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The Miraculous Mind

Conversations about the many feats and idiosyncrasies of human mind...

by Praveen Baratam

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Evangelist

Level 4

Nicholas Bc Shumate - 9 years ago Permalink Edit

This talk has changed my entire perception of life and our world. The idea that so many people have yet to realize it, and even myself as well is a staggering one.

How does the brain organize so much information to fit basically what you want to see in your life? More importantly how do we change it?
On this I have heard a promising theory of Brain Programming
The second video is kind of cheesy but it is spot on with the
theories I've heard, namely that if you spend about five minutes
constructing your goals and using visual representations for them
in your mind right before bed, and your brain will begin to
reorganize your reality.

It is incredible how we know so much about Child Development and yet still insist on smothering the very traits we know to be necessary to our survival as a species. Children are curious by nature of their environment both physically and socially because of their need to develop new neuron connections, and we then diagnose them with ADD
and medicate them so they quit doing what they were biologically designed to do.

However the potential is incredible and boundless.

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

Disciplined self-hypnosis as outlined in the second video is indeed a very credible way to reinforce and change models inside our brains and I practice it too. Telling yourselves every now and then that you are 'Fantabulous' works wonders! Similar auto-gestures can be used to reinforce other traits but then a word of caution here, do not try to reinforce any belief about anything external to you using this method. Ex. Superstitions, Religious and Political Ideologies, etc.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

@Praveen- Good to here some confirmation from others that I'm heading in the right direction. There is definitely a very great potential of wrecking the system if you put the wrong information in so to speak, I keep it strictly goal oriented, something to boost me up every so often.

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

On the other hand ADD has become a household term these days and many children are misappropriately labeled and even treated for the same simply because they are unable to focus on a dull curriculum at school. Its unfortunate that we want our children to think, act and follow like sheep and discourage the most rewarding traits of enthusiasm and curiosity in them!

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

It comes down to more than just a boring curriculum, by our biology, we are extragenetic learners. We must mess with our physical and social environment when we are developing in the stages of 3 months to twenty-two years and then some, yet we refuse to acknowledge this chronicled fact in other areas of our society like education.

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Maven

Level 8

Praveen Baratam - 10 years ago Permalink Edit

Its amazing how our mind nearly deceives us at times. Really even the greatest computing machine, which paradoxically is part of us than being something we created, has many many bugs!

Makes me wonder if all the shapes and sizes we perceive are near approximations and assumptions that turn out to be accurate most of the times but are curiously inaccurate at times.

These 10 cool illusions say it all.

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10 Amazing Illusions

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Manigandan Muthusamy, Evangelist - 10 years ago Edit

good one

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Praneeth Baratam, Evangelist - 10 years ago Edit

The biggest illusion that we do not realize that we are being belied into for more than a century now is a 'movie', when it is just a sequence of pictures played at a certain frame-rate.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

@Nicholas - Fantastic talk and presentation by Mr. Lotto. Ultimately, what we see is an interpretation of the sensory information by our brain rather than a true representation of the same. As pointed out in his talk a true representation can have many gaps and without a heuristic system to fill those gaps it may not be useful after all. But whats interesting is how this heuristic system interferes even when there are no apparent gaps in our sensory input.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

I fear you are getting a little over my scope of knowledge at the moment, just graduated high school a year ago

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

what do you mean by heuristic system? are you referring to a method of investigation or a model of thinking?

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

You are too good for a high school graduate mate. Great going! Heuristic systems are those that learn from previous experience and apply such knowledge to solve current challenges. In the present context brain fills the gaps in the sensory information using previously acquired knowledge of similar objects and situations. These processes also cause various illusions and delusions by acting even when there are no apparent gaps by corrupting our interpretation of the world around us.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

So then would you say that one could develop a heuristic system of thinking to adjust they way our brain interprets the sensory information without the use of a chemical catalyst? What gaps in sensory information are you talking about specifically?

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

By gaps I mean incomplete sensory information that cannot by itself be sufficient to rightly interpret the situation. In the TED Talk by Mr. Lotto you were referring to earlier, he clearly explains how incomplete our sensory information can be in certain situations and the need for our brain to step in and fill the gaps. Unfortunately we may not be able to train our brains as this process of enhancing sensory information is part of the subconscious. What chemical catalysts were you referring to?

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

well there are things like acid and mushrooms, Etc. As to subcon. There is the school of thought that it can be programmed like a computer

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

Training the subconscious/involuntary-processes inside our brains!! There is some evidence but training ourselves out of illusions may also hamper our ability to interpret our surroundings effectively in a majority of circumstances. The processes causing illusions are also the ones that are helping us create a tangible picture when presented with spotty sensory information.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

Maybe not so if done in the correct manner, Computers after all were designed after the brain itself. A complex task center backed by a simple task center with multiple areas devoted to the same specializations in the event of legions or other disturbances. We program them.

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

Could be possible! On the other hand, computers are not modeled after our brains, we want them to work like our brains do and we are trying hard to build such things but we are not there yet. Infact our present day computers have very little similarity to our brains. They are just fast command processors whereas our brain can process, learn and react at the same time.

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

You might wanna check out the topic on Artificial Intelligence - http://www.talkonomy.com/topic/artificial-intelligence for more on this.

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Maven

Level 8

Praveen Baratam - 10 years ago Permalink Edit

Do we sense our surroundings first or do we start interpreting and reacting to them right away? Logically we are tempted to assume that we first sense our environment and then interpret it.

For example when you see this symbol - 'µ' - its commonsense to believe that we first perceive its shape, color, etc. and then interpret it to be 'Mu'; but those events may not be happening in that order after all.

We tend to interpret as we sense and vice-versa. The final perception seems to be a mix of both actual and assumed details and our brains must have evolved this mechanism to reduce reaction times.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the case of dyslexics and synesthetes. While dyslexics have trouble seeing symbols as depicted, synesthetes perceive symbols in varying colors irrespective of the color they are actually depicted in.

Obviously if we are seeing first and interpreting later, Dyslexia and Synesthesia are logically impossible.

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Dyslexia

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 10 years ago Edit

Exactly, that's what my post is all about. We don't seem to completely rely on sensory inputs for perception. Our brain may be processing only those stimuli that are required for it to make an informed decision about what is out there. For instance, when synesthetes perceive the shape of a symbol, their brain may be automatically associating a color to it with out relying on actual sensory information.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

There was an experiment discussed in the late Dr. Carl Sagan's book Dragons of Eden where a Dr stimulated nerves in a patient's brain to stimulate the patient's pinkie finger and then stimulated the actual finger and found that contrary to what one would think, stimulating the finger caused the signal to travel to the brain faster than stimulating the brain first, in fact the stimulus was never applied to the finger and the brain still reacted.

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Praveen Baratam, Maven - 9 years ago Edit

@Nicholas - Can you please provide some more details about the experiment by Dr. Sagan... a link to an article or a video should help us understand the experiment better.

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Nicholas Bc Shumate, Evangelist - 9 years ago Edit

http://www.oocities.org/athens/acropolis/1628/A41brain.htm The book Dragons of Eden is an incredibly eye opening novel and the best book i have ever read. I'm trying to spread awareness about it and discuss it with people.

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