Gallery Discussions: Cognitive Potential of the Brain's Hemispheres for Collective Intelligence?

One of the other discussions that Great Uncle Ram, Diane Moreau and myself - or rather a prelude to a deeper conversation - was the amount by which we humans use our brains. I'm no expert on this topic, and I don't know anyone who is, but a few people have written books about brains. I have a few, I've read a few, and I shocked a few people by reading neurobiology texts for fun back in the late 1990s. What I can say is that I'm at least familiar with the topic, and while I'm not writing about human brains as much as referring to them, there will probably be one neuroscientist out there that will jump up and down for a bit.

One of the things that was mentioned in discussion is that we do use a lot of our brains - and the truth is that, physically speaking, we use 100% of our brains. Really. There's no 'dark side of the brain', though with some people there could be made a witty observation that there certainly isn't a 'light side', either. But it is arguable how much cognitive potential we have and how much we actually use - as a species, and as individuals. Suddenly this becomes a deep topic, ranging from psychology and psychiatry to plain common sense.

Tonight, I whipped out some old books and started poking around in them, refamiliarizing myself with some of the language so I could hone in a bit more on how to research the topic better¹. The idea tossed around is how we process information - believe it or not, this was a subdiscussion based on ICT, on renewable energy, and quite a few other things that related to perceptions - and changing perceptions, and collective intelligence, and... none of them really had anything to do with it. And the reason that I brought them up? It's not about the brain, it's not about the mind, and it's not about a lot of different and distinct things. In fact, it's about different integrated things.

The point of the matter is that our brains are considered pieces of hardware by some, and consequently our minds are seen as software. But, in true recursion, this is a limitation based on our frame of reference; we know more about computer hardware and software than we do about our own brains and minds and subsequently we sometimes attribute them as parts of a machine that we can break up and understand instead of integrate and use. So many things like that simply fall into culture; some people label this aspect of ICT as 'education' - but again, this falls into 'breaking things up so we can understand them', or drawing analogs.

All of this was running through my mind as I sat under the Pipal tree this afternoon, after I had cleaned the weeds out from under it. There is something else here. We can talk about things that we see, hear, feel, taste - all based on our perceptions - and while our perceptions make them real to us, it doesn't mean that they are real. And because we don't feel things, it doesn't mean that they aren't real. This sounds a lot like quite a few philosophers who have written books like punctuation marks along the human experience - I realize that - yet there is no way that a person would expect a tree to grow lungs. When you start to consider why you would think that, considering a mammalian lung and a tree, it just doesn't fit. And the reason it doesn't fit is the whole point of this - we are trained to think it doesn't fit by a lot of schooling, when education should be telling us that a tree is, in itself, a lung - it just respires differently than we do. Tricky little thing involving photosynthesis.

Thus, another one of our 'sensory organs' is our community, or our surroundings - which sounds a lot like some psychobabble that has been running around academia like a lunatic in search for a sharp object. But when, as individuals, we consider why we, as individuals, think the way we think as individuals - a lot of it has to do not with culture, or parents, or how you feel about your mother and how much cocaine you use - it's about connecting the sensory organs together in cognitive thought. For example, the left brain has been found through scientific testing that the 'left brain' associated a word quickly with a meaning, whereas the 'right brain' associated multiple meanings of the same word². Puns and plays on words - associated with creativity - don't depend on one side alone, but the presence of both sides - the integration makes humor (and sometimes very poor punny humor).

On a larger scale now, we can discuss networks of people the same way. A lot of the discussions we've been having in the gallery have revolved around the fact that people, though connected, are disassociated. Olivier was showing me a project today that is trying to associate people - but not in the manner of handshakes and exchange of business cards. Instead, the idea is to 'integrate the left and right brain' - having the creative and engineering sides, defined by our own classifications, integrating to create things as valuable as humor³, or as useful as applied science (technology) for increasing the [quality of life], as well as the quality of the environment.

In a world that segregates information and knowledge, we celebrate the life of Rosa Parks. Maybe a few more dissidents need to stand up and say that they aren't willing to sit at the back of the intellectual bus. Maybe that's what the Wikipedia and other community endeavours are really about. And maybe that threatens the status quo - but in a world where peace can allow injustice⁴, maybe a few people need to shake the tree a bit with endeavours such as the Wikipedia.

Maybe we ain't so dumb out here. Maybe we ain't got no good English⁵, but we got us some brains that experts ain't quite dun writin the manual on. :-) And maybe, just maybe, it's time to regroup from specialized means of thinking and schooling to allow mankind the education it not only deserves - but more importantly, to allow mankind the education it needs.

¹ Books referenced are below, in case you were wondering.
² Ornstein, Robert; 'The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres'; Chapter 8
³If there is something more valuable than humor, I want it hunted down, drawn, quartered, and jumped up and down on.
⁴Funny that this is the battlecry of some government administrations...
⁵Hey Jinger. :-)