3/12/2009



人是用甚麼思考的?









人是用甚麼思考的?
…………………………………………………*李察
(問到底 No.7332 2009 0312 Thursday)

最正確的答案,是說「人是用心去思考的。」雖
然,沒有人能夠告訴你,心是甚麼。李察曾在「莊子
原著與莊子原理」書中,提到心是甚麼的問題。但沒
有人留意。

舉一個例。今日可能大多數人不會用算盤。這種
中國遠古發明的計算工具,是怎樣思考的呢?

你撥上一顆珠子。再撥上兩顆珠子。你就是在計
算了。你的題目是:一加二等於多少。算盤是直接用
珠子計算的。你數一數,就能知道,答案是三。

現在,讓我們設計一種無線電計算器。你先發出
一個電波。這電波的意義,代表是一。再發出另一個
代表是二的電波。這樣,空氣中就有了兩種電波:一
號波和二號波。而我們的電波,是可能在空氣中互相
作用的。一號波和二號波相交,在空氣中自動「產生」
了三號波。但是,你不會知道,三號波已經出現。要
等到你的無線電計算器,接收到了三號波,然後,你
的熒幕上出現一個符號,告訴你,三號波收到了。

於是,你的數學題算好了。你得到一個正確答案:
那就是「三」。

  這是一種無人想過的設想:計算不是像中國算盤
那樣,在實物裡進行的,而是在空氣中進行的。

  李察相信:我們的大腦,就是一個這樣的無線電
發生器。人的大腦,是一個無線電發生器,也是一個
無線電接受器。

  這算是甚麼天方夜談呢?肯認真去想的民族,就
是未來世界的領導者。而這樣簡單的儀器,可能殊不
簡單。能在空氣中互相作用的電波,是全新的研究領
域,從來沒有人想到的。若果我們有了一座「超級圖
書館」:這是library 和laboratory 的混合品,簡
稱為labrary,就能製造出來。這樣,我們對於人類
大腦的研究,就前進了一步。

不過,這一類的網絡瘋言,是不值得重視的。




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(本文貼出日期: 2009.3.12. 香港時間: 6:00 pm)
(明天問題:人是用經絡系統思考的嗎?)

3 則留言:

  1. 親愛的李察先生,

    如果係咁, 咁我地可唔可以將一切既知識都好似輸入電腦一樣輸入去我地既腦呢? 咁我地就唔駛用幾年甚至幾十年時間去考取一門尊業知識, 幾分鐘就可以有醫生, 律師, 世界歷史既知識輸入腦, 已後我地淨係學修養, 判斷等要靠經驗累積既學問, 咁幾好!

    Peggy

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  2. Leechard,

    While you are describing the benefits brought from the study of how brain work in thinking process and ask our people to do that, the British scientists are now working on it. According to the guardian report published on 12 March, researchers have used brain scan. the functional magnetic reasonance imaging, to read people memory. They have now known that particular collections of brain cells encoded the person's location in the virtual world and they were able to use this to predict where each volunteer was standing.

    The british is moving, as far as i know,steadily in the area of the Brain study, and has become the world leader in this area. It is them who would make a good use of your suggestion to put into practice, so as to lead the human being into a deeper insight of the origin and mechanism of brain activiity.

    i shall let you see this article:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/12/mind-reading-brain-scans-memories/print

    Researchers use brain scans to read people's memoriesComments (…) Digg it
    Ian Sample, science correspondent
    guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009
    larger | smaller
    Article history

    Collections of brain cells in the hippocampus encoded the person's location

    Scientists have used brain scans to read people's memories and work out where they were as they wandered around a virtual building.

    The landmark study by British researchers demonstrates that powerful imaging technology is increasingly able to extract our innermost thoughts.

    The feat prompted the team to call for an ethical debate on how brain imaging may be used in the future, and what safeguards can be put in place to protect people's privacy.

    The study was part of an investigation aimed at learning how memories are created, stored and recalled in a part of the brain called the hippocampus.

    By understanding the processes at work in the brain, scientists at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London hope to get a better grasp of how Alzheimer's disease and strokes can destroy our memories and find ways to rehabilitate patients.

    In the study, volunteers donned a virtual reality headset and were asked to make their way between four locations in a virtual building. Throughout the task, their brain activity was monitored using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

    Eleanor Maguire and Demis Hassabis then used a computer program to look for patterns in the volunteers' brain activity as they stood on virtual rugs in the four different locations. They found that particular collections of brain cells encoded the person's location in the virtual world, and they were able to use this to predict where each volunteer was standing.

    "Remarkably, using this technology, we found we could accurately predict the position of an individual within this virtual environment, solely from the pattern of activity in their hippocampus," said Maguire.

    "We could predict what memories a person was recalling, in this case the memory for their location in space," she added.

    The study overturns neuroscientists' assumption that memories of our surroundings are encoded in the brain in an unpredictable way. The latest research suggests that this is not the case, and that the information is stored in our neurons in a very structured way that can be picked up by scanners.

    The scientists could not tell where somebody was from a single brain scan. Instead, they had to perform several scans of volunteers in each location. Only afterwards were they able to find differences in brain activity that betrayed the person's location.

    "We can rest easy in terms of issues surrounding mind reading. This requires the person to be cooperative, and to train the algorithms we use many instances of a particular memory," said Maguire. "It's not that we can put someone in a brain scanner and suddenly read their thoughts. It's quite an invovled process that's at a very early stage."

    Though preliminary, the research raises questions about what may be possible with brain scanners in the future. Future advances in technology may make it possible to tell whether a person has ever been in a particular place, which could have enormous implications for the judicial system. Information from brain scans has already been used in court in India to help judge whether defendants are telling the truth or not.

    Demis Hassabis, who co-authored the study in the journal Current Biology, said: "The current techniques are a long way away from being able to do those kinds of things, though in the future maybe that will become more possible. Maybe we're about 10 years away from doing that."

    "It might be useful to start having those kinds of ethical discussions in the near future in preparation of that," he added.

    Previous work in rats identified the hippocampus as a region of the brain that stores spatial memories. But experiments that measured the activity of handfuls of neurons in the animals' brains suggested there was no predictable pattern in how those memories were stored.

    The discovery that spatial memories are encoded in a predictable way in our brains will give scientists confidence that other memories might be readable using brain scanners.

    In the near term, Maguire said the research will shed light on some of the most debilitating neurodegenerative diseases of old age. "By using techniques like this we're learning more and more about how memories are laid down. If we can understand the processes involved in how you form and store and recollect memories, we can begin to understand how these pathological processes erode memories, and much further down the line, how we might help patients in a rehabilitation context," she said.

    In a previous study, Maguire used brain scans to show that a brain region at the rear of the hippocampus known to be involved in learning directions and locations is enlarged in London taxi drivers.

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