Complex Numbers

Brains

Today's science article is, I'm afraid, fairly long - but it's written to be easily understood:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/15/magazine/tech-design-ai-predictio...

Randy Buckner was a graduate student at Washington University in st. Louis in 1991 when he stumbled across one of the most important discoveries of modern brain science. For Buckner — as for many of his peers during the early ’90s — the discovery was so counterintuitive that it took years to recognize its significance.

Now, there's a lot to unpack at that link. The title, I think, is a bit sensationalist: "The human brain is a time traveler."

Well, as it turns out, kind of. What he means is only that we have the ability to contemplate both past and future, sometimes skipping between the two in less than a heartbeat. Okay, fine. Then he proposes that, perhaps, this ability is what makes humans human and not, say, sponges or dogs.

Jury's out on that. Every time someone comes up with a single thing that claims "This... this is what gave us the ability to go to the moon / create reality TV / contemplate quantum mechanics / build skyscrapers / whatever," someone else comes up with an example of someone in the animal world having the same ability. Language. Tool use. Opposable thumbs. Etc. Apparently, it's not any one attribute, but the whole complex of them.

But, anyway, let's take this at face value for now. Like I said, there's a lot to read in that article, but I'd like to pay particular attention to something that's more between the lines.

I've been hearing a lot more lately about "mindfulness," usually in the context of "living in the moment" or in the present. This idea has never sat very well with me. Based on the information in this article, it turns out I may be onto something.

First of all, I don't think there is a "present." Or, if there is, it's something akin to the infinitesimals they use in calculus - something arbitrarily small that helps us to calculate a broader function. And I've just lost at least half my audience, so I'll move on to my next point.

Seems to me that, given this information about how our brain works in its resting state, any attempt to live in the present makes us less than human. And while there are a lot of things that humans do that we ought to be ashamed of, is the answer really to attempt to revert to some sort of pre-cognitive state?

I don't know. I did say I was biased. But I'll continue to contemplate the past and the future, because, as the author points out - that's the essence of storytelling.

Sure, the future is uncertain, and the past can be murky because our memories aren't exactly precise. But they're all we've got.