{"id":664,"date":"2007-06-05T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/2007\/06\/noisy-brains.html"},"modified":"2007-06-05T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-05T18:00:00","slug":"noisy-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2007\/06\/noisy-brains.html","title":{"rendered":"Noisy Brains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a fascinating bit of <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/newsoffice\/2007\/noisy-brain-0604.html\">neural research out of MIT<\/a>.   It proposes a whole new teacher\/tinker model for learning and creativity at the level of how the brain is wired.  It would seem to account for that &#8220;ah-ha!&#8221; moment when you&#8217;ve been mulling something about and finally all the pieces drop into place &#8211; a physiological Gestalt of sorts.    Looked at another way, it makes thinking a lot like herding cats.  The &#8220;teacher&#8221; keeps trying to organize thoughts while the &#8220;tinker&#8221; keeps having them wander off.   In this way, the teacher is your rational self while the tinker is your creative self.  It&#8217;s like Scrabble with neurons.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m wondering about tinker stimulation though.  What amplifies noise?  Just thinking out loud, but it strikes me that noise at the neuronal level is probably similar to electronic noise in a circuit.  After all, they are both primarily electrical devices.  If you want to increase noise in a circuit, you increase the current and the component density.  In the brain, I imagine this amounts to increasing the frequency and density of neuronal firings.  In other words, you think about more stuff.  This may explain why it&#8217;s almost impossible to be creative by concentrating on it.  Creativity most often happens while you&#8217;re busy doing something else.<\/p>\n<p>It also occurs to me that this is a very natural model to develop.  In a sense, the yin\/yang approach here is similar to how evolution works at the genetic level.  Genetic mutations are the tinker or the noise.  Survival then becomes the teacher, correcting\/selecting for the most useful recombinations.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, this makes thought control devices and sci-fi telepathy a bit more complicated, but nobody thought that was easy anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Very cool&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">Brought to you by Tim&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/\">-Read the whole blog here-<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a fascinating bit of neural research out of MIT. It proposes a whole new teacher\/tinker model for learning<\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\"><a href=\"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2007\/06\/noisy-brains.html\" title=\"Read Noisy Brains\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}