Tag: Brain

Your Brain: Your Garden

Sohaib Athar

brain-gardenMy son likes to watch Mr. Bean, which is a little worrisome for me, as I do not believe in ‘harmless  and silly fun’. While good humor and puns certainly  stimulate your brain-cells (aka neurons), I think that part of the reason people are amused by Mr. Bean, Charlie Chaplin (or any of the  situation comedy heroes who are typically getting into trouble because of their stupidity) is because watching such shows offers them comfort and relief in the knowledge that some other person can be dumber than themselves – and the feeling of having a relatively higher intelligence is enough to boost their self-esteem and actually make them laugh.

The above is just an unproven personal theory, and since I’m not a psychologist by trade, so I will probably not bother to research this idea any further, but that doesn’t stop me from telling my son that “If you watch too much Mr. Bean, your brain will slowly shrink into a pea-brain and you will start acting like Mr. Bean”. I believe it is fair, since he also knows that his brain grows and expands whenever he reads or plays games, so that he can balance the Mr. Bean silliness with some reading or games.

It seems that I am not that far away from the truth, as this recent neuroscience study from Leicester University suggests that we tend to dedicate whole neurons in our brains to a celebrity or even a fictional character. The study involved showing pictures of celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Oprah Winfrey to test subjects, and detecting the neurons that were fired! After this calibration, it is possible to tell whether a person is looking at a picture of Jennifer Aniston or of Halle Berry simply by monitoring their brain cells.

This phenomenon must have a lot of applications  in the Neuromarketing and the Psy-Ops markets, and is definitely the basis for  celebrity sponsorships and endorsements, but more importantly, it has implications within our own relatively ordinary daily lives. The next time you sit in front of the TV for a few hours of entertainment, or decide to watch a movie, you might want to assess whether the neuron-to-entertainment-value trade-off is worth it for you before giving away a few more precious neurons in your brain. Of course, if you don’t intend to use all those extra neurons, then you don’t really need to watch what you are watching.

So what kind of neurons are you growing in your brain, and what kind of stuff is your head filled with?  If you can spare a few, please stare at my avatar for 3 minutes without blinking 🙂

Bored?

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

Are you bored? Do you have ٰnothing to doٰ? I salute you!
You, my friend, are a buddha-in-the-making.
Actually, you are better than Buddha. Buddha he did not have instantaneous access to the all the information in the world in the form of Internet, he did not have a phone to call friends, or a TV to watch the sufferings of the world. He did not have a few thousand mp3s to listen to, no million blogs to read and certainly did not have a billion webpages available for him no billion topics to learn about or a gazillion topics. He had no Youtube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no live cameras, no online discussions. All he had was a tree to sit under and mediate, and yet he had difficulty emptying his mind of all thoughts.

A bored Buddha
A bored Buddha

You, on the other hand, have access to all of the above worldly distractions, and then some. This is why your boredom is an absolutely amazing feat in self-control and concentration – something to be really proud of!
More and more people are seeing the light and converting into boredom monks like you. You should get in touch with them and start a group blog, and if you can share the secret of achieving that zero-hour-workday state of mind, please do share, I can use some tips. Thank you for your time.

Graph of Thought

Sohaib Athar5 Comments

chainA phrase that has been really bothering me since I was a teenager is “Chain of Thought” or “Train of Thought” – it even has its own wiki page! As I have recently realized that one use of blogs are meant to be a personal ranting space, so let me do that.

A chain is a lot like a vector, so when I hear the phrase “Chain of Thought”, I see a thinker/brain jumping from link to link, much like an iterator, and most of the links are identical. I don’t think like that, and I’m sure most people don’t either.

When I try to visualize thinking, the picture that comes to my mind is that of a set of stacks, with thoughts popping out of some and being pushed into others.

At other times, thoughts remind me of a tree, with the brain traversing it, sometimes depth first, and sometimes breadth first, but more often, thought looks to me like a graph, with the brain hopping from node to node however the hell it pleases.

A tree is a graph, and a vector is a tree, so why do we have to chain our thoughts by making them look like they follow a linear pattern? They are seldom that linear! Ok, a “Graph of Thought” sounds modern, but trees have been around for much longer than chains!

To me, analogies and models are dangerous oversimplifications. Whenever we use a model to represent something, the thing that is being represented loses a certain part of its being. By sticking to a chain model, we are simplifying our thought process, and perhaps, becoming just a little bit more stupid in the process. I say, let us kill the phrase “Chain of Thought” and climb one teeny weeny step higher on the ladder of evolution.

After this post, I will take the nested brackets that I love (and I do love them (honestly (yes, this is a forced example))) as deep as I want to, without bothering about grammar.

Grammar needs a redesign.

Kids Songs, Adult Songs and why Superman is like the US of A

Sohaib Athar1 Comment

When my son Harris was three, he used to go to sleep while listening to Nirvana, Pink Floyd and Alanis Morissette, so it is ironic that I found this video when I was searching for kids songs for him on youtube:

and while we are listening to songs, here’s some good advice that you may remember if you grew up in the 90s:

and this page verifies my years-old belief that Superman sucks!. I have never watched any of the Superman movies and don’t regret it

and press the red button here to see what death in Iraq looks like, when taken as a statistic

and free-will may not be as free as we think it is

and sorry about the title of this post, but I really need to make my “TO BLOG” bookmarks folder a bit lighter 😀

Brainnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnns

ReallyVirtual

Its been one year since I started working with the Blue Brain Project team. Dr. Felix Schürmann, the Project Manager of the Blue Brain Project, informed me last week that the project is officially entering its next phase very soon, which has got me pretty excited.

Meanwhile, here's what the rest of the world of Brains (aka. neuroscience) has been up to recently:

PS. On the number of 'n's in the post title (18), I became curious how people actually spelled brai(n)+s, and spent the next 5 minutes charting out the Google hits. Here are the results:

brains-google-hits