Courtesy of google.com
In 2002, Jason Padgett, age 31, was assaulted outside a Karaoke bar in Tacoma, Washington. He suffered a concussion, but when he recovered, the futon salesman discovered he had become a mathematical genius.
Savants are usually born with their talents, but instances of induced genius resulting from trauma do exist, though they are rare. Padgett admits that not only was the experience life-changing, but it also opened him to the beauty of the universe.
All that we know of the universe comes from our brain, of course, which, for protective reasons, keeps our sensory bandwidth narrow. Humans don’t have a cat’s night vision or a dog’s sense of smell. We perceive only what we need to perceive to survive. Our brains discard the remaining data as chaff.
What we retain comes to us in bits and pieces. While we have no notion of the source of consciousness, experts suppose our sense of continuity comes from the thalamus. Sitting in the midbrain, it constantly updates information and makes its best guess about the world. Because survival is the prime directive, the thalamus sacrifices detail for speed. We do not need to know the color of the lion’s mane, only that the predator is lurking in the bushes.
Awake or sleeping, the thalamus is at work, which raises the question of its relationship to dreams. Drawing on the notion of quantum entanglement, scientist David Leong hypothesizes that dreams may be windows into alternate realities the mind enters during sleep’s fluid state. A majority of his colleagues take a different view. They suppose dreams are the stuff of ordinary life, our experiences mingled with our personality traits.
All parties agree, however, that the thalamus coordinates the neural activity between the two sides of the brain with an ease that the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems still struggle to replicate.
While truth is a mental construct, scientists believe information may be physical. … atoms hold miniscule masses of the information they require to interact with each other and the rest of the universe. Dark matter may be a form of intelligence. If so, where does human reality lie? Are we the “stuff” of dreams? Or are we composed of digital ones and zeros?
Given the ambiguity in human existence, pursuing certainty may be a fool’s errand or a form of insanity. As the Cheshire cat warned in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, “We are all mad here.” Even so, the good news is that we seem to be free to define ourselves.
Donald Trump understands this notion. He keeps himself busy by erecting monuments to celebrate his imagined achievements. The rest of us stand in wonder. We see in him no deity capable of building castles in the air, but a man blind to the needs of the people he was elected to serve.
His delusions could go unchallenged if they didn’t create so much harm. If he didn’t appear to enjoy his chaos. If vengeance and fear weren’t his crown and scepter.
Unlike Trump’s reality, in mine, cruelty is a cardinal sin. The notion of legacy is the ultimate delusion. Adrift in a universe fraught with tumult, our destiny lies not in the stars but in how we treat each other. Let us choose compassion over vanity. In the end, each of us dies with a sigh. That is all we know and all we need to know.
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