The Complicated Mind

Hi all,

Either I'm a terribly slow reader, or the books I choose to read have small font. I guess it also has something to do with the types of books I read too. I haven't read fiction books in a while now; I tend to read books related to ethics, psychology or something to do with Computer Science. I was reading my book 'On Intelligence' earlier today. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but it brings up some really interesting concepts of how our brains work.

I've thought that the 'mind' was in fact created BY the brain, but it seems that in neuroscience, they are one and the same thing. The mind is in fact the brain itself. I guess it depends on your own perception of what the 'mind' actually is. It's actually astonishing to think that the mind is constructed purely of a series of densely packed cells as part of a watery, almost jelly like structure. Everything you perceive, everything you're thinking, doing and unconsciously doing right now is the pure product of that series of cells inside your skull. They relay information to and from each other at lightning fast speed, through different parts of your brain, and transform particles of light into electrical signals that travel through your brain to give you visual images of the world. They transform the particles of chemicals that travel into your nose into a smell; something you can perceive and sense. All of what you know about the world is stored behind the eyes which you are using to read this blog. In a sense, the world is in your head. YOUR world is, anyway.

With all the complicated calculations that must go on inside our brains, you'd imagine that different parts of the brain would be constructed differently to perform different tasks. In other words, there's only one place where hearing can be processed, where grammar is processed, emotions etc. The theory has yet to be proven, but it's a strong one, in my eyes, and is goes like this: There is only one way in which the cells in your brain are organised, so that means that your brain processes vision in the same way it processes sound and everything else. The only thing that determines what a particular part of the brain processes is what that part is connected to - parts that are already processing certain things, or 'highways' connecting your eyes to your brain (your eyes are, effectively, a part of your brain). Now this is made quite astonishing, and incredibly exciting for neuroscientists and those involved in artificial intelligence. This means that there is one way a brain processes information; one algorithm that needs to be found, possibly unlocking the secrets to our minds. This is one of the many reasons why I want to get involved in this sort of research at university. This is essentially discovering ourselves; what makes us human; what 'reality' really is, or at least our perception of it.

They've already proven that a brain can be rewired to perform different tasks in different areas than normal - in ferrets at least. Whether or not the theory that the brain is just a series of repeated cell patterns is still to be proven. Nevertheless, our understanding of the human brain has come a long way since we first started poking around in one. We're far from finishing, and as I mentioned before I think we'll sooner find the origin of the universe than find out exactly how our brains work.

Until next time.