The mindbrain and its machines

My reading this morning was about how much goes on in the mindbrain. It is enormously busy – like a fast-forward film from inside a termite colony. There has to be a way for the important stuff to rise to the top. What kind of system would make this possible?

There is need of functional cognitive and emotional ‘units’ which can be compared and contrasted. The units might be points of view based on new stuff related to old stuff. Inputs via the various sense organs are decoded and inter-related to tell the story that guides the action/ reaction/ response.

A recent TV programme told the story of a pride of lions that targeted a dilapidated herd of Elephants for supper. They were worthy opponents. One time I was training game scouts in the South Sudan. We were walking in the Nimule National Park and stumbled on a herd of Elephants headed for the Nile. Fortunately they were not phased by our presence but, even so, there was direct experience of the fragile insignificance of being human in the savanna.

There were also lions in the park. We heard them roaring but did not see them. They would have seen the guns and kept well clear. We may have puny bodies but we also have exceptional minds; and they have invented tools to support our early hunting and gathering way of life and our more recent sophisticated ways.

While in the South Sudan I ran a Technological and Industrial Studies Group (TISG). We dealt mainly with intermediate technology – water filter, solar food dryer, fuel efficient stove and bread oven, and a ventilated improved pit latrine (VIP).

Some of the students were keenly ambitious. At a brainstorming session there was the idea of putting a Southern Sudanese on the moon. But, after giving it thought, we realised that there was just too much that we did not know. It was as Carl Sagan noted, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”. In the end we decided to make a wooden bicycle but, after several insurmountable technical problems, we went for plan B which was to set up a Raleigh and Wuyangpai bicycle maintenance shop.

Carl Sagan again: “Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change.”