Three-card-monte and Bats

Three-card-monte and Bats
Andre Willers
11 May 2008

Will Bats go for Three-card-monte ?

And how !

The poor suckers will be hooked from moment go .

The better the sensory equipment , the bigger the sucker . (AW)

Their sensorium can see not only the position of each card , but also the direction it is moved in . But being of a mammalian order , there is a left-hand and right-hand brain memory stack with a limited capacity The oldest item gets pushed down and out .
The brain also moves data about the left-hand stack to the right-hand stack to keep track of the object before it is painted on the sensorium . And vise-versa of course .

In humans , it has been shown by fMRI that if the switch is done faster than the left-right transfer rate , the memory at the bottom of the stack is lost . This is not an illusion . The hand is not faster than the eye . The hand is faster than a rather bureaucratic information transfer of data in the brain .

The eyes sees perfectly well , but the memory system loses track .

What is amazing here is the low frequency . The visual system keeps track at about beta-brain freq (ie about 16 herz) . Hand switching is about 4 herz .It seems to take at least 4 cycles to move data from the left-hand of the brain to the right-hand . For error-correction included , this seems about correct .

(Systems without error-correction – see amygdala systems))

So , for something not deemed critical to survival , the mammalian system gives a whole whopping quarter of a second leeway .

Like humans , bats , whales , dolphins , etc simply will not believe that they can lose track of an object moved faster than 4 times a second . They will try over and over again . It does not matter how good their sensory system is .

Another definition of being a mammalian : susceptibility to Three-Card-Monte

You can hook humans , bats ,dolphins ,whales to the internal endorphins .
Then lead them into some serious gambling .
Remember , the rewards are internal endorphin releases . Creatures in virtual isolation are extremely vulnerable . Suckers .

Then , you can teach them poker or mah-jong .

Dolphins and whales should be pretty good at mah-jong or go , but bats should be whizzes at poker .

The problem in training humans or mammalians is usually what reward makes sense to them . The endorphin reward of gambling is mammalian specific and general .
You can hook any mammal on gambling .
Then uplift them . For their own good , of course .
The unending route of effort for relative advantages .

Do birds gamble?
We know that all mammals have a primitive neural knot that releases endorphins on gambling . This is a major reason for their success and ties in with boredom .

For dinosaurs and birds we can look to the ripple effects after the KT boundary .
Dinosaur descendants quickly repopulated (large bird-like raptors) But speciation into the empty ecological niches (the small ones) was faster in mammals because of the random “gambling” nerve-complexes in mammals . Taking a chance paid off if the pay-off is biased in the positive direction .

This has been the general experience of mammalians since then .

From this , we can infer that birds (and dinosaurs before them) did not gamble .

If the bias does not favour you , you are doomed anyway . You have to bet as if the bias favours you .

You have to bet .

And try to figure out a way to change the bias in your favour .

This is why you are a mammal and not a bird-dinosaur .

PS
You can get bankrupt betting this way .

Andre