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The Basis of the Mind
Sherlock Holmes had funny ideas. He actually believed that the
brain can get full. So he ignored anything that was not part of
his core business as an Investigative Consultant.
This zany character was invented by Conan-Doyle, as a failed
medical student at the London Hospital who never attended the
lectures unless they involved crime. Even when he has to share
his lodgings with a disabled medic - Dr. Watson - in order to
pay the rent, he refused to learn from him that the Moon goes
around the Earth because it had nothing to do with crime.
The Conan-Doyle Holmes view of the mind is a LINEAR model.
Everything takes up the same amount of space. However, I have
long held the view that the mind is EXPONENTIAL in its function
- that knowledge is held by association with other knowledge,
and that each addition to the database multiplies the amount of
knowledge gained.
Under such conditions, the space taken up would be the LOGARITHM
of the entire data set. For very large repertoires of knowledge
- such as an entire long life - the space-saving becomes
enormous, and easily explains why we can contain it all in just
a kilogramme-and-a-half (about three pounds) of grey matter. My
researches into data-compression were aimed at finding ways of
compressing repetitive data, such as in a machine-made poster,
into the smallest possible space. I was ultimately to succeed at
this, and the result can be seen at http://wehner.org/compress .
Human comprehension of comprehension itself has been growing
over the last century or so. Hermann von Helmholtz studied the
cochlea of the inner ear, and found that there is a basilar
membrane that varies in its stiffness. High frequencies resonate
at the small end of this membrane, and tickle the nerves to
define the strength of high-pitched sounds. Low frequencies
resonate at the wide and floppy part of the membrane at the
mouth of the cochlea. The entire membrane is bathed in a damping
fluid, itself in an exponential horn.
I described this in some detail in the section of my website
concerning the science of the honky-tonk piano.
What is going on it that the pitch components of a sound are
being pulled apart by mechanical resonance (frequency analysis).
Then, in the pair of eighth cranial nerves, the components are
matched up again. If the first component (the Tonic, also called
Fundamental) occurs together with the second harmonic, the third
and so on, then the source was just one shrill note. Otherwise,
it is several sources. The ability to know this provides an
important survival advantage.
However, between the two cochleas are the semicircular canals.
These were once believed to provide the sense of balance - but
it is not exactly so. A pilot was flying through cloud when his
instruments misbehaved. He knocked his knuckles against the
artificial horizon, but it continued to turn senselessly.
Then the cloud cleared, and the pilot saw that the ground was
turning exactly as was the artificial horizon. He swerved the
plane out of the spiral dive, and reported an air near miss.
Was he mad? No. The authorities did not send him to a
psychiatrist (who deals with mad thoughts) but to a psychologist
(who deals with the mechanism of the brain). The psychologist
decided that whilst the plane was spinning, so was the pilot, so
were his semicircular canals - and so also was the fluid within
those canals.
With no differential motion between the fluid and the
semicircular canals, the pilot could not be expected to feel the
rotation. All pilots must fly by instrument, and ignore their
feelings.
The psychologist decided that the semicircular canals measure
the RATE OF CHANGE of motion. In mathematics, we speak of the
DIFFERENTIAL. To regenerate the original positional information,
the eighth cranial nerve pair must INTEGRATE the data from the
semicircular canals.
This leads to the conundrum of the INTEGRATION CONSTANT.
Now we see why the nerves from the semicircular canals are
bundled together with the nerves from the cochleas on each side.
If a SOUND is heard to the left, or to the right, it will
REINSTATE the exact positional information. So sound and balance
work together.
In the cockpit of a plane, however, the cockpit, the pilot and
the sources of noise are all moving together. It is only sound
EXTERNAL to the cockpit environment that will be of use in
determining absolute position.
The author was a member of the Stereoscopic Society in London
when another member, Martin Wilsher, said "I have found the
sixth sense, and it is not the superstitious kind". The author
had found that the sense of touch (from Aristotle`s "five
senses") has to be divided into two - into hard/soft and
warm/cold. There is therefore another sense, which is that of
TEMPERATURE. The author listened to Wilsher. What would this new
sense be?
Martin Wilsher said that it is BALANCE, and the author`s mind
flashed to thoughts about the semicircular canals. As there is
an organ to detect movement, it had to be true.
The author investigated the thoughts of Aristotle, and
discovered that the latter had considered that there might be a
balancing sense - but as the eyes could see position, it would
be redundant. It was on this basis that Aristotle rejected it.
In my study of the way in which hearing and balance are
combined, I have shown the error that Aristotle made. It is
hearing, not vision, that is most intimately connected with
balance.
As Wilsher laid claim to the sixth sense, I will declare my own
sense - temperature - to be the seventh.
Neither Martin Wilsher nor myself claims to have discovered
these senses for the first time. Rather, it is a case of
updating the classical literature to keep pace with modern
discoveries.
What is going on in the various nerves of the brain is a process
of refining, by which the data is made simpler and simpler. My
3D section describes how the visual cortex "reverse engineers"
an image by extracting the colour information (the "chroma"),
and finding the edges of the brightness information (of the
"luma"). Data is reduced to a set of lines with their brightness
and colour information.
