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Comment by stuartcw | Hacker News Reader

I have always wondered whether new ideas are seeded by cosmic rays disturbing neurons in the brain..

That'd mean people underground (or under thick layer of concrete, like in skyscrapers) are not creative.

Sounds like we have a hypothesis and a test environment; now we just need a test for creativity and we can start doing science!

But grad students are often sent to work in the basement, and yet they need to have the most ideas!

I guess you could say they'd be...

Living under a rock.

Yeah, yeah, I'm leaving. Put the weapons away...

I suspect that modern processors are closer to quantum limits than what neurons are.

That's actually mind blowing to think about. Thanks for sharing this.

> That's actually mind blowing to think about.

That would be too many cosmic rays.

And the "flipped the wrong neuron" possibility is much scarier in my mind. And probably in everyone else's brain as well.

I always wondered if that random stabbing pain in your rib or kidney etc was a comic ray to the nerve.

seems too low-level, no? the temporary excitation of a single neuron would most likely just fade away into the equilibrating process of the brain

>In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

Is there reason to believe the brain is chaotic on that level? The reason I doubt it because any stable biological system has as one of its primary tasks - if not its #1 primary task - to maintain equilibrium. Otherwise it would collapse into chaos due to the inherent imprecision of molecular phenomena. So I would be very surprised if you could stimulate a neuron - not even a neuron, but an electron inside a neuron - and cause something as complex as an idea to form. More likely it would be equilibrated away

Well, cosmic rays can cause perceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena

That said, just saying "chaos theory means any change can cause anything" is a terribly weak argument for "cosmic rays cause ideas". Not to mention all the reasons why it's implausible as a significant idea generator.

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