Future of the Mind — Notes
5 min readJul 7, 2020
- The left hemisphere is responsible for convergent thinking and the right hemisphere for divergent thinking. The left side examines details and processes them logically and analytically but lacks a sense of overriding, abstract connections. The right side is more imaginative and intuitive and tends to work holistically, integrating pieces of an informational puzzle into a whole.
- The right brain is much more precise than the left brain, which often distorts reality and confabulates.
- It is believed that the right brain must work extra hard because of damage to the left brain, and hence savant skills develop as a consequence. For example, the right brain is much more artistic than the left brain. Normally, the left brain restricts this talent and holds it in check. But if the left brain is injured in a certain way, it may unleash the artistic abilities latent in the right brain, causing an explosion of artistic talent.
- The key to unleashing savant capabilities might be to dampen the left brain so that it can no longer restrain the natural talents of the right brain. This is sometimes referred to as “left brain injury, right brain compensation.”
- Caudate nuclei (which is involved with forming habits) and the temporal lobe (which stores facts and figures).
- The key to photographic memory may not be the ability of remarkable brains to learn; on the contrary, it may be their inability to forget.
- In the process of creating new memories, the dCA1 receptor was activated. By contrast, forgetting was initiated by the activation of the DAMB receptor. Forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine.
- Savants have a high capacity for memory. But maybe it isn’t memory that gives them this capacity; maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This might also be the strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory — what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as a cognitive enhancers?
- Only fifteen million base pairs, or “letters,” that make up our genome (out of three billion base pairs) separate us from the chimps, our closest genetic neighbor. (Each “letter” in our genetic code refers to a nucleic acid, of which there are four, labeled A,T,C, and G. So our genome consists of three billion letters, arranged like ATTCCAGGG.…)
- most of our genome is made of “junk DNA” that does not contain any genes and was largely unaffected by evolution. This junk DNA slowly mutates at a known rate (roughly 1 percent of it changes over four million years). Since we differ from the chimps in our DNA by 1.5 percent, this means that we probably separated from the chimpanzees about six million years ago. Hence there is a “molecular clock” in each of our cells. And since evolution accelerates this mutation rate, analyzing where this acceleration took place allows you to tell which genes are driving evolution.
- A stretch of 118 bases that together became known as human accelerated region 1 (HAR1). Of these base pairs, only eighteen mutations were altered since we became human. Her remarkable discovery showed that a small handful of mutations could be responsible for raising us from the swamp of our genetic past. HAR1 was remarkably stable across millions of years of evolution. Primates separated from chickens about three hundred million years ago, yet only two base pairs differ between chimps and chickens. So HAR1 was virtually unchanged for several hundred million years, with only two changes, in the letters G and C. Yet in just six million years, HAR1 mutated eighteen times, representing a huge acceleration in our evolution.
- Sexual selection in turn accelerated our evolution to become intelligent. So in this case the engine that drove the expansion of our brain would be females who chose men who could strategize, become leaders of the tribe, and outwit other males, which requires a large brain.
- So from an evolutionary and biological point of view, evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people, at least not as rapidly as it did thousands of years ago.
- There are indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence, so that any enhancement of our intelligence would have to come from external means.
- In order to carry out its incredible feats of mental gymnastics, the brain has to conserve energy, and hence it takes many shortcuts. Forgetting is an alternative way of saving energy. The conscious brain has access to only a tiny portion of the memories that have an impact on the brain.
- Technology is never the monopoly of the privileged rich. Sooner or later ingenuity, hard work, and simple market forces will drive down its cost.
- No one ever got rich doing relativity.
- Watson can process data at the astonishing rate of five hundred gigabytes per second (or the equivalent of a million books per second) with sixteen trillion bytes of RAM memory. It also had access to two hundred million pages of material in its memory, including the entire storehouse of knowledge within Wikipedia.
- most human thought is actually subconscious. The conscious part of our thoughts, in fact, represents only the tiniest portion of our computations.
- There are at least two basic problems confronting AI: pattern recognition and common sense.
- Unlike a digital computer, which has a fixed architecture (input, output, and processor), neural networks are collections of neurons that constantly rewire and reinforce themselves after learning a new task. The brain has no programming, no operating system, no Windows, no central processor. Instead, its neural networks are massively parallel, with one hundred billion neurons firing at the same time in order to accomplish a single goal: to learn.
- Level 0 consciousness describes thermostats and plants; that is, it involves a few feedback loops in a handful of simple parameters such as temperature or sunlight.
- Level I consciousness describes insects and reptiles, which are mobile and have a central nervous system; it involves creating a model of your world in relationship to a new parameter, space.
- Then we have Level II consciousness, which creates a model of the world in relationship to others of its kind, requiring emotions.
- Finally we have Level III consciousness, which describes humans, who incorporate time and self-awareness to simulate how things will evolve in the future and determine our own place in these models.
- A typical robot, therefore, may have Level I:10 consciousness.
- silicon consciousness might differ from ours in two key areas: emotions and goals.
- When the link between the prefrontal lobe (which governs rational thought) and the emotional centers (e.g., the limbic system) is damaged, patients cannot make value judgments. They are paralyzed when making the simplest of decisions (what things to buy, when to set an appointment, which color pen to use) because everything has the same value to them. Hence, emotions are not a luxury; they are absolutely essential, and without them a robot will have difficulty determining what is important and what is not.
- Emotions are shortcuts the brain uses to rapidly determine this.
