30Spirituality· Vision Team

Believe in your own religion

Fiction

// The science behind it

Have you heard of the Ultimate Supercomputer? It boasts mind-blowing storage capacity, excellent memory, top energy efficiency and (in certain newer models) super-fast processing speed. It acts as a powerful interface between humans and the physical world, transforming inputs into outputs, encoding and storing information. It doesn’t stop there – it constantly processes and reprocesses information – even when it’s on sleep mode. It has a highly sophisticated way of recalling memories and experiences that happened as many as 60 or 70 years ago. Even occurrences that happened during factory assembly. It has an inimitable way of communicating with other computers – millions of them around the world. The best thing about this supercomputer? It’s already living in your home. Maybe even three or four of them.

You’ve guessed it: I’m talking about the human brain. Compared to a computer, the brain is ten times more energy efficient than a computer. When AI becomes self-aware one day, it might say that humans aren’t the brightest lightbulbs in the box. But our brains only use roughly 10 watts of power, compared to the 100 watts of power a typical computer requires.

With an estimated 200 billion neurons (nerve cells), the brain’s storage capacity is thought to be 1 petabyte – the equivalent of 1000 one terrabyte SSDs. While you might argue that you can’t compare computer bytes with neurons, remember that every single neuron has about a thousand connections to other neurons. Every neuron is linked to others via hundreds of trillions of tiny contacts called synapses, along which electrical impulses travel.

The brain is a vast universe of synapses – in the cerebral cortex there are more than 125 trillion synapses. It has the unique ability to combine one neuron with another to help create and store memories. We might not have the accessing memory of computers but our ability to relate and string memories together is unsurpassed. According to Stephen Smith of Stanford University, the senior researcher of a new imaging method of capturing brain connections, one synapse may contain the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. “A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and internet connections on Earth.”

Why am I telling you about brains? Because they are not computers, they are better. A brain’s complexity is almost beyond belief – an incredible organ that houses a mind, filled with a rich tapestry of memories and intricate connections. Brains can think thoughts, churn out ideas and solve problems. We have boundless untapped potential in our heads.

Supernatural abilities are not just the remit of magicians, mind readers and fortune tellers. Some people with autism have abilities beyond the range normally experienced by ‘neurotypicals’. Some, like activist Greta Thunberg, calls these superpowers – unusual talents, skills, qualities and advantages.

The organisation Embrace Autism has a long list of sensory, cognitive and behavioural strengths. For example, autistic children can see a greater intensity of colour. Visual hypersensitivy means that autistic people can see from six metres what a non-autistic can see at two metres. They have acute hearing, heightened pitch detection and sometimes exceptional frequency discrimination skills. They very often have high prevalence of synaesthesia (where multiple senses are perceived simultaneously, e.g. see smells, taste sounds). Then there is the encyclopaedic knowledge, savant-like memory and profound abilities in music, art, mathematics or all things mechanical. Autistic people excel at pattern recognition and lateral thinking – coming up with unusual and novel ideas.

There’s also the small percentage of people born with ‘savant syndrome’ – a rare but extraordinary condition where someone with a serious mental impairment displays a spectacular abilities. Megasavant Kim Peek (on which the movie Rainman was loosely based) could read by scanning the left page with his left eye, while reading the right page with his right eye. Peek, who only walked at age four and couldn’t button up his shirt, could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books. Then there’s architectural artist Stephen Wiltshire who can look at a subject once, then draw an accurate picture of it. After just one short helicopter ride over a city, he would create a detailed drawing of it. In 2005, Wiltshire produced his longest ever panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo on a canvas of ten metres long.

Savants usually encountered brain damage, generally in the left side of the brain. To compensate, undamaged parts of the brain and lower-level memory capacities are engaged. A kind of rewiring happens and releases dormant capacity from the newly wired area. This process is described by the world’s foremost authority on savants, Dr. Darold Treffert, as “the 3 Rs”: recruitment, rewiring, release – when exceptional abilities that were previously dormant rise to the surface. It has been known to happen later in life too, called ‘acquired savant syndrome’. Following a head injury, dementia, stroke or other form of brain damage, prodigious skills in art and music suddenly appear. These urges take over someone’s personality, with an irresistible desire to express these new skills. There are many examples that Dr Treffert is keeping track of, such as the orthopaedic surgeon from New York who discovered a passion for playing the piano after being struck by lightning, or the man who began to paint and write poetry after suffering a stroke.

