Tag Archives: brain

Its all in the mind

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Decorative image of a flowerWe all exist in our own minds where we construct a world based on our proprioceptive and mental experiences.  I have written previously about the accumulation of experiences over time leading to the building of our consciousness [see ‘Is there a real ‘you’ or ‘I’?’ on March 6th 2019].  In Jonathan Coe’s recent novel, ‘The Proof of Innocence’ during a tiff between a young couple on a train travelling along the south coast of France, the girl, who is watching an episode of the TV show ‘Friends’ on her phone, says to the boy, who is admiring the view and admonishing her for not doing the same, ‘You don’t know what’s going on in my head. Because you are not there.’  Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe took advantage of the inaccessibility to others of our minds to create a parallel world of her own in order to free herself from constraints and conditions of imprisonment in Iran.  She has described feeling liberated when she realised that no one could take the parallel world away from her.  She chose not allow others access to her parallel world; however, we can choose to give some level of access through communicating with others.  I am confident that my wife has a pretty good idea of what is going on in my head, or least a much better idea than that of the young couple in Jonathan Coe’s novel, because we have been communicating with each other for about forty years.  If you are a regular reader of this blog then you have been on a journey which will have provided glimpses of my mind.  Reading allows us to learn about humanity through looking into the inner lives of others [see ‘Reading offline’ on March 19th 2014] who are prepared share, probably in the spirit of reciprocal altruism.  There is some risk involved in sharing because the closedness of your inner life appears to be essential to its role as a survival tool; however, understanding others also helps to navigate and thrive in society, which implies that sharing also has an important role.

Sources:

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, The feeling of freedom, FT Weekend, 7th & 8th December 2024..

Jonathan Coe, The proof of my innocence, Penguin, 2024.

Sleeping on the job

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Decorative image onlyAt the end of 2023, following my visit to IBM [see ‘Chirping while calculating probabilities‘ on November 22nd, 2023], I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand quantum computing and exploring its potential applications in my research.  It was really challenging because, as one article I read stated, quantum-mechanical phenomena appear to be weird and the mathematical tools used to model them are complex and abstract.  Just to make it harder you have to learn a new language or at least new terminology and mathematical notation.  I have always found that my unconscious mind is capable of solving mathematical problems given sufficient time and sleep.  However, the mathematics of quantum computing took many nights of unconscious thought to assemble into some sort of understanding and left me with mild headaches.  Around the same time I was reading one of Cormac McCarthy’s new novels, Stella Maris, which consists entirely of a psychologist interviewing a mathematician who is a patient in a hospital. They discuss that mathematical work is performed mostly in the unconscious mind and we have no notion as to how the mind goes about it.  They find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the unconscious mind does not use numbers.  I suspect that it does not use mathematical notation either; perhaps it is more a form of synaesthesia using three-dimensional shapes [see ‘Engineering synaesthesia‘ on September 21st, 2016].  A couple of pages before discussing the unconscious mind’s mathematical work, one of the protagonists comments that ‘If we were constructed with a continual awareness of how we worked we wouldn’t work’.  So, perhaps I should not probe too deeply into how I have acquired a rudimentary understanding of quantum computing.

BTW in case you missed my last post at the start of January [‘600th post and time for a change‘ on January 3rd 2024] and have been wondering what has happened to my weekly post – I have decided to switch to posting monthly on the first Wednesday of each month.

Source:

Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris, Picador, 2022.

Napping, releasing the soul and brain maintenance

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Decorative photograph of painting: The Punishment of Lust.I read recently about the renovation of a small Parisian flat into a single office for the writer, Simon Kuper (How I made my perfect office).  The furniture included a sofa by the window for his post-lunch 15-minute nap (20 minutes on a bad day).  There was a brief period when I regularly had a nap in my office in the middle of day.  Now, I regularly nap at the weekend in the afternoon, or a weekday in the early evening after dinner.  Research has found short daytime naps improve cognitive performance (Lovato & Lin, 2010) and may help to preserve brain health by slowing the rate at which the brain shrinks with age (Paz et al, 2023).  So, short naps are probably good for you, though longer naps have been associated with reductions in cognition, the ability to think and form memories (Li et al, 2016) as well as increased blood pressure (Vizmanos et al, 2023).  In his outstanding novel, ‘The Salt of the Earth‘, Jozef Wittlin describes sleep as releasing or giving freedom to the soul.  Perhaps it is the wandering of the soul that we sometime recall as dreams.  On a more sinister note, sleep is described as practice for death by Ernesto Sabato in his novel, ‘On Heroes and Tombs‘, when presumably our soul is released forever to drift to Nirvana as in Giovanni Segantini’s painting ‘The punishment of lust’ in which the souls of neglectful mothers are shown floating towards the mountains representing Nirvana, a Buddhist heaven.  In the light of the inevitability of death, I quite like the idea that we can practice for it; however, I prefer to think of naps preserving my aging brain and improving my cognition.

Image: photograph of ‘The punishment of lust’ by Giovanni Segantini in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool.

Amplified intelligence

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Decorative imageNotebooks have been used for centuries to extend people’s minds while computers and smart phones have taken the extension to a new level.  I find myself using the more than 500 posts in this blog as an extension of my brain.  Not only to recall information but to reconstruct thought processes and ideas.  Perhaps it is idleness or just faster than waiting for my neurons to shuffle through options until they reassemble the pattern that I am looking for.  Of course, this blog is a very public extension of my mind and was accessed from more than 140 countries last year, as it has been every year since 2016, based on data from WordPress.  It is difficult to estimate the total readership of the blog because it is published through several media but last year it appeared to increase substantially.  I started posting in July 2012 [see ‘Why RealizeEngineering?‘] but only started weekly posts ten years ago this week on January 7th 2013 with ‘Renewable Energy?‘.  Today’s post is number 548.

A cyberneticist, W. Ross Ashby coined the term ‘amplified intelligence’ to describe the role of computers in extending our minds [W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, William Clowes & Sons, 1956].

Image: Painting in the possession of the author.