I Have A Dream

I bet you must have not just once but many a times wondered why you dream. This post will describe a theory that takes some ideas from the domain of technology. Remember, we talked about the enormous network of brain neurons in an old post. We will visit that subject again. Just to tell the novice, the brain is composed of a massive network of countless neurons and its in these very neurons where the information gets stored. Every neuron would store some part of the info and when the brain needs to retrieve the complete information, it will pass a signal through a known and structured pattern of neurons and all the info in these neurons gets combined to give the complete information.The neural network concept, which is used to store information in artificially intelligent systems, uses a similar approach to organizing information. It was only after some research on these synthetic neural networks, that a very brittle, yet intriguing idea emerged on why would a human being dream. Here's a brief explanation of the same.

A network of neurons

While we are sleeping, most of our body parts get engaged in routine maintenance tasks. The brain takes up this diagnosis and correction task and checks if all organs are functioning properly. It sends signals to these organs and they would do tasks like pumping some extra blood, disposing something in the impure blood and some other similar stuff. The brain also sends some check signals to itself. Tough Job, I must say ! The primary maintenance job it assumes is to free neurons which don't have valid information or information which may no longer be needed. But its the Brain and for its being so intelligent, you wont expect it to delete the info in these neurons straightaway. In fact, the brain checks to see if this info is useful and has to be retained.

The brain tries to see if these neurons have any useful information by sending random, yet organized, signals to them. These signals are similar to the information retrieval signals introduced in para 1 but, these signals are sent while you are wild asleep. These signals are sent across the neurons and the information in them is combined. This information gets played back while you are dreaming. The dreams are in a way a complement of the information you retrieve while you are awake. Now, these neurons had random pieces of information and they are combined randomly by some random signals. That's why the dreams we see often don't follow any specific flow of thoughts and we keep swinging from one place to another and combine people whom we met in different nations. In fact, the brain passes its own inputs to make the dreams more meaningful because it assumes that it has to supply any missing information to fill any gaps. The brain may supply commonsense knowledge that one has acquired or knowledge regarding the places you have visited or the people you know or have met at any time in your life. That's the reason why while dreaming, you end up combining several places into one and meet 10 people from 10 different houses in your own.

That's how it all happens. In cases, when the brain is unable to get an ending for the dream, it just hangs up and waits for some real life event. The real life event like ringing of a bell, or yours falling on the ground, is combined in your dream so as to get an ending. And you wonder why you were dreaming of something that actually happened.After the dream gets over, the brain deletes all the information that was saved in those neurons. However, the dream that was generated is a new information in its own. Now its upon the brain to decide on whether the dream has to be retained or deleted. That's why at times, you remember what you dream't and at times, you don't. One more thing to this is the fact that while generating some dreams, the brain spends a lot of effort as the neurons it tries to combine don't have structured information and the brain has to put in a lot of stuff to make it meaningful. That's why the brain decides to break the dream and awake you. Or if the brain succeeds in finally generating some information, it lets it stay there and won't break the dream. But the next day when you get up, you wont feel fresh as your brain had been working a lot while you were asleep just to get the dream ticking.

This was a very different theory and that's why I felt like sharing it with you. And since we've went a little off the track for this one, I will also like to thank an all time contributor to these posts - Tzinga Health Drink. I get all my ideas on posts and how to present them while I'm on my cycling spree every morning and the spree lasts for 80-100 minutes. The time I spend makes me feel refreshed and gets my ideas ticking but it also demands a lot of energy from me. So one of my pals told me to have this awesome health drink called Tzinga. This health drink comes in three irresistible flavors - Mango Strawberry,Lemon Mint and Tropical Trip and I feel that this is the only health drink which also gives a really refreshing taste to your taste buds apart from giving some serious charge to your body.When the other drinks demand you to put some clip carrier to your bicycle for holding them, you can carry Tzinga straight in your pockets and with a sipper like outlet, you can easily take a sip as an when you need it. A pack of Tzinga contains some serious energy so please be careful while using it. 

Okay, now lets get back to the topi  and have some sort of a conclusion. This theory is one amongst those 100 theories on dreaming. Some of them tell that its the subconscious mind and some tell that its some other complex mechanism related to the locomotion of the body. But whatever it may be, this one actually explains most of the phenomena related to dreams and I personally believe, this one might be the real reason.Please tell me if you agree with me or if you have some different idea or any knowledge regarding this. I'm on this thing now !!!

