activity not only we can identify the person (because they are that predictable and that unique to him) but we can also begin to understand a little about his thinking, habits, interests, intelligence, demographics and all which is then implied. 

By studying the patterns of connections between different parts of the brain we can see distinctive flows of activity even when the brain is at rest that also reveal a great many things. This, incidentally, also reflects directly on semantic search which hinges on identity, connections, relative influences and the importance between each connecting point and some other set of connecting points. If everything is relational and relatively fluid it can also be stable and predictable in its fluidity despite the fact that at close range and in each particular, and very specific, point of examination it appears to be very different. 

In search, for example, one type of query may be wildly different from another set input an hour, a day or a month later. But each query, input by a particular type of searcher reflects a pattern of behavior. A search for ice-cream, for example, may diversify into a look at climate change and the debate around it. It seems a leap too far to connect one with the other except that the type of query is reflective of the particular interests of a particular searcher and becomes a ‘signature’ of sorts. 

This is why, in helping content appear in semantic search, it is important to use some kind of cataloguing process either by applying structured data programming or by creating ontologies through grouping which then naturally lend themselves to relational connection mapping. 

Brain activity, search activity and ordinary everyday living are all characterized by metadata that can be studied to create accurate predictions of expected behavior within specific constraints. The brain is reflected in the world outside it because, ultimately, that world and everything man-made in it is the result of the brain. The activities and behavioral patterns that mark our passage through the offline space are motivated by the understanding and implications of the brain. 
This gets a little complex to understand, especially when we go deep into each area of study, except it can be shortened to “get real” and “be yourself”. That way the mapping in any of these areas remains true. It also happens to work in relationship building (more connections and more behavioral patterns) in marketing. Cool, right? 

Now dive in for the details:  http://goo.gl/embgBD