As long as computers have existed, people have compared them to the human brain. Most of these analogies break down almost immediately. Brains aren’t mechanical; they’re biological. Brains are analog; computers are binary. Brains have emotions; computers don’t.
In 1982, Sun Microsystem’s John Gage first said what has become a truism: “The network is the computer.” And of course the brain is a network.
Researchers in Switzerland have found that the brain is perpetually rewiring its circuits. Rewiring The Mammalian Brain: Neurons Make Fickle Friends in Science Daily reports on the discoveries of researchers Henry Markram and Jean-Vincent Le Bé at the Brain Mind Institute of the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).
They found that connections between neurons switch rapidly on and off, leading to a form of adaptive rewiring in which the brain is engaged in a continuous process of changing, strengthening and pruning its circuitry.
“The circuitry of the brain is like a social network where neurons are like people, directly linked to only a few other people,” explains Markram. “This finding indicates that the brain is constantly switching alliances and linking with new circles of “friends” to better process information.”
“This continual rewiring of the microcircuitry of the brain is like a Darwinian evolutionary process,” notes Markram, “where a new experience triggers a burst of new connections between neurons, and only the fittest connections survive.”
Back to John Gage, a fellow Berkeley resident,
“There used to be inviolable lines — there were vendors, suppliers, customers, partners. But on the Net these organizational definitions and metaphors, based on intuitions drawn from experience with containers — bins, shelves, warehouses, barrels, packets — change to definitions based on intuitions drawn from flows — always changing, always interconnected, always evolving feedback mechanisms. Our challenge is to dissolve the organizational structures of our customers, even as we dissolve our own organizational structures, and try to understand how to help them evolve.”
Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote:
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Everything flows and nothing abides. Even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe. If we do not exepect the unexpected, we will never find it.”
Heraclitus was ahead of his time.
Nothing is rigid. Everything is connected. Mind flows.
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