Magic
Bookworm on Apr 02 2008 at 1:34 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
If you’ve been to Las Vegas and spent a lot of money to see fancy magic shows, I’m sorry to say that you’ve been wasting your time and your money. This is the real deal. I’m completely overwhelmed.
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Often people will talk about how the human being only uses 5% or something close to that of their total brain area at any one time. Then people will imagine that human trans-enlightenment or evolutionary mental leaps can be obtained from activating more of the human brain at any one time.
The mathemagician’s mention of neumonics is interesting because clearly he is using parts of his brain involved in reading and linguistics and combining it with the serial computational logic of numbers. Thus, in reality, he is using parts of his brain as storage while other parts process the raw data.
The human brain is not a computer, you cannot just slap on additional ram into a slot. In fact, you can’t even do that for computers, yet computers can obtain memory upgrades simply through the addition of another slot while human beings do not have access to that. We can only use our memory capacities more efficiently.
The evolutionary benefits to having a brain taking up a sizable percentage of your blood-oxygen nutrients is also an interesting subject. Obviously any creature with a large brain will consume vital nutrients that the body might need to escape from predators ro fight off predators. Thus did humanity evolve using only a small percentage of our brain at any one time because that was all that we needed? After all, most of the processing concerning visual/auditory senses are done by the hardware analog of our brains. Meaning, we don’t need software for it, we don’t need a conscious intent to flip right side up our stereoscopic vision. We automatically process it as usable data. That would be part of the brain that is always in use if you have eyes. And perhaps the reason why blind people become more sensitive to sound, or at least one of the reasons, is that they now have empty brain segments that can now be devoted to processing audio and tactile senses.
It doesn’t take much brain power to calculate escape paths or attack patterns using hand to eye coordination. The abstract calculations found in mathematics, however, are obviously a demonstration that there is some peculiar human gene that somehow causes certain individuals to interlock parts of their brain together into one gigantic parallel processing CPU. Idiot savants, geniuses, prodigies, etc.
Then again, every natural genius can still become a fool if he or she tries hard enough. We have plenty of people, well versed in their fields, that lack anything comparable to human wisdom out on the streets or in war.
Then there’s the fact that the human brain still needs to exercise neuron paths if it is to maintain the speed of calculation. It still takes hard work to lessen human error. No matter how many natural gifts a person has been given, it still takes a human will, decided by that free will, to make something productive of those gifts.
It is interesting how people wish to put superior specimens on pedestals, to use them as examples of why they shouldn’t try very hard because obviously they won’t ever get to that level due to natural disadvantages.
My perspective is slightly different. Humans, no matter the individual differentiations, are still mortal and thus can still make mistakes. This is a good thing since it levels the playing field. A weaker opponent has no excuse for working less hard than a stronger opponent at winning an advantage. In fact, weaker opponents have every reason to work even harder to offset the advantages of their competitors.
So there’s two philosophies that you might come across when it comes to geniuses and those with advantages, inborn or not. You can either see it as fate and believe yourself unworthy of challenging the godlike power of this select elite few of humanity. Or you can try to make your own fate, which is harder done than said.
Economically disadvantaged people can either improve themselves, accept their lot in life as serfs, or they can cheat. Cheating which means killing the god on the pedestal and putting yourself on that seat.
It is amazing how many people would prefer the third option to overcoming America’s advantages. It is only outmatched by the great majority of humanity that accepts number 2.
Art’s a professor at Harvey Mudd College, the best undergraduate science and math school in the country. http://www.math.hmc.edu/~benjamin/