The brain (2)

I stayed back in the lab till 11 PM yesterday to start some simulations. I was hungry, tired but I wanted to start the runs so that I get the night time for my runs. But, today morning I noticed that 8 of my codes have stopped running in the middle of the run because the hard drives had got completely full. It took me a few hours in the morning to clean up the space. I had to call Orbitz to smoothen an issue with an airline ticket and they kept me on hold for 45 mins. When I was finally ready to start my sims, I noticed that some other person had started his sims on the computers I was using. I searched for other nodes where I can restart the sims. While I was trying to run sims, old, unpleasant incidents started coming to my mind and I wanted to shout at somebody. Reminded me of theme of the book 'The Sphere' by Michael Crichton. How delicate is our brain's composure. And how we choose to exhume old incidents as excuses to be angry when the reason is the present.

Stationary solution of thought

Suppose person X acts in a certain way. Now, person Y gets to know about X’s action and interprets it in some way. Now if X understands how Y will interpret his action, then this will influence his actions. But, if Y also understands that X would know how the action will be interpreted by him, then he would interpret X’s action in a different way, under the conditioning of awareness of X. And, if this process goes on and on, we get a stationary or an equilibrium solution of thought, which decides how X will act eventually. But, if the state space is discrete, then the solution may be oscillatory. For example, suppose my brother and I have a comic book, which we both want to take to school for reading.  The comic can be either in a shelf or in a bag. But, the school bus leaves in a minute, and so my brother can search for the comic at only one place. Now, if I know where the comic is and he asks me about it. Then, no matter what my answer is, the stationary solution of his interpretation will be oscillatory in nature.

Brain

The brain fascinates me – different facets of it - which hardly get noticed because we are so used to it. Different inputs get treated differently, and it constantly works involuntarily on those. And, sometimes it generates its own inputs (dreams) which do not get stored in the memory, but sure have some importance which we do not understand. How is so much information packed in our genome? Or should I ask, how does the brain know what to do? I think it is the wrong question to ask. We never ask how a polymer molecule knows how to behave in a given environment. We simply say that if we know the density of states of the polymer, then we will know how it will behave based on the set of rules we have already figured out. The density of states does not need a large memory to be saved, but it defines the polymer completely. I am sure someday we will find the density of states of the brain. Ghosh! What will be the possibilities then!

Pointers to brain

I don’t know but something has led me to post more blogs these days. I used to maintain a diary during my undergrad years till quite recently, and in it I used to write my thoughts and ideas as is. With ‘as is’ I mean, that unlike writing a blog or a comment to a blog, which needs to be read again to make it sound coherent and flowing, my writings in the diary were exactly the words I used to think in. The ideas which were very clear in my mind, when written in a diary, used to come out as words totally abstract. The entries in my diary are so abstract that no one else can ever understand what I am trying to say there. But, when I read them again even now, I can recall the context, my mood and exactly what I was trying to say when I wrote those words. Its amazing how those simple English sentences are cryptic messages that only I can decode. They are like pointers to my brain analogous to pointers in C++. They store the address location of the idea that came to my mind some years back. As soon as my mind sees those seemingly vague sentences it goes to the address location that still stores that idea and every data point is available to the active memory! It is quite amazing actually. It also tells me that our brain’s storage capacity is enormous. To further elaborate on this, consider this – when we recall something that happened years back, we actually recall those instances the way our eyes had recorded them - as clear motion pictures of extremely high quality (not as text files). Considering how many things we remember and can recall when encountered with small pointers, it is amazing how much we store in our brain!

I think a diary should not become extinct because of blogging. Most of the texts we read or write – in books, internet or papers are carefully crafted collections of sentences. One idea flows from the previous one and everything falls into place. A diary is the only proper manifestation of the complicated way our brain works. It needs no revisions simply because a diary is for ourselves to be read again and a blog is for others. One motivation of writing this is a hope that other bloggers realize what I am trying to say and dig up their diaries to read them again – to discover what pointers to brain exist in them!

Convergence

In our society, a convergence is required, or a compromise is required. Or else, a better personality would do – someone who is not in the first standard deviation of the Gaussian distribution of the ideas of our society. Well, by this I mean on the positive half of the Gaussian of course. There are numerous examples to prove this, and the best one is how people have good idea that some things are bound to occur or understand well the causality of different events. Convergence as such may be very difficult to achieve. It requires a fine equilibrium – mental and social. It requires perseverance as well as patience. If the fine equilibrium of convergence is disturbed, the situation gets converted to an avalanche of ignorance, which gets intensified by perseverance, a simple effect of funnel shaped free energy landscape of the entire situation (the goal is to reach the bottom of the funnel together). The avalanche should be dealt with patience and a stable mind set. Since convergence is not an equilibrium situation, an avalanche is quite inevitable I believe. But the avalanche can be controlled. That’s the key – by moving up the free energy curve. But, that requires work. And yes, moving up the free energy curve requires thermal energy. Higher the thermal energy, better the chances of saving the avalanche. Confused? Its crystal clear to me!