Synapses
I suddenly began humming and whistling “New York, New York” in biochem lab today, which in and of itself is not all that interesting (and a bit embarassing, as I am embarassed by most things that I do). However, when I got back to my room - amazingly - there were round-trip plane tickets to New York slid under my door! No, no there were not. That was a lie. A fib. A stretcher. In truth, I returned to my dorm room and promptly looked up the lyrics to said song.
I wanna wake up in a city, that doesn’t sleep
And find I’m king of the hill - top of the heap
I got to thinking - why on earth did my brain dig this up from the dusty recesses of unconsciousness and catapult it all the way into my conscious mind? Do I want to be “king of the hill?” I haven’t felt any desire to be “top of the heap,” that I am aware of.
A strict materialist philosopher (as explained to me in philsoophy) believes that at some point, there must be a random deviation from “the typical” (much like London Dispersion Forces) in order for reality to exist as we know it. I remember this concept being described to me as a stream of particles all following a gravitational pull, and suddenly one jogs to one side, perpendicular to the flow. I vividly recall Dr. Laumakis’ hands tracing out these flowing particles in the air, then picking out a point at the tip of his finger and tracing it against the others. It was clear he didn’t really believe the materialistic viewpoint. I’m inclined to agree.
So, if my seemingly random memory wasn’t triggered by an actual random event inside my head, what caused it? Thinking through it, I’m forced to concede that my brain is doing much more than I am aware of. Information from all around me is streaming into my brain: snippets of conversations, music, posters on the walls, campus squirrels in my peripheral - some signal came through all that noise and triggered a memory. Sometimes I wish I could harness these subconsious powers of my brain - why can’t I read cell biology while coding PHP while running on a treadmill?
I’m wishing for a more boring version of the new show Heroes … here, the characters suddenly find they have superhuman powers. I wouldn’t want the moral baggage of near invincibility or teleportation, but I would settle for being able to do three things at once. Or two. I’ll take two.
Comments
Nils
I too have often tried to piece together how I find myself suddenly thinking of something completely out of the context of which I was previously doing or thinking. I believe that we are only aware of a fraction of what our brains are doing and are only slightly informed on how our consciousness operates. After all, they do say that we only use 10% of our brains, maybe it's just that we are not aware of that other 90%. Maybe?
John T F Larson
If you think about it, the sheer volume of information/data/stimuli that is hitting our bodies is various forms is absolutely amazing. It is unbelievable that we are able to filter out so much, while still retaining what our minds determine to be useful, that we can even make sense of our environment. Oh yeah, random synopsis firing just makes life that little bit more interesting, doesn't it?