It's time for the human brain to look to the future, but what will that future be? There's a lot of updating going on already. The brain is making bigger news than genes, which wasn't so twenty years ago. The standard model of the brain was a stable, porridgy gray mass that couldn't heal itself or even grow new brain cells. A standard way to warn about the damage done by alcohol was to point out how many million brain cells were killed off by heavy drinking, cells that would never be replaced. But this old brain model has proved to be either wrong or incomplete.
The latest model reverses most of the accepted beliefs from the past. We now see the brain as dynamic, not fixed. Its processes are so "soft-wired" that new pathways are formed by everyday behavior, habits, and conditioning. Stem cells exist in the brain, allowing for newborn neurons at every stage of life. And the injured brain can regenerate and heal itself, shifting a lost function to a new, undamaged area of itself. None of these things are disputed anymore. Everyone in the field is excited about the next big breakthroughs in neurology, whatever they may be.
My bet is on quantum biology, which hopes to link the brain as we know it to a completely new world, where physics has defined reality in terms of uncertainty, wave and particle duality, and relativity. "Quantum" has become a cliché, but not when it comes to the brain, because only in the quantum field can we hope to unravel the brain's most profound mysteries, such as where thoughts come from and why we are conscious in the first place. Let me outline a few basics so that the next revolution won't come as a shock -- lots of work on the quantum brain has already been done, and it's stirring up considerable controversy.
Right now, if you want to explain how the brain thinks, the ruling theory comes from computer science. It seems like a natural fit. Computers process information, and so does the brain. Digital language is based on two letters (0 and 1), while neurons use positive and negative, the opposite charges of chemical ions. Computers have hardware and software, which seems to fit the brain's billions of neurons (the hardware) that support language, sensations, memories, and so on (the software). Because we know a great deal more about computers than we do about the brain, science finds itself in a strange reversal. Instead of looking at the brain to tell us how computers work, it uses computers to teach the brain how it is functioning.
Quantum biology doesn't agree with this approach. The noted British physicist Roger Penrose started tearing down the accepted explanations when he declared that the brain can't be reduced to mechanical formulas. There is no mathematics that can infallibly program a brain cell. Penrose didn't mean that the math got too complex, even though the brain's hundred billion neurons would certainly need a mammoth supercomputer to be duplicated. Penrose had a far more crushing point to make. The brain is working through quantum calculations, he said, because until a brain cell picks which process to favor, both choices exist simultaneously. Such "indeterminacy" has long existed in the way physics explains the nature of light, which can be either a particle or a wave in its behavior. Until a photon "decides" which way to behave, the possibility of wave and particle exist together.
I know this sounds complicated, but consider your own thoughts. At any given moment you don't know what your next thought will be. Thoughts come out of the blue, and yet once they arrive, they are definite. You can't think "blue" and "red" at the same instant. It's one or the other. Yet before you make that choice, both colors are possibilities. This example simplifies the argument, but it doesn't falsify it. When you get down to the smallest structures in the brain, the so-called microtubules that allow only one ion of sodium to pass through them (like a fat person who can barely make it through the door), simple pictures won't work. You must envision thousands of potential ions waiting to carry "blue," and thousands waiting to carry "red" they are poised to jump on stage, but until that happens, both sets of ions must wait offstage in the wings.
How can two complete sets of ions occupy a tiny space that barely holds one? They can't, which is why Penrose's argument for a quantum brain has proved powerful, if highly controversial. Only if the two sets of ions are in a quantum state -- that is, existing as shadows of possibility -- can we explain how a single thought emerges from two potential thoughts. Of course, there are a lot more colors than red and blue, and a lot more thoughts than thinking about colors -- an infinite number of potential thoughts. Once you see the logic, you realize that the computer=brain equation never worked very well. Computers are capable of infinite computations, but they are all based on a set program. The brain is unpredictable and therefore creative. (If one scene of a Shakespeare play was absent, no computer could write a genuine replacement, but Shakespeare himself would have no trouble.)
There's a lot more to be said about the brain's future, but here is an intriguing insight. Experimenters working with rats have discovered the pleasure centers in their brains. When this center is stimulated, the rat is "happy." There is no need for a more complex explanation. If you feed a rat, its pleasure center lights up. But to add a twist, if you put the rat near its feed bowl or fill its cage with the smell of food, the pleasure center will light up in expectation of eating. So the rat can be happy even before the food shows up. Human beings can relate. When we think about taking a beach vacation next summer, our pleasure centers light up as well (in fact, one key to happiness, we are told, is to plan long-range pleasures like vacations rather than short-range ones like a candy bar ten minutes from now. The short range pleasure has no lasting effect, while planning a vacation can keep you in a pleasant state for months.)
Human beings cannot be made happy by pleasure, however. We have a quality known as perverseness. Someone can offer you your favorite chocolate, and instead of having your brain light up like a rat's, you can say no. Maybe you are mad at that person or depressed about your life. Maybe you are bored with chocolate, or just maybe you are feeling perverse. Computers are incapable of perversity. If you program them a certain way, they won't do the reverse, they won't be arbitrary or fickle, and most important of all, they won't balance yes and no as equal possibilities at the same time.
