What Matters Most: August 2011

Friday, August 12, 2011

Our Brains

What Matters Most……Commentary by Jim High

A friend recently sent me an Internet video clip about some computer scientist in Japan that were working with robots and teaching them to have real intelligence. We are all familiar with robots that can do things. They are programmed by the computers that run them to do those things. But the break through here was that these robots had a form of artificial intelligence. They could think for themselves without the programming.

The test was simple enough, after all this was like teaching a baby to do something. The robot was presented with three things. A pitcher of water (actually small plastic beads to avoid a wet mess), an empty glass and an ice cube, actually a blue hard rubber cube. The computer program told the robot to pick up the pitcher and the glass and pour the water into the glass. It did this correctly. Even using its eyes to look and find the pitcher and glass on the table.

But then the program told the robot to pick up the ice cube and put it into the glass. But you see the robot had two hands like we do and it was holding the pitcher and the glass. It looked around, found the ice cube, but had no available hand with which to pick it up. So on its own (they said) it decided to put the glass down and using the now free hand it picked up the ice cube and dropped it into the glass.

This feat was not followed by giving the robot a piece of candy, clapping, or even words to let the robot know that it had done well. They did not explain what total program the robot had been fed to allow it to run through all the options open to it to find a free hand so it could follow the direct command to pick up the ice cube. And watching the video you could tell that the very subtle movements that we humans make by controlling our muscles were absent in the mechanical movement of the machine that was the robot.

I, of course, am glad that someone somewhere is working on things like this. But it made me realize not how wonderful this robot breakthrough was, but how marvelous our brains actually are. You see everything we are as humans is controlled by our brains. Everything we think and remember, everything we envision for or about the future, every emotion we feel, every movement of our bodies including all our bodily functions is controlled by that brain inside our skulls.

Reading about our brain the other day, I learned that there are more connections between the various neurons in one square centimeter of our brain material than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. That’s a lot, billions in fact, and our brains are way larger than one square centimeter. You’ve heard that we actually use only about 10% of our brains, but that’s not true. The total brain is working all the time. We only realize about 10% of what it is doing.

Looking at that video of the robot I realized that it will take many lifetimes for robots to approach what we already have in our heads. And the reality is that it took millions of years for our brains to evolve and to make us human. It would be nice to have a robot like Data on Star Trek, but that is thousands of years in to the future, if at all. Still it’s nice to know that those folks in Japan and elsewhere are working toward that day, maybe in the year 3011.

What is more important is to use and improve your own brain. Scientist tell us that the human brain is the most complicated thing in the entire universe, and also the most powerful. Powerful because everything we have and everything we know about in our modern civilization was first just a thought in someone’s brain. Ideas move the world forward. Thinking solves all problems.

What Matters Most…..is to realize the importance of brain power. And to know that it is developed early in life beginning at the moment of our birth into this world. A child’s first few formative years are not just for the development of the body, but for the development of the brain. I’m not sure that computer games and the other modern day distractions of today’s kids are developing their brains, and that’s a problem. Reading, education, actual doing, building, accomplishment, and getting positive feedback, those are the things that develop the brain

Monday, August 8, 2011

Childhood

What Matters Most……….….Commentary by Jim High

Even though it was a long, long time ago I can remember my childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi. Was it better than growing up now? I can’t say that, but it sure was different. My earliest memory at three years old is of a trip I took with my Mother on the train to St. Louis to see my Father before he shipped out to the Pacific in 1943. I remember the day the war ended in 1945, and the day my Dad got home to Tupelo.

Then I began first grade at Church Street School in Miss Mary Frances Beard’s classroom. I had been to kindergarten in a room in the basement of the school the year before. Don’t remember the teacher’s name, just that she was wonderful. For four years I walked to school every morning and home in the afternoons. We never heard of or saw a school bus.

By fourth grade I had made the Safety Patrol and got a special belt with a sash and a bright shinny Safety Patrol Badge. Can you imagine a nine year old kid without adult supervision of any kind directing traffic and seeing to it that the smaller kids got across the street safely at the corner near the school? The school’s still there, the corner of Church and Walnut is still there, the neighborhood is little changed, so why not now I say.

During recess my girlfriend and I played house inside the big hedges between the school and Robins Field. We salted and peppered our potato chips with sand and crumbled up dried leaves. And all the boys belonged to different gangs, maybe I should say group, the word gang has taken on a new meaning these days, but we called them gangs back then.

I moved to Milam for the fifth grade through the ninth, and next door to Tupelo High School where I graduated in 1958. All that time I also walked to school, but of course, my house was only three houses away on Jefferson Street. I actually came home for lunch every day, and never left for school until I heard the bell ring. After the first ring, we had three minutes to get to class, and that was just enough time to cut across the Gravlee’s and Weaver’s backyards and be at school in less than three minutes.

During high school some kids from out in the county did arrive by school bus, and a few students in high school had their own cars. When I say a few, I mean a few, maybe only a dozen or so. Those were not the days when everyone in the family above the age of fifteen had their own personal car. Mr. M. M. Winkler who lived across the street walked to his accountant’s office every day, walked home and back for lunch, and home in the evening. I remember Mr. Winkler as being very fit and trim.

The kids in our neighborhood grew up in the 1940’s and early 1950’s without TV. One memory I have of my grandfather was him sitting in his chair every evening listening to the news and commentary on the big floor model radio that we had in the living room. Yes, we had radios that were furniture, just like the first TV sets were. The Community Antenna System finally brought early cable TV to our house about 1955. That system was the beginning of COMCAST that still serves our city today. I would come home from school every day and watch the Mickey Mouse Club. My favorite part was the adventures of Spin and Marty, and the Hardy Boys. All TV programs were in black and white in those days.

Another thing we did as kids was make up our own games to play in the evenings. Our house had a huge front porch so we invented a game we called Run Jump Off The Porch. You had to go from the yard to the chairs on the porch and back without getting tagged or you were it. Being it was bad. We played Kick The Can and May I. Kids have so much else to do today; I really wonder how they manage it all.

What Matters Most………childhood is a magical time, or it should be for every little child. I know that mine was, and that I am a much better person today because of my childhood. I appreciate the adults in my life that saw to it that as a child I was loved and cared for. Today’s world is a busy complicated place, but let’s never forget how important childhood is to a child.