Doing experiments at night

I often wake up in the middle of the night with ideas for experiments. I write them down on a notepad, then the next day try to decipher what I wrote. Sometimes I get things like this:

A mermaid is a person of merness
If someone calls you ‘honey’ it's because they think you are off-color and have high viscosity

neither of which admittedly is very helpful in the lab. More often I get stuff like this:

Bbrof licommon hew mimmon pmflannatio
Clean scopter, envelope. check on sidboad apps or niide

But here's a thought experiment: what if you woke up one night and thought of a way to prove once and for all that the world is a simulation? What would happen?

If you were right, what would happen is that whoever is running the simulation would erase it from your mind before you could write it down. No matter how hard you tried, you would be unable to remember it. One could argue that this being the case, it must have already happened and therefore our inability to discover a proof that we are living in a simulation is proof that we are living in a simulation.

On the other hand, the answer could be so unexpected that the brain would be unable to remember it. Humans have stray thoughts all the time. It's part of how we think creatively: it may be that creative people are just better at remembering the crazy stuff and hammering it into something useful. For most humans, if a thought does not fit the narrative the brain is creating for itself, it gets thrown away. Most people never remember that the thought existed.

The question of whether whoever invented the human brain added that feature to prevent us from accessing the truth is left as an exercise for the reader.

Try to think of examples of something totally crazy: it's almost impossible, even more so, I suspect, for a person with mental illness, who often finds him- or herself locked into a coping strategy that doesn't work but which he dare not abandon for fear that doing so would open up an abyss of despair and uncertainty. And indeed, getting us to feel despair and thereby drop an unsuccessful coping strategy might be the basic reason for depression. It is unpleasant, so people quite naturally resist it, and they construct elaborate scenarios to explain the things that are going wrong. The delusions aren't a symptom of a disease. They are their brain's attempt to save them.

Saving the individual's life is the sole purpose of the brain. To your brain, surviving is far more important than truth. Most adults try, albeit with sometimes limited success, to face the truth, knowing that the shock of having a delusion shattered is worse. That is why they create a bubble of like-minded people. Imagine the shock of discovering, for example, that there really are only two sexes, that energy is not quantized, or that the planet is not really a goddess and the climate is not really having a midlife crisis. The only way to avoid that is to censor those who are trying to tell you. Humans have evolved to protect their delusions no matter what the cost.

That's a bit dangerous. If the world is not real, everything that happens and everything you read is put there for a specific purpose by a deity or the Great Programmer. That may be how religions get started—as a way of hoping the world has a purpose and is not as horrible as it appears to be—but as far as our brains are concerned, everything is a religion.

Context switching

I'm convinced that as humans get older, it is not memories that are getting lost, but the ability to perform context switching. In certain neurological disorders such as autism, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer's, this leads to a phenomenon called perseveration, where the person answers every question with the same word. For example, if you ask them what day it is, they might say “Tuesday.” Then if you ask them where they are, they'll say “Tuesday.” They might sound as if they're just joking, but what's happening is that they can't switch context.

This is eerily reminiscent of those people who reply with their favorite political obsession to explain every problem. We hear them every day. This can't be attributed to age: it is found in political activists of all ages. Perhaps the toxicity and the appeal of politics lie in its ability to inhibit context switching.

Humans don't remember everything all at the same time. Knowledge in the brain is tagged and compartmentalized, which is why when we start speaking in one language we never get confused about which words go to which language. If you try to remember the name of Alexander the Great's horse (Bucephalus) while you're doing a math problem, it's a lot harder than if you're at a racetrack.

Part of retrieving a memory is to retrieve the context in which the event occurred. If that is impaired, retrieving a memory is much harder.

mar 25 2023, 5:23 am