The Human Brain: Your very own supercomputer

We get amazed after hearing about computers that have unbelievably large memories and processing speeds, but we fail to recognize that the best supercomputer was always within us- our brain.Yes, that's true.You must have heard of computers having thousands of Terabytes(1 Terabyte(TB)= 1024 Gigabytes(GB)), but when we talk of the memory size of the human brain,we need an even bigger unit - the Petabyte(1 Petabyte(PB)= 1024 TB). In fact, the best approximation of human memory is 2.5 PB(2.5 * 1024 * 1024 = 2621440 GB) .Wow, that's something. In analogical terms, this, of course, is the secondary memory, i.e the memory in which we store permanent data just like a computer does in HDDs.

Actually, the brain is composed of around a 100 billion neurons, on an average, and all of them connect to form an interconnected network. On an average, each neuron connects with 1000 other neurons. These neurons respond to the neural impulses that the brain receives from the nervous system, which itself is handled by the brain. In simple terms, its safe to assume that every single neuron is a tiny computer in itself. It has some processing capabilities, it has some memory and it treats the neural impulses just like computer responds to commands.All of these neurons connect and coordinate to make up for the overall storage that we talked about in the first para, but the processing is divided among each and every one of them.

How a neuron works, is a very complex thing, but the overall system is such that tasks are divided into portions and the neurons individually solve these portions. Who divides the task into portions - another set of neurons. Hence, as it goes, different neurons assume different roles as and when demanded. Some of them would do the division of work, some of them would do small scale computations and some of them would add up the results to form the overall results.Every neuron is capable of doing any function, just like the processor units in supercomputers.

Actually, supercomputers are composed of processor and memory arrays in such a way that processors may have their separate memories that they can use for calculations. In this way, any processor can be programmed to do anything. The same goes with neurons of the brains.The processing of data, is more or less the same. However, the supercomputer processor units don't have anything to do with permanent storage(secondary memory). Secondary memory is organized as separate RAID/LVM arrays with separate memory controllers for access. Hence, the neuron, which can handle all the departments on its own, is more superior than supercomputer units.

Now, the concept of primary memory is not applicable in brain, because a the brain is always online. Hence, logically, the brain treats short term and long term storage alike, but its just that it either disposes or retains the short term storage as per the demand. For example, you make a big calculation which involved prediction of sales on the basis of some market values. Now you start working with some predefined calculation logic and the market values. The logic is already there in your neurons, and the values are loaded temporarily. The neurons work out on the calculations and give you the end results.Now while making the calculations, you would have made some sub-calculations like carrying of digits, adding multiple figures to get a single figure.Now, you will hardly refer back to the carries that you made or the intermediate results, so after some time, the brain will flush them.Whereas, the final figures results will be retained for a longer time, as you would use them again. The logic will also be retained because it was there, and since it was used here, so it may be needed again. So, in short, brain stores important things and discards the less important ones.Importance is determined by how frequently you used that thing.So, we can assume that the neurons store all the information, both permanent and temporary, and both of them are equally accessible, unlike computers, where primary memory is more easily accessible than secondary.

Now, if we assume that some neurons store permanent data and cannot participate in calculations, even then we have tonnes of neurons which can. Even if we take 1 percent of the total to be available, we have 26214 GB of memory available for computations. This is analogous to RAM of supercomputers. Ever imagined a computer with this much of RAM.Moreover, every neuron is capable of processing the data that it has and the data that it gets from the signals. Hence if we assume an analogy here, then the processing capabilities of the brain would be at least 100 times of the latest supercomputer by Cray. Supercomputers may have specialized architectures,separation of floating point operations, or even AI based task-allocation schemes, but no supercomputer can,at least for the next 10 years, even think of matching the human brain. You are not aware of this, but let me make you get some closer.

When you see things, you are using the feed from a high-definition camera- your eyes. The camera is so good that the transfer rate is in GBs/sec. Same is the story with your ears and other sensory organs. The brain keeps getting data from these "peripherals" and keeps processing it. It also stores the important impulses and stores a large amount of them in the subconscious memory. In short, even when we are doing nothing, the brain is working on TBs of data. Now when we do some extensive calculation tasks, we are using just a small portion of the available capabilities. As per a research, the average human being uses only a percent or 2 of his brain's capabilities. Einstein used around 3-4 percent, though. And everyone knows what he did. So, if just by using a mere 3 percent of such a large setup, a man was able to change the world forever, well, you can imagine what will happen, if someone uses all of it.

Brain is in fact a very complex computer. You must have heard of the dream theories. Dreams are thought to be brain's own creations. Brain simply combines stored things from the past and creates new meaningful things. Trust me, no computer in the world is capable of doing it. So, I just want you to speculate for a while on the amazing capabilities that this organ in our skull possesses. Yep, you are the owner of the best computer in the world.