Popularity altering synaptic activity
 

In the human brain,...

The more often a certain information takes a certain channel, the more likely it is for the channel to become more transmissive for this information. This mechanisms is supposed to be one of major importance in modifying synaptic activity in the human brain.

It is a common experience that the brain can be trained by repeating the same thing over and over again. The more often one thinks a certain thought, the quicker this thought will be thought the next time. It is quite likely that synapses become more transmissive each time they have transmitted a signal.

 
     
 

...on the internet...

If synaptic plasticity is understood as the property of information channels to alter the likelihood with which they transmit information, then the internet search engines found by http://www.google.com can be called synaptic in the truest sense.

Internet search engines usually go through documents on the internet and look for intersting catchwords. these are either explicitly stated by the author of the document or the search engine itself applies criteria to decide which word in a document best reflect the content (i. e: headlines, words repeated very often).

The user of the search engine can then enter words the search engine compares with the words it recently found in the internet itself and returns related documents as "hits" of the search.

This type of search usually cannot differentiate properly between the quality of the documents found. The user of the search engine is then confronted with a very large number of hits that might all bear some relevance to the topic he searched, but he has to open all the documents to assess the quality himself.

Google has found a criterion for exactly this: the more links are laid on a certain document, the higher its quality should be. A link on a document is defined by the author of a different document and clearly reflects that the latter considers the linked document to be an interesting one and that he himself uses it more often than not.

Having searched the internet, google orders the found documents according to the number of links laid on them. That google also weighs the links does not matter in this context. In other words: The more often a document is used by authors of other documents as a link, the more likely any user of the search engine google is to find the information on the document.

 
     
 

...and within a future company communication software

Suppose you are in a managerial position of the medium level. Your daily work is dominated by a constant inrush of far more information than you can possibly process. Many e-mails, letters, circulars etc are hastily scanned by you and preferably passed on to someone else or sorted out as obviously irrelevant. You would be much relieved, if the communication system coud pre-filter the information.

Applying the idea of googles synaptic plasticity to a company communication software might imply anything of the following:

  • ingoing e-mails presented on your screen are ordered (amongst other criteria) according to the number of replies the resprective senders have received over a past period (say, a year). Junk mails no-one ever replies to will then appear at the bottom of the list.

  • a company intra/internet-browser works just the way google works. Entering the search words "norms machinery" will probably place a page showing the norms playing an important role in the daily work of the machinery department at the top of the result list and a page about some abstruse legal effects of a new European norm concerning excavating machines further down the list.

  • The calendar functionality of a group ware may first assess the "popularity" of each proposed participant of a planned meeting and sort possible dates according to the overall popularity of all possible participants (if no date suiting all the participants can be found). Criteria for the "popularity" of a participant might the number of invitations he has received over the past year, the number of e-mails he receives per day etc.