In a world full of crazy experiments fueled by the desire to understand how we work, can we ever hack our own selves?

Dragonflies

are amazing creatures, respected for their preying capabilities. As a child, I wondered how dragonflies could catch prey with such agility, while in-flight. Dragonflies have an impressive 97% kill ratio, and most of these kills are done in flight!
I used to wonder how the dragonfly could manage to process such voluminous data in such a small brain size. The answer to this question was found in this research article, the essence of which is showing that a group of only 16 neurons that directly descend towards the wings are able to control the dragonfly’s mid-flight trajectory as the dragonfly notices a prey. This entire article has been shortly summarised in the following video, where researchers attach electrodes to these neurons and show the dragonfly’s behaviour towards prey and predators.


Essentially, the gist is simple. Only 16 neurons are able to make the dragonfly move in the direction of the prey. What’s interesting to note is that this behaviour is hardwired; it’s a reflex. The dragonfly doesn’t think before moving towards the prey. There’s no thought process involving:
“Ooh, a tasty insect. Let’s eat”
<loop>
“Oh it’s moving this way”
“I should maneuver in such a way that my trajectory crosses the insect’s estimated trajectory”
“Ah, I should compensate for this wind”
</loop>
“yum yum. Nice”.

The thought process simply is:
“Ooh, a tasty insect. Let’s eat”
<loop>
Cool hardwired stuff.
</loop>
“yum yum. Nice”.



Thoughts

are expensive, and it takes a lot of energy to generate the electrical impulses required to think.
So, what causes us to think? In terms of evolution, what reasons us into beginning an act of expending energy which seemingly serves no tangible purpose?

For a moment, let’s consider how you think.

  1. You might say that you hear a little voice inside of yourself that talks to you; that you have an internal monologue going on inside yourself.
  2. You might say that you’re able to see words or abstract pictures form as you think those words, which means you have an absence of internal monologue.

An interesting observation is that people in different groups don’t really believe that another way of thinking can exist. This means that even though people have a similar language, they don’t really have the same neural pathways to parse that language!
The point to take away here is that the brain is essentially a black box which goes through enough reinforcement learning in a given number of years to be able to parse data reliably.
Language in itself is like a dynamic programming tool for the human brain.

For example, take a moment, and think of a jumping elephant. An elephant, maybe huge, maybe small, jumping, it’s tail flailing with that act.
Now, if you really think about this elephant, one of two things may have occured:

  1. You might have imagined the jumping elephant. Kudos to your imagination, because elephants actually can’t jump.
  2. You might have simply refuted to think of a jumping elephant because you know for a fact that elephants cannot jump. Kudos to your memory, it significantly controls what you think.

In any case, you hypothesized about the existence of the jumping elephant. You tried reconstructing a fictitious representation from memory and immediately modelled a virtual environment to test your hypothesis. Depending on the rules that your memory put forth, you either imagined the elephant jumping, or you didn’t.
And all of that happened because I uttered a specific series of words of a common language, which you parsed at your level of understanding.
Beautiful, isn’t it?

Yuval Noah Harari, in his wonderful book Sapiens, reasons this habit of humans creating fictional thoughts inside their massive brains. I find myself particularly fascinated by the fact that the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis, the stereotypical “caveman” body type) had almost equivalent (if not more) brain volume as compared to Homo Sapiens. Even though Neanderthals and Sapiens share genes responsible for development of language processing zones in the brain, Harari argues that Sapiens had a much better command and flexibility on language than Neanderthals. A glance at the skulls of the two species shows that there is a significant difference in the size of the prefrontal cortex.

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Neanderthals’ skull (left) and Sapiens’ skull (right)

It seems like the size of eyes, nose and jaws of modern Sapiens has been compensated to accomodate a supposedly more important prefrontal cortex. The Sapiens’ skull in itself seems to be transformed into a more spherical shape (compared to an elongated Neanderthal skull), and spheres are mathematically proved to be able to pack the most volume with the least surface area.
Of course, a bigger brain doesn’t necessarily imply more complex functioning. It’s no big news, blue whales suck at calculus.
But Neanderthals could make stone tools and set traps. There has been evidence of Neanderthals conducting funeral rituals, worshipping spirit animals, and dancing to the stars as a form of recreation. The caveman was much more ingenious than what the archetypical portrayal is. So where’s the difference?

An article resulting from studies on neurodegenerative diseases of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) highlights that such diseases are generally an impairment to creative tasks, albeit facilitate artistic tasks. Patients although could not succeed at general creative cognitive tasks, they performed drawings nonetheless. An inference drawn in this study is:

Damage to the PFC may alter the intentional appropriateness and originality of patient productions by altering planning, fluency, mental flexibility, rule-based thinking, or abstraction. However, clinical observations of frontal damage patients suggest that some symptoms associated with frontal damage provoke cognitive, conative, and behavioral changes, including social disinhibition, compulsive behaviors, emotional distortions, and the relaxing of cognitive constraints, which can motivate and favor artistic productions.

Another research found that suppressing the conginitive filter of the brain helped in ‘creative-ambling’ of the brain.
Conclusions from these studies point towards a subtle difference between Sapiens and Neanderthals. Even though creativity and fiction might have been a common trait, the testing of that creativity with the help of a more advanced PFC might have helped Sapiens become inventive instead of arduous, developing a logical inquisitive nature instead of a mere curious fascination.
With a more advanced PFC, Sapiens may have achieved appropriate intention for hypothesizing fiction, followed by patching it up with logical rules to validate its real-life behaviour.

Although little conclusive research has been done on the reasons of difference between the brains of the Neanderthals and Sapiens, it has been systematically hypothesized that modern cognition and the ability to manipulate and create fictitious concepts with our language has been an essential contributor.
Think about it…
You have been able to understand my thoughts in this article through this medium of the English language. You are essentially able to reprogram your brain just by reading things that I have written. The only base requisite here was knowledge of the same set of sounds, semantics, metaphors, syntax, and grammar - bundled in a neat word - language.



Computer Architecture

has developed manifold over the years. From analog computers that could perform integration in hardware directly, to finite state machines, to explicit application specific hardware, to processors being able to perform integration using a programming language - this timeline looks unnervingly similar to how evolution has been observed in the animal kingdom.
From a dragonfly which is hardwired to kill in order to survive to supremely flexible humans who can contemplate suicide, natural selection has sincerely favoured dynamic adaptivity and improvisation techniques, and humans win because their brains allow them to adapt and behave differently with just the power of active fiction.

As software progresses, a limit will soon be observed on the speed of the soft and flexible processor. In an effort to be more adaptive, more skilled and more resourceful, this software will need some hardware accelerators to perform menial/repititive tasks effortlessly without the use of conscious thought. Maybe driving a car, or cutting vegetables, or lifting heavy loads, or remembering important dates in history, there are a plethora of use-cases where our fictitious brain can be supplemented.
Context switches may happen only when there’s conscious thought involved - possibility of an accident, whether to slice/chop/dice, whether to store some data permanently or as a buffer, etc.
I see it as nothing but deterministic to assert that it is in human’s future to be able to control some hard-wired part of their self while being involved in other complex thought.
The brain is, afterall, still a black box…