EVOLUTION AGAINST ENTROPY - 0 The Mega Brain

RUNNING NAKED THROUGH THE STREETS:

THE EUREKA EVENT

THE TALE OF SAUL OF TARSUS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS IS

one of our culture's most powerful stories of mental transfor-mation. Like some impetuous, driven district attorney, Saul had made a name for himself with his zealous persecution of the hated Nazarenes, who were springing up in and around Jerusalem in the years after the death of Jesus. So obsessed was he with eradicating this sect that he even went to his employer, the high priest, and asked for authority to journey out of his usual bailiwick - Palestine - to distant Damascus, to seek out these cultists, so that "whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem," and have them put to death.

But while he's on the road to Damascus something unex-pected happens: suddenly he's hit with a light so bright it knocks him down, blind and bewildered, and he hears the voice of God. His traveling companions lead him off to Da-mascus, but for the next three days he's blind, and just sits in a stupor, without eating or drinking. Then one of the very Nazarenes he has been so determined to persecute appears,

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incredibly vast potentials of interaction between neurons, "A brain composed of such neurons obviously can never be 'filled up.' Perhaps the more it knows, the more it can know and create. Perhaps, in fact, we can now propose an incredible hypothesis: The ultimate creative capacity of the brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite."¹⁹⁵

4 EVOLUTION AGAINST ENTROPY

RUNNING NAKED THROUGH THE STREETS:

THE EUREKA EVENT

THE TALE OF SAUL OF TARSUS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS IS

MEGABRAIN

calling him Brother Saul, and claiming he has been sent by God. Instantly Saul's eyesight returns, and he knows exactly what he must do: he becomes a Nazarene, and does the exact thing he was persecuting Nazarenes for, going into the syna-gogues and preaching this new religion. Having changed his name from Saul to Paul, he becomes the most influential and charismatic of all the early Christian apostles, traveling all over the known world to preach and convert.

I retell this story as a clear example of a mental process all of us have experienced, though probably in a far less dramatic and soul-searing form. It is an example of that moment when some problem that has been bothering us suddenly and sponta-neously solves itself; when the pieces of some puzzle that have been shifting and sliding back and forth inside our heads causing a feeling of vague discomfort or dissatisfaction sud-denly all fall into place.

It has been called the Eureka event, after the tale of Archi-medes, the Greek thinker who had been trying to figure out how he could determine the amount of gold in a precious crown without melting it down. He had pondered the problem from all angles, but could find no answer. Then one afternoon while taking a bath, he noticed how the water in the tub was displaced by his body. Suddenly he saw the answer to his problem: measure how much water the crown displaced.

Everything fell into place, and he ran into the streets still naked crying "Eureka!" ("I have found it!").

Whatever we call this experience - the Aha! moment, the flash of insight, creativity, having a brainstorm, turning on the light bulb in the brain, the "felt shift," wordless knowing -our gut feeling is that in some way the contents of -our brain have been rearranged, or perhaps that our brain itself has been reconstructed. As we shall see, scientists have discovered that this is exactly what happens. During those moments, the pat-tern of electrical waves that sweep throughout the brain is altered, the type of electrical waves the brain generates changes, and individual neurons in the cerebral cortex alter the number and shape of their dendrites, dendritic spines, and synapses, so that the network of other neurons they are linked

EVOLUTION AGAINST ENTROPY

with is altered, creating new patterns of electrochemical mes-sage transmission, new states of mind: a way of seeing reality that is totally new.

THE BENEFITS OF GIVING RATS BRIGHT IDEAS

IN FACT, THESE FLASHES OF INSIGHT, RANGING FROM

LOW-wattage inner light bulbs like "Say, square pegs do not fit into round holes!" to high-intensity mental lightning flashes like Einstein's E = mc², are what constitute the process we call learning. And to return to our Berkeley rats in enriched or impoverished environments, what Rosenzweig and colleagues first set out to investigate was the relationship between learn-ing and brain chemistry. What if, they wondered, we could cause one group of rats to have a whole bunch of Eureka events, or flashes of insight, while another group had almost none whatsoever - what would the difference be in their brain chemistry?

As we saw, there were great differences. The brain chemis-try of the Eureka (i.e., enriched-environment) rats was much higher in brain enzymes associated with learning. And what's more, the brains of the Eureka rats were larger and heavier and had qualitatively more complex cerebral cortexes. So, when we speak of feeling "new connections" being made in our brains during our moments of insight, we are not using a metaphor but being literally descriptive: in those moments we learn, our brains actually undergo structural change with in-credible speed.

The question, of course, is why? Why does some external stimulation cause the brain to alter so radically while a similar stimulation will hardly affect the brain at all? One person driving his car passes a red neon light and barely notices it.

Another person, an astrophysicist, say, who's working on some problem about the expanding universe, sees the red light, is reminded perhaps of something having to do with the

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Everything fell into place, and he ran into the streets still naked crying "Eureka!" ("I have found it!").

EVOLUTION AGAINST ENTROPY

with is altered, creating new patterns of electrochemical mes-sage transmission, new states of mind: a way of seeing reality that is totally new.

THE BENEFITS OF GIVING RATS BRIGHT IDEAS

IN FACT, THESE FLASHES OF INSIGHT, RANGING FROM

Another person, an astrophysicist, say, who's working on some problem about the expanding universe, sees the red light, is reminded perhaps of something having to do with the

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red shift, or a specific red in some spectrogram, and it sud-denly triggers a full-blown Eureka experience, leading him to the solution of his problem. A third person, having recently experienced certain personal traumas, sees the light, is re-minded of the red skirt of the woman who has left him, and is immediately thrown into such an extreme emotional state he loses control and goes mad. Same red light in all cases.

Why can such simple stimuli have such extraordinary transforming effects in the brain? Why can such stimuli lead in some cases to brain states that produce higher levels of order, beauty, complexity, and in others to disorder and de-struction? Why is it that the brain even needs the input of an external stimulus to be spurred or boosted or triggered into making new connections, forming new ideas, experiencing Eureka moments?

These are important questions; but they are doubly impor-tant in this context because if we can answer them, we can perhaps discover something of momentous consequence: how to intentionally direct specific stimuli to specific areas of the brain and trigger new ideas or Eureka moments at will. In fact, users and designers of some of the machines we will look at claim that this is exactly what they do. What an idea! Crea-tivity on command! Flashes of insight at the push of a button!

Is this possible?

In document 0 The Mega Brain (Page 58-62)