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Comment by gofreddygo | Hacker News Reader

My view of the human brain at this point is a massive excel spreadsheet.

Some cells depend on others. Some dont. Change one cell and it usually has an effect on others. Some changes are instantaneous, some takes longer. Some take long enough that you can't figure what caused this effect.

The only difference vs excel is here is we only get to see the cells, and their values, not the formulae behind it. And we are systematically trying to reverse engineer the formulae from the changes we see. We find some patterns, think its a formula, only to later find a contradiction, and that we don't know enough of the formulae yet. In some cases, the contradictions haven't been found just yet.

Theory after theory, change after change.

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Ya, cool metaphor. Boids meets reactive programming.

In a book stuffed with ideas, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky [2001] had two metaphors that have stuck with me.

There are Darwinian processes within the brain. Like your ear hears some noise, could be interpreted as either "cap" or "cat", those two possibilities fight it out until one wins.

There's a song, some kind of pattern sequence, weaving back and forth, which might be how parts of the brain intracommunicate, which might be how memories are encoded and retrieved (and may also explains why memories are changed by being recalled).

https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Machina-Reconciling-Darwin-Cho...

I also remain enthralled by the notion that our brains are prediction engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...

I want some kind of synthesis of your spreadsheet and Hawkins' prediction engine metaphors to be true. That'd be cool.

A spreadsheet with probably at least thousands of columns and billions or trillions of rows.

A spreadsheet with a strange search engine.

This morning I was trying to remember the name of an old movie I used to watch when I was a child. I could have easily found it online with a few keywords but I wanted to see how long it'll take for me to remember it organically.

So there I was trying really hard to connect the dots from some fragments of memory up to the movie title. I easily spent 10 minutes to no avail. I gave up. Went to do some chores. And there it was, an hour later, the full title popping in my mind.

Somehow I'm impressed that it kept searching while I was busy doing some other stuff.

Yeah it's fascinating. In my very unscientific mental model for cognition, there's a distinction between "active" and "passive" mental operations. "Active" is anything requiring intention - when you "push" with your mind - like for instance when you are writing code or doing your taxes or building a piece of furniture. It's analytical and requires effort.

"Passive" is when you let your brain solve a problem. For instance when you have that idea in the shower, or think of that movie title when you're folding laundry.

There are problems recalling that distant fact, or the act of creativity which can't be solved actively, and the process of trying to brute force it with effort actually runs counter to reaching a solution.

You can ask your subconscious a question, forget about it, and receive the answer later.

It's really cool.

The brain's way of storing and retrieving information is a absolute mystery. None of the proposed theories are consistent to everyday observations.

So, what's the name of the movie? :)

It seems like this microcosm is akin to the macrocosm of human emotions, memories, psychology etc.

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