Perversity, it turns out, has a hidden genius inside. We feel free to think and act any way we want. That's obvious to anyone who has dealt with a young child going through the terrible twos, a teenager, or the state of falling in love. It irks computer scientists that these anomalies mar their mathematical model, but these are not anomalies. Being free to do whatever you want is what makes us human. No machine can duplicate such a state, and according to quantum biology, the reason is rooted in the indeterminacy of the quantum state. Indeed, we may be too creative to fit inside our brains. The prospect of eliminating the brain and going directly to the infinite field of consciousness, a field that permeates the entire universe, is looming larger and larger.
(To be cont.)
Follow Deepak Chopra on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DeepakChopra
Matthieu Ricard: Why Pleasure Is Not Happiness (VIDEO)
Victor Stenger: The New Spirituality
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche: Letting Go of Labels and Seeing the World Anew
Kingsley Dennis, Ph.D.: Quantum Consciousness: Empathy and Entanglement
Our brain has so much more potential than we think and our intuition will lead us forward. Our brain is the means to connect to this universal collective consciousness. It is the gateway to that oneness which we all seek. We need to learn how to use our intuition to a much greater degree than we use science if we want to interpret and understand these energies. Intuition is looking into the future, science is trying to prove intuition's past.
...Of course.
Yet, ONLY YOU saw that -in "my" world.Your grandfather was right when he sounded his bugle the day you were born!!!
My heart is busy composing the happiest little song with your name instead of notes.
♥ Many of us will sing it in a chorus, and just...lit up!!! : ) ♥
Always love, light and laughter;
Leticia Huber : )
www.HubersINN.com
www.PortTownsendPeeps.com
It seems to me that we need to conduct a lot more study into how brains work, and that an interdisciplinary approach will likely be very useful. As to that question of how brains work, it seems to me that four and half billion years of evolution is not going to come to a screeching halt with the advent of human egos. Rather, evolution appears to me to be speeding up, and while none of us may be alive to see it, the future will likely bring radical changes to earthly life forms, and the function of the brain will likely play a key role in evolutionary development.
There is also the role of the environment to consider when discussing our biological development. The pressures of gross overpopulation and the increasing amounts of pollution in the biosphere may have strong effects on our evolution.
The 'function' of the brain is to pass on information gleaned by the physical body, what it sees, what it feels (sensory wise) and what it experiences, through the brains filters, to the mind, the consciousness. This isn't always acceptable to those totally wrapped up in the mechanization
of the body, but I believe it will eventually come to be seen as the process. The brain interprets the physical reality according to beliefs we set up from day one.
The fact mentioned that only until recently were the brain's regenerative capabilities recognized underscores to me the reality that brain science likely still has quite a long way to go.
A scientific understanding of the nature of thought? Probably not in your lifetime or mine, dear author, but I'll hold your bet in the meantime if you wish.
New Robot Capable Of Unhealthily Repressing Emotion
JULY 30, 2010 | ISSUE 46•30
PITTSBURGH—Announcing a crucial breakthrough in the effort to create machines that accurately simulate human behavior, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said Monday they had built the first robot with the capacity to suppress its emotions. "This is the holy grail of artificial intelligence," said project director Kate Tillman, explaining that the robot instantly performs millions of computations to ensure feelings of unresolved anger and simmering resentment remain deeply buried within its complex circuitry. "We felt we were on the right track when we brought up a personal shortcoming and it paced around the lab muttering, but when it started breaking eye contact and changing the subject, we knew we had accomplished something revolutionary." Tillman added that with its superior processing power, the robot could apply for clerical work and settle for the nearest available partner 10,000 times faster than a human being.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-robot-capable-of-unhealthily-repressing-emotio,17806/
for the purposes of ego engorgement.
The Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence?
Right.
We become trapped in an intractable circularity. An attempt at a causal scheme always ends up showing a relational setup, or a dependent co-arising (Buddha's patticasamupada).
Just as in Yoga the most difficult posture is stillness, the most difficult thing for thought to see is its own limitations.
Meditate.
The other point is that the two concepts, mind and brain, are part of the definition of each other; we cannnot get past this circularity and really know in a deep enough way that is so satisfactory that no further inquiries arise.
and:
"Because we know a great deal more about computers than we do about the brain, science finds itself in a strange reversal. Instead of looking at the brain to tell us how computers work, it uses computers to teach the brain how it is functioning."
Excellent perception!
me 2 ;-)
.
.
to be serviced every 3000 miles.
His guess on how the brain works is most unlikely, because we know brains are not connected to his favorite idea, a universal intelligence field ...
Mixing a little science into the spiritual or the supernatural and does not make them real.
looking forward to your next post
http://book-marq.blogspot.com
Werner Heisenberg thought that molecular biology would have to be revised in light of QM. He envisaged having to replace the lock and key model of molecular interaction to the types of approaches mentioned by Deepak. It was thought until recently that QM does not apply to biological the realm because of the relatively warm temperatures of bodies. But we now have evidence that photosynthesis involves QM and not the just lock and key metaphor, and so onwards to the rest the biological realm.
Quantum Mechanics is a description of the world, of how things are; it is our best scientific description to date. It supersedes the Newtonian description which is an approximate description compared to QM. While the Newtonian mathematical description could be understood with the aid of mechanical metaphors, QM cannot. The word "mechanics" in Quantum Mechanics is a historical accident, for it not a mechanical type of description. The metaphors of pulleys and levers and clockworks just do not fit with the mathematical description known as QM. The world cannot be fully described as a machine or mechanism. This opens the door to thinking about consciousness as a part of our fundamental description of the world, rather than as a latecomer in evolution. Its fascinating to watch the ongoing progress in this direction.