This ability to know things that you never learnt is fascinating to me. Dr Treffert believes that all of us have this latent Rain Man-like capacity inside us. He’s not the only one. The Australian neuroscientist Allan Snyder has a vision of a ‘creativity cap’ – a method of transcranial magnetic simulation that can artificially replicate savant syndrome. With some mild brain stimulation, it suppresses brain activity in the left anterior temporal lobe while exciting activity in the right anterior temporal lobe. The studies never got anywhere but, who knows, maybe in 20 or 30 years’ time we’ll all have access to these brain-boosting caps? Some people claim that you can do it chemically. For example, some say prescription stimulants like Ritalin can be used as cognitive enhancers, while other believe in the power of amphetamines or psychedelic drugs.

I believe that we are gifted with these powerful processors inside our bodies for a reason. Our brains perceive so much more than just what our conscious mind sees, hears, smells and feels. Our environments matter even before we’re born. Firstly there is our DNA – the traits we inherit from our parents but also the instruction manual on how to grow cells, find food, procreate, cope with danger, etc. This is where the relatively new field of epigenetics is so interesting.

In the 20^th century, scientists started to realise that it’s not only our DNA sequences calling the shots and telling genes what to do. Some instructions were coming from our epigenome – a collection of other chemical markers and signals that interact with and influence our DNA. We’ve seen studies of mice where fear memories were inherited across two generations. Researchers trained male mice to associate a certain smell with an electrical shock, so that after a while they would fear the odour itself. Would you believe it, they then saw that the smell also scared the next two generations of mice. In another study, researchers found that the grandchildren of women who were pregnant during the Dutch famine of 1944 to 1945 were more likely to be fat as new-borns.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But we’re going to discover much more about this epigenetic inheritance over the next decades. We may well learn that a person’s experiences could lead to directed molecular changes on top of his or her genes. And, in direct contrast to what we’ve learnt from Darwin, that these molecular changes could get passed on. In other words, that someone can inherit experiences.

DNA aside, our first experiences start in our mothers’ wombs as we soak up all of her habits and drink in her adventures. We’re born as empty vessels and start digesting our own feelings and observations. Sights, smells, feelings, loves, hates – don’t think for a moment you only start having memories from age five. Everything that happens to you from the moment you open your eyes and scream blue murder is carefully filed away in your conscious and subconscious mind. As you’re bombarded by thousands of pieces of micro-information in the cacophony of life’s sights and sounds, your brain does its astounding processing thing in the background, constantly monitoring your ambient surroundings and tapping into the zeitgeist of the world.

Dream some sense into life

At night, as you dream, you relive and process the emotions of the previous twenty-four hours. Your body goes through the filing cabinet of the day and decides which of these learnings, likes, dislikes and experiences to keep, and what to discard. As your brain synapses make connections, every piece you store is related to a smell or sound or feeling, compartmentalised to what your subconscious deems important. What you dream might not be real or true but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are. In essence, dreams help us to strip the emotion from an experience by creating a memory of it. As the Scientific American aptly puts it: “Dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories.” Did you know that you don’t see colour or faces in your dreams? It’s when you save them as memories that you ‘paint over’ colour and assign meaning.

This process is of course different for each individual – just as some people can listen to a song once and remember the lyrics, the level of detail your body processes varies. People who are very analytical might perceive life in a very black-and-white way and discard most of the noise absorbed during the day. Others who are very creative thrive on overloading their senses with layers upon layers of details and inspiration. People also change over time. Analytical minds start to crave creativity and creatives start to look for order. As you get older and your responsibilities increase, you’ll reprioritise the memories you keep. The example of Bill Atkinson springs to mind. One of the most brilliant programmers in the early days of Apple, Atkinson lived in a world of reason and algorithms for many decades. Then, he went in a completely opposite direction to become a much-heralded nature photographer.

