The Ultimate Technology

recently consumed

technology: the human brain

tasting notes

I actually didn’t recently consume the human brain, but I thought that would be fun to say. What I have recently consumed was a great DISCOVER article “10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain”.

The human brain is one of the subjects that never fails to fascinate me. I remember walking around Body Worlds for the first time, looking at human muscle, organs, and bones. They all made sense… plumbing, joints, reinforcement, filters, pumps. As complex as our human system is, the functions that each of the individual pieces play is relatively simple. That is, until you get to the human brain. Seeing it in the display cases sliced into thin strips revealed nothing. Here was the most complex object in the entire universe, trillions of times more complex than the smartest computer ever built, and it was an indistinguishable bit of lumpy gray mass.

The reason that I felt the need to blog about the brain is based on a dream that I had recently. I was in the car with my husband, driving between apartments (we were staying in a different one while our main one was being worked on). We were having normal conversations about work and what not, it was one of the most real and mundane dreams I’ve ever had. All of the sudden, something snapped for me, and I said “Tom… I can’t remember the last time I cooked a meal. I can’t remember the last time I’ve looked in our fridge. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so homeless.” By that I meant ‘between homes’ or ‘without a place to call home’. And it was as I concentrated on my inability to recall the normal mundane details of life that it dawned on me, “I can’t even remember getting up this morning, this has to be a dream.”

I woke up with a rush of adrenaline. It isn’t a particularly reassuring feeling to accept a scenario as complete reality only to awake yourself to its falsity. And while I should have found myself relieved to wake up in the bedroom of my actual home, I found myself looking for flaws in my surroundings, just in case reality was still not in true “reality”. Of course I could go on about what is “reality”, especially since all our senses are filtered through this complicated gray mass in our head, open for interpretation, but that is huge bag of metaphysical worms.

Instead it just had me thinking about the purpose of dreams, which the DISCOVER article theorizes is a way for our brain to process “scenarios”, digest and sort through its daily input, and test out hypotheses before we attempt them in the real world. This theory was based on various research, including testing human retention for memorization between same day studies (test in the morning, test in the evening) vs different day studies (test one day, again the next). People that had the night for their brain to place learnings from the mind’s equivalent of RAM to long-term storage did far better on the follow up testing.

I wonder what sort of scenario my brain was trying to run in my head. Perhaps it was a way of trying to make me appreciate the home I have, and feel more positive about the recent work we’ve been doing on it. Or to appreciate the small pleasures I have in life, that despite how busy my schedule is I still find time to cook a meal most nights.

There really isn’t an epiphany here. But, I think that the human brain is often a forgotten mystery of our everyday universe. I think it is important to take a step back and consider some of these mysteries. After all, that self-aware pondering of our own instrument of pondering is yet another reward of that big pile of gray spaghetti in our heads.

suggested pairings

• Brain-teasers, such as:
  • If there is something we can’t remember, is it really gone from our brain or has our brain just forgotten where that information is located?
  • What is the sensation of deja-vu? Remnants of our dream time “scenario” running? Misfiring of our long-term and short-term memory impulses?
  • Is the taste of some food, like lemon, the exact same perception for me as it is for someone else?
• Possibly my favorite book ever written, Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan’s masterpiece about the evolution of the human brain
• Waking Life, a philosophical film centered around a character who finds himself unable to wake up from his dreams

technorati tags: human brain