PATTERN DETECTING BRAIN`S MAIN TOOL FOR THINKING
”Thinking about thinking, at thirty-five I had a vision of how the brain operates.
I imagined thousands of ”glass plates” in a row, all with a memory of an image, printed or engraved onto it, a form or a pattern of some kind. Every glass plate also connected to a detection lamp.
If one wanted to categorize or identify a new impression, an image, an entity, a new expression coming to your senses, simply put an experience of some kind, one had to search one’s whole memory to compare to this new phenomenon to identify and see what it is.
This new pattern, also on glass plate, would then fall through all the other glass plates in the memory trying to compare this new with what already is memorized or recorded. When a similarity is detected a lamp would lit up indicating a hit aimed for further investigation. I imagined not necessary a ”full” hit, a true similarity, but only a slight similarity would be required for the lamp to lit.
My thought experiment involves only two dimensions, but a more accurate description of the multifaceted way the brain operates would require glass plates in rows in every imagined direction, backwards, fragmented, whatever, and on top of that all glass plates also interconnected in equal amount of dimensions.”
To be continued..