We are all quite focussed on what happens in the foreground of our lives but I believe it’s what happens in the background that is really powerful. The memory reserve that our subconscious create for us is what guides our lives, whether you know it or not. Says researcher of hypnagogia (the brief time between waking and sleep), Valdas Noreika: “When we enter sleep, the brain steadily dismantles the models and concepts we use to interpret the world, leading to moments of experience unconstrained by our usual mental filters.”

These unconstrained experiences, I believe, are the heart of many of the seemingly inexplicable things that happen to us: hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, déjà vu, telepathy, daydreams, sixth sense, intuition, gut feeling… This is the ‘whispering in your ear’ our body does when we draw on our memories and subconscious for guidance. It informs our humour, how and why we fall in love, what gives us anxiety, what makes us excited and terrified. Why we like to wear a certain designer’s clothes, why we like one sister-in-law over another or why we vote for certain politicians…or not. Why a song or a painting will make you cry or feel angry or turned on.

Interface Us

As senior research psychologist Robert Epstein points out in his essay about the brain as a type of transducer – converting one signal to another signal, from one medium to another – nature is superb at building transducers. Our bodies are encased in transducers from head to toe, especially our sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) which “transduce things like electromagnetic radiation, air pressure waves, airborne chemicals, liquid-borne chemicals, textures, pressure, and temperature into distinctive patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain”. While there is no hard evidence of neural transduction theory,

Epstein floats the interesting notion that the human brain is a transducer that connects us to some kind of ‘Vast Intelligence’ or ‘Operating System’. How else do we explain things like blindsight (the ability of some blind people to be aware of objects in their environment that they cannot consciously see) and mindsight (when congenitally blind people have near-death experiences in which they are able to see normally)? What happened with the Australian woman who, after surgery, woke up with an Irish accent? Called ‘foreign accent syndrome’, could this super rare condition be down to a transduction error?

How we connect with other human beings is what gives meaning to the world. The sum of all the connections we make with our memories give way to the emotions we feel. This is our religion, if you take the literal meaning of the word ‘religion’ as a system of behaviours, practices, morals and ethics. I see the way we connect with others as sets of overlapping circles. What’s inside each of our circles is what you choose to fill your life with: feeding your mind with thought-provoking content (not just Facebook and TikTok all day), hanging out with inspiring people that challenge your thinking, cross-pollinating your being with lots of new and interesting concepts. Pruning toxic people and situations from your life and using the power of technology to fertilise ideation. Yes, the metaphor of a garden is somewhat of a cliché but it’s by tending to your mental and physical garden that you enrich your thinking and can tap into a global consciousness.

We are more connected in our thinking than I think people realise. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, feel the same sun on our skin. We’re part of the noosphere – the realm of human minds interconnected and interacting through communication. The concept was explored by French philosopher of science, Edouard Le Roy, and the prophet of cosmic hope, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and further developed by biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (who called it the planetary "sphere of reason"). But whoever coined the phrase first, the noosphere sees human cognition as a part of the environment of Earth. As De Chardin described it, first there was the geosphere (inanimate matter that made up the rock of the world and the gas around it). Then there was the biosphere – the ever-changing biochemical make-up of life, and finally there was the noosphere – when one of these biological creatures developed the mental and practical power to change the world in ways that no other creature could. Both Vernadsky and De Chardin shared the thesis that human reason and the scientific thought have created, and will continue to create, the next evolutionary geological layer.

2050: evolving through creativity and imagination

“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

My vision for 2050 is a world where people are finely tuned to their unconscious minds. A world where we can bear witness to the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit and are shown that, even in the most desperate circumstances, there can be hope. I hope for a world that we will take our destiny in our hands and continue to use the incredible creativity and imagination that us humans are capable of to evolve our civilisation further. As De Chardin declared: “each act of love, no matter how small or hidden, moves all of reality closer to unity and connection.”