Wednesday, April 28, 2010

On brain prosenses

You know how times flies by when you're having fun? Because it literally is. When you're enjoying yourself, your brain is "sucking in stimuli" faster than when you're in a shitty mood. You're brain "opens up". You "allow" yourself to be more vulnerable to everything around you. You've slowed down all brain receptors, allowed things to just "happen", let time flow without processing.

On the contrary, when you're mood is down, things tend to drag on. Time seems to move much more slowly. In your head, you're blocking the surrounding stiumli to an extent. You're disallowing time to move on by speeding up your brain receptors, processing ever more stimuli around you. At this point, for all intensive purposes, your brain is traveling "closer" to the speed of time. Relatively, time slows down.

What receptors are we using? Humans have 5 senses: smell, hearing, touch, taste, and sight. These senses are used to process the outside world. All living things have some type of receptor to process the outside world: starfish have feelers, dogs have ears, koala have tongues. Each of these senses is used to maintain a balance in the animal's world without having to consistently process the outside world.

That koala eats eucalyptus leaves. How does it know that the tree it eats is eucalyptus? Why doesn't he eat other tree types? The first time he ate the leaves, his genetic code was satiated: the taste, texture, hunger subsided. It was an epigenetically familiar flavor. He learns the location of that tree. The way it looks. Smells. Feels. He no longer has to "process" that tree anymore. He "automatically knows" eucalyptus when he sees it.

This is what senses allow us to do - relinquish our brain's struggle with the crazy little world in which we live. By struggle, I mean, constant processing. Senses automate the things that would otherwise slow down our processing, thus allowing us to concentrate in higher level tasks.

Soon we'll get there.
Artificial senses.

Posted via email from bryanized