Tuesday, October 6, 2009

the brain and your mind

This is an argument taken from the book titled, "The Brain has a mind of its own," by Richard Restak, M.D. copyright 1991.

Richard Restak has written many best-selling books on neuroscience and he himself is a Neurologist.

on page 12, he states this insight, "Because the brain is a physical structure, it exists in space; but the mind operates in time alone."

reflecting on this, I marvelled at this understanding--that who we are is not defined by the physical matter of our brain, but by the operation and changes it undergoes within our lifetime which gives us our personality.  Then i thought, isn't this understanding the same as that of a computer or the network we call the Internet?  The computer is the physical matter and the Web is that always changing and connected network which works in time rather than physical space.  

another book I'm reading, "The Big Brain" goes into depth about the key similarities and differences between the brain and the computer--how they both evolved and how the brain easily trumps the computer in many ways given the brains structure, architecture and means of communicating within itself between compartments which enable us to hear, see, feel, taste, smell, think, react, and remember all while making dinner or going grocery shopping or driving and how complex these tasks are inside our brain while we don't think a second thing about the means of communication it takes.  

our bodies are the space with which our nervous system communicates, just as the Web is the space to which many computers and people can talk to one another.

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