I have always used metaphors to explain. It is not only
common for me but I have observed it with others also. We use metaphors for every
activity / event / experiences etc.
The biggest error that crept into
me and others is the metaphor “Human beings like computer process, store
and retrieve information”.
Now, the question is why I mentioned
it as an error, the credit goes to the article i.e. “The Empty Brain” by Robert
Epstein (appeared in Aeon).
In this article there was a shocker at start when the writer states “the human brain isn’t really empty, of
course. But it does not contain
most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as
‘memories’.”
I was not ready for the above
statement, as it went against conventions. When moved further, the writer
explains why we should stop using metaphors to explain Human Brain and how it
is a silly activity.
The explanation by writer about
the newborn opens our eyes that lets debunk the metaphors we have associated with
Human Brain.
“To see how vacuous this idea is,
consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the
newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact
with it effectively. A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention
to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of
voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from
another.”
“A healthy newborn is also
equipped with more than a dozen reflexes – ready-made reactions to certain
stimuli that are important for its survival. It turns its head in the direction
of something that brushes its cheek and then sucks whatever enters its mouth.
It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands
so strongly it can nearly support its own weight. Perhaps most important,
newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to change rapidly so they can
interact increasingly effectively with their world, even if that world is
unlike the one their distant ancestors faced.”.
The above statement pulls us back
and forces us to re think our metaphors about Human brain. Writer states that
it is senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms helps us to survive. And he
clearly states “we are not born with: information, data, rules,
software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models,
memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or
buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat
intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also
don’t develop them – ever.”
The writer goes ahead and
explains how the various metaphors like clay etc were imposed on human beings
to understand Human Body and subsequently Human Brain. In this process, it
included many great philosophers and scientist who used different metaphors to
explain Human Brain.
The current thought that is
prevailing amongst many of us is the Information Processing (IP) one which
writer states is standing tall.
I believe, the success of
information technology in the last few decades gives the IP metaphor a strong
pedestal to stand on.
The writer has used a Drawing
example to prove how brain works and why memory was not helpful during that
experiment. The drawing example is an excellent one and worth reading.
Though we all know that every
human being is unique we still believe that the process or brain functioning is
common for all the human beings like a computer. Here, we contradicted
ourselves.
The writer has explained how it
is difficult to understand the basics, I will reproduce it as is here:
“Worse still, even if we had the
ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to
simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that
produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP
metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers
do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long
periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains
our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps
functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose
pointed out in The Future of the
Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be
meaningless unless we knew the entire
life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or
she was raised.”
“Think how difficult this problem
is. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human
intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion
neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths
with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000
proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain
contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each
brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life
history..”
The article is worth reading to
understand how we have to stop using metaphors to understand human brain, since
have a long way to go.
Robert correctly stated at end “The
time has to come to hit the DELETE key”.
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