So it is not just balance and sound, but also pictures that
are
simplified in readiness for comprehension.
Data streams into the brain, which compares CLUMPS of data with
other clumps that have been experienced before. This is not
theory. This is FACT. Indeed, the process that I discovered is
so simple yet fundamental that it opens up an entire new
science. This I call the (new) Calculus of Sets.
As the data flows in, the mind just has to say "OLD, OLD, OLD,
NEW, OLD" and so on - in REAL TIME. That is to say, it must be
recognized as it happens. There is no time to ponder.
The process I define as DIFFERATION because of its close
relationship with the mathematical process of differentiation.
However, the brain cannot - and does not - do mathematics. The
proof of this is that we send our children to school to learn
the philosophy of mathematics, and it is the philosophy that
does the mathematics. Those who do not go to school - like cats
and dogs - cannot do mathematics.
The brain simply MATCHES data against data by logical
comparison. That is differation.
However, there is more to this. One CLUMP is matched against two
old clumps or more. Thus, the size of the clump of data that can
be coded grows exponentially. One recent clump might be two
older clumps, which are four older still, and eight clumps that
are even more old.
In 1982, Professor Noam Chomsky published his Universal Grammar.
In the mind of a child, there is an awareness of things about
him for which he has no name. However, with amazing speed the
child will learn their names. It is as if the grammar was
already there, and needed only the semantics to be attached.
Chomsky stated that the Universal Grammar is perhaps NOT GENETIC.
My research with simple exponential data-compression programs
showed that even a few hundred bytes of code will do this. My
programs found a sine wave, the edge of a picture, a row of
pixels and so on.
There was not a single GENE, nor even a NUCLEOTIDE in the entire
program.
I was beginning to understand how an ant can know that it is an
ant. The simple compound eye has few pixels, but they are
checked against each other to find a simplification. That
simplification is then compared by differation with past
experiences. In an ant-hill, swarming with ants, the formic mind
becomes so swamped with ant data that eventually it cannot avoid
knowing it is an ant.
A puppy is born with its eyes closed. Watch closely, however,
and you will see its RNM sleep. That is like the REM sleep of
humans. It is Rapid Nose Movement.
Clumps of smell-data enter the mind. Just as a human child may
say "Look, Daddy, Car", and then again, "Look, Daddy, Car", so
the puppy is noticing a smell, and then another smell.
Everything to the newborn is new, so the differation process has
few "OLD"s and many "NEW"s. The canine mind is learning to build
a repertoire of smell-recognition, which becomes the BASIS of
its mind.
After a while, the ears begin to move. The puppy is associating
SOUND with the smells. Finally, the eyes open, and IMAGES become
differated in conjunction with the other senses.
So the canine mind has vision put on top of hearing put on top
of smell. The fundamental preoccupation of a lifetime - the
canine interest in smells - has been laid down.
And birds? Often, when hatched, they have closed eyes. However,
the sense of smell comes from tiny nose-holes just above the
beak. It is the sense of HEARING that is important to birds.
Why? Because of BALANCE. Having learned to recogise absolute
position, and to link the rate-of-change of position to it, the
bird has built a BALANCING psychology as needed for flight. Then
the eyes open, and the bird relates all that it sees to the
prepared sense of balance.
Bees need to recognize patterns, such as the shapes of flowers.
Recent research showed that when a photograph of a certain human
face has a drop of sugar-water attached at one corner, the bee
will hover in front of a series of human-face images, trying to
decide whether the pattern is the one that has the sugar-reward.
There was a high rate of success with this apian human-face
recognition, and still much better that 50-50 after two days.
So the system of awareness is to look at clumps of past data in
the memory. Clumps are clumped with other clumps, to see if they
match the incoming data. If they do, only a single pointer is
needed to the superclump.
The subconscious mind is that part of the brain where the data
is thrown once it has been recogized. The conscious mind is the
point of comparison of the real-time data inflow with the stored
clumps in the subconscious.
The Universal Grammar grows out of data-clumping, and is
automatic. It needs no special apparatus, so even the simple
brains of ants and bees can build a grammar of nouns from the
environment, against which to recognise their world.
The earliest data-clumps are the foundation of the psychology.
The sequence in which the senses open up determines the
data-awareness priorities of the animal.
Experiments with homing pigeons showed that they get lost when a
magnet is strapped to the neck. It seems that pigeons at least,
and probably other birds, have an eighth sense - a sense of
magnetism.
Experiments with ants show that when a large sheet of polarizing
film is held above them, and slowly turned, the ants turn in the
same direction and get lost. It seems that ants, and probably
other insects, have a sense of the polarization of light.
Such is the abundant variety of Nature`s tricks.
Charles Douglas Wehner
------------------------------------------------
references:
http://www.wehner.org/3d/towne/
Hermann von Helmholtz "Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als
physiologische Grundlage fuer die Theorie der Musik", 1863,
1870.
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/051209_beesfrm.htm
http://www.wehner.org/compress
http://www.chomsky.info
About the author:
Born in Port Erin, Isle of Man, in 1944, inventor, engineer and
technical author Charles Wehner was involved with
photoelectrics, radar, measurement-and-control systems and many
other fields.
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