Chapter One
The Extraordinary Computer Between Your Ears
The growth of the human mind
is still high adventure, in many ways
the highest adventure on Earth.
— Norman Cousins Your brain weighs about three pounds and it looks like a soft, wrinkled walnut. Pretty unimpressive looking at first glance. However, it has been in the making for about five million years. Whether you consider what it does or how it is constructed it is, by far, the most extraordinary organ in your body!
The human brain can store more information than all the libraries in the world! It is the cause of that violent outburst that you were so embarrassed about as well as the force behind the best idea you ever had and the most charitable action you ever took. Your brain regulates all bodily functions and is responsible for your most primitive behavior as well as your most sophisticated accomplishments. All of your thoughts and emotions, indeed your personality, is inside that three-pound organ. You can receive a heart or lung transplant and still be yourself but if you were able to receive a brain transplant, you would no longer be you! Scientists have studied the brain for hundreds of years yet it remains so mysterious that many consider it humankind's ultimate frontier. Your brain is a biological organ but it is also like an amazing machine, a supercomputer. It is miraculous! Your brain is truly one of the most amazing things in the universe. Think of it this way—the human brain is the only object capable of contemplating itself!
We, as human beings, tend to sell ourselves short. We stand in awe of computers, yet inside each of our brains lies ten times the amount of AT&T's entire communication networking system! We marvel at other animals like dolphin or ants. We can sit and watch an ant colony and be fascinated by it. How do they create such a complex structure? How do they communicate? An ant has about five hundred brain cells. That's the amount a person loses from drinking one glass of wine! But don't worry, we each have about 100 billion brain cells—that's as many as there are stars in the sky.
Each brain cell, or neuron, connects with all the others. Imagine, 100 billion electrical connections going on inside your head right now! Think of it this way: Imagine everyone in the world (about 5.5 billion people) talking on the phone to each other at the same time. That's a complicated image, isn't it? But to get an idea of the complexity of what is happening inside your head, you have to expand on this image. Take those same 5.5 billion people, put them on eighteen telephones each, have them all talking to each other at the same time and, if you can picture that, you can begin to understand the complexity of the communication process inside your brain!
If each neuron could only touch two other neurons, the number of possible configurations in your brain would be two to the 100-billionth power! That number would take you about nine hundred years to write out at one second per digit! In reality, because each neuron connects with all the others, the possible configurations are impossible to understand.
These busy little neurons send, receive and store signals that add up to information. Everything we do and all we know depends on the transfer of signals from neuron to neuron. A neuron has one big tentacle, its axon, and many smaller ones, its dendrites. The axon sends the signals which are received by the dendrites of other neurons. This is an electrochemical process that occurs at a point between cells called a synapse. This is as technical as we are going to get (aren't you happy!). But let me give you an extraordinary fact about dendrites, the receiving tentacles of the neuron. Believe it or not, we have over 100,000 miles of dendrites in our brains! In other words, the total length of dendrites in your brain could encircle the Earth—four times!
You might think that as we develop as human beings, the amount of connections among the neurons in our brains would increase. However, it appears that the opposite is true. There may be more connections in an infant than in a fully developed adult. Development seems to be about refining certain connections and not about making new ones.
Think about this: In the first weeks of life, a baby's babbling includes almost every sound of every known language! However, infants lose their ability to make sounds that aren't in the language they are learning to speak. The point is that the brain has enormous potential to do many things, such as learn the thousands of languages in existence, but we may only learn one or a few. What human beings are capable of is astounding; what we accomplish is often disappointing.
Can your brain physically grow? Consider this extraordinary experiment conducted by Mark Rosenweig and Marion Diamond at the University of California at Berkeley. The scientists took three brother rats and separated them into one of three environments:
- Enriched: One of the brothers was placed in a large cage with other rats. This group was given new toys to play with daily, as well as food, water, etc.
- Standard: One brother was placed with two other rats in a small cage with food and water.
- Impoverished: One brother rat lived by itself with food and water.
The experiment concluded that the rats in the enriched environment had an actual increase in the weight of their brain! Ten percent was average.
And, what about the idea that we only use 10 percent of our brain? This figure and similar ones have been thrown around for years. I have been guilty of doing it myself during my entertainment and speaking engagements. Some people argue that only 10 percent of the brain has been mapped. We know that huge sections of the brain can be damaged and we can still function normally and we know that damage to certain small areas of the brain can be disastrous. Perhaps all of our brain is used at some point. We don't really know. What we do know is that we are far from knowing the limits of the mind's capabilities and our full potential. Compare your brain to your computer. Most of us only use a small percentage of our computer's power; it is the same with our personal computer power, our mind power.
In many respects, the brain is like a supercomputer. Scientists have spent more than a decade trying to develop a computerized version of the brain called a neural network. But these neural networks are very primitive when compared to the human brain. For example, while the human brain contains 100 billion neurons, its electronic counterparts typically contain the equivalent of a few thousand neurons (called neurals), or less. Each neuron in the brain has at least forty-six different attributes, such as the ability to interpret what you see or what you hear. The average electronic neural has about five attributes. Robert Hecht-Nielson of HNC, Inc. (a neural network firm in San Diego) says creating a brain-like computer is hundreds of years away. He likens the creation of this theoretical computer to the difficulty of developing spaceships that fly faster than the speed of light.
The entire notion of creating computers with artificial intelligence (A.I.) has been steadily losing ground. In the 1970s and 1980s, scientists specializing in A.I. were confident that they would someday replicate human intelligence by creating a computer that could learn and reason. Marvin Minsky was one of those scientists, a pioneer in A.I. In 1970 Minsky felt that within three to eight years a computer with the intelligence of an average human would be a reality. Thirty years later, no one has even come close to creating a machine that thinks like a human.
What about the chess-master-defeating IBM super- computer, Deep Blue? As you probably recall, Deep Blue defeated grand-master Garry Kasparov, and this fact hurt some human egos. But let's put this in perspective. Deep Blue is still just a machine. Do we really think any less of humans because we can't run as fast as a car? Because we can't fly like an airplane? Because we can't add as fast as a calculator? Perhaps some human egos were bruised by the defeat of Kasparov because while many people can accept being surpassed by machines in mechanical tasks, they believe chess to be a creative as well as a mathematical endeavor.
Deep Blue is a two-million dollar, 1.4-ton supercomputer with thirty-two microprocessors and 512 support chips that was not designed to reason or learn, but rather to do one thing—crunch numbers. By doing that, it could come up with strong chess moves because the human brains of Deep Blue's programmers successfully reduced chess to a mathematical game.
Let's take a look at how you can use more of your extraordinary brain! What would you say if I told you that when you finished reading this chapter (and applying what you've read), you will learn to think like a genius? Accelerated learning experts have developed techniques based on the idea that you can become more creative and productive by using your whole brain.
What do I mean by this? Our brain has two hemispheres, the right and the left. They share our thinking and the control of our body. The left half of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right half of the brain controls the left side. Each hemisphere seems to specialize in certain functions.
The left brain's specialties are spoken and written language, logic, number skills and scientific concepts. Work that might primarily involve the left brain are bookkeeping, laboratory jobs and the like.
The right brain excels in recognizing patterns and shapes and how they relate to one another. It also seems to contribute most to insight and imagination. It is the hemisphere that appreciates art and understands humor. The work of a musician or architect draws heavily on the right hemisphere.
We need to strive to balance these two hemispheres. Creativity consultants say that left-brain dominants can learn to use their right brains by ...
