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