Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Our operating system, machine analogy makes sense.

During a recent flight with Air Canada, I came across this intriguing article in the in-flight magazine. Basically, ever since I was a child and I was asking those never ending series of why’s, a notion that never stood up in front of me was that we only use a really small percentage of our brains. I heard any number between 3 and 10. I even heard that Einstein used 15% of his brain. Obviously he’s a genius, the rest are sleeping by comparison. Now I don’t want to start an argument on this, even if I know people that could testify that ex’s brain was probably never in danger of being used at all.

The interesting idea that Christopher Dewdney in his “Total Recall – Is “cybermemory” making our memory obsolete? A provocative look at the very human act of remembering.” puts in my head (not as literally as he is suggesting there, there is no prosthetic extension of my mind) is that we are, in fact using the entire brain.

We are using the entire brain just like the computer uses the resources available. For anything to work, you need an OS (operating system) to make everything work. The OS has a basic API (interfaces to the hardware) which is born with. On this basic set of interfaces, all utilities are built to make the entire system run smoothly, either by being developed or acquired.

In fact, we can even distinguish between OS’es and we do so every given day. The OS, though, is running so smoothly that you only measure the loads coming from other processes, and you’re using tools provided by the OS to do so. It might even have redundancy built-in. It’s possible that it evolved, that newer versions are being born every day.

So, in fact, our brain is not supposed to be used at 100%, the OS needs a good machine to run on and to make running. Now that makes sense! Just load your computer to 100%, or 75 … it’ll be so slow, it’ll even give the wrong answer and the system might also need to be reset.

You take it from here, to me, that article made a world of difference.

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