Brain: An Insight Into the Unknown Premises

The sensitivity of the
unknown, the complexity of
the hidden, and the
propensity of the conscious
to follow without knowing
the obscure intelligence, continuously and
vehemently, forces the
development of the day
today human being. What we
do and why is a very intricate
phenomena guided by thousands of facts and
fictitious concepts. The
possibility of reasons behind
a certain act, thought or
feeling can go as far as
infinite. And we may not be aware as to how vaguely a
certain act may affect a
future one. Psychologists and
philosophers have spent
hundreds of years
developing theories for explaining the hows and
whys of the one most
unpredictable creature on
this earth, the human being-
and they have succeeded in it
to some extent-but still a lot needs to be done in the field
of the ultimate human truth. The human brain is one giant
machine packed inside a tiny
cauldron working every
second throughout our life
span. We cannot gauge the
amount of work performed and the capacity of this giant
by sitting inside a laboratory,
peeling the layers of the
biological structure.
Laboratory results may help
in curing the effects on our nervous system but a
thorough investigation of the
human past and present only
can give a fruitful
explanation of our actions. It
may be considered that we can generate a report for each
and every single human
being by attaching a device to
it, right from the birth and
until it disappears into the
eternity, collecting data for each and every second of the
human life. This may help
in unraveling the human
experience and its cause, but
the amount of data generated
and it's processing would go beyond the capacity of our
present technology. Even the
most capable of the super
computers cannot simulate a
human brain. But saying that
a human brain is incomprehensible and that it
cannot be cracked by
continuous observations
would be too pessimistic. We are talking about
observations, but observe
what? Our actions or our
thoughts? Which one would
be a better entity to be looked
after? Let's go into some detail. Speaking of our
actions, we know that
actions are manifestations of
our thinking process and yet
many of them seem to be
totally uncontemplated. Whenever we find ourselves
in this dilemma of acting
without thinking we need to
consider something which is
beyond our normal thinking
scope. Every action involves- whether verbal or physical-
some kind of brain activity.
The brain decides on the
basis of experience and the
present stimulation what
action to perform. The responses are more or
less fixed, and a closer look
at the situation will reveal
that our final response is a
combination of our natural
responses. And if we see that we have acted or reacted to a
certain stimulation without
performing any apparent
brain-cracking, then we
should know that the
responses for such stimulations are already well
cogitated and thus seemingly
surprising and weird. It may
be that we might have
reacted to the stimulation in
a totally unrelating manner but in such cases we only
tend to find some
stimulation and we react in a
particular way. Any other
stimulation could have
brought the same result. So in a way the stimulation only
actuated the process of
reaction rather than acting as
the actual cause for it. As far as our thoughts are
concerned, we have a
multitude of them. We can
have hundreds of thoughts
and we may process them
simultaneously in the background without
apparent visible appearance
just like a daemon process in
the computer world. And
yes, they are equally
important in determining the responses. These thoughts are
forked from time to time by
various stimulations and
some of them may continue
running for over years. Thus
they consume -let's put it like this- the unconscious
RAM, which processes the
present stimuli. Let's
consider the effect of a very
simple process that is
"having breakfast in the morning". A person who
used to have boiled egg every
single day of his life, so to
say, had to eat bread and
butter just for one day.
Howsoever acceptable this may seem to the person,
there will be an unusual
response in the body. A new process gets forked
and it doesn't know what to
do because it's been called
for the first time. This
process may die instantly or
may linger depending upon the state of the person after
eating the breakfast. If it
offers a new experience
which is welcomed by the
person then it may continue
to live and will find some kind of output for the person
to relate itself to- the person
might say "oh, I love this
thing". If the person
indulges more and more on
this activity then the output gets modified, but if there
are no more feelings about
this new thing and the
person still likes to have
such breakfast then the
response stays but without any deviation from the
response which the person
had for the first time; and
thus we can say that the
response has become fixed in
this case and whatever stimuli may cause to instigate
the process, the person will
react in a particular manner. Thus we can see that
thought-monitoring can
prove to be the game point
for us or at least a fair
enough beginning. Some
more phenomena can be accounted for if we look
even closer at the Brain-
computer analogy such as
memory loss. Let's take the
example of memory loss.
Consider the situation where an event manages to destroy
the long active processes.
Since a lot of processes are
interdependent and therefore
killing a parent process can
put the child processes in abeyance. They may or may
not get killed in this event
but unfortunately, due to the
event they have lost the
source and thus no input to
operate upon. Thus thousands of process
continue to run without any
inputs and thus outputs. They
do not process any thing just
keep on waiting for some
input. However, this doesn't mean that we cannot bring
back the source...what else
do we have hard-disks for?
Yes, in many cases it is
possible to reinitiate the
source from the memory; though a very uncertain
process. But sometimes even
the deepest information also
get's corrupted and thus there
is no coming back from the
jumbled state of hanged processes. And thus we can
guess how the human brain
works at the basic level. The whole process of brain
analysis is very complicated
and may involve work of
many centuries yet to come.
However, the possibility of
discarding the brain computer analogy and
devising a completely new
one can not be neglected; but
our best efforts at the
moment can certainly be of
some experimental use for our future generations. Ashish Dabral Article Source: http:// EzineArticles.com/?
expert=Ashish_Dabral