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Monday, January 26, 2015

Brain-Complexity Love Affair


Human brain is a very interesting organ. We, as humans, usually suffer from complexity and seem to get stuck in either analysis paralysis or in absurd reductionism faced with anything including more than a few processes and components. However, our brain seems to thrive on the same. It becomes very obvious in the research process. While the researcher is loading piles of information into his/her brain ( no matter how unrelated and useless it is), the brain does its job. I think, it actually enjoys it. And after all that information overload the brain just suddenly shows the path in all that chaos and the rest of the information becomes nicely classified, labeled as "important", "unimportant", "relevant", "irrelevant", "left for the future". Now I remember that this is exactly how kids learn (and how adults often forget to learn since the convenient world is already labelled).
Recently, I've listened to a course in neuroscience on decision making. At first, I found it difficult to grasp why they are talking about whether we, as humans, are in charge of our decisions. It is in fact proven that the brain makes the decision much earlier than it is presented to our conscious mind. And we only rationalize that decision afterwards to make it look as we consciously decided. Now reflecting on the brain's ability to research and analyze the information, it seems kind of obvious: our subconscious does all the work and the consciousness is only given a briefing.
Yeah, nurture your brain...Who knows what it can do to you if left neglected ;)