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

© 2011 #16  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467