Brainy Ignorance

A new gene has been discovered. It is not unique to people. It appears in for example rodents as well. And yet they claim this is "a remarkable discovery". The reasoning is that it appears more in humans than in other mammals, so it may have something to do with thinking.

More interesting than what may have something to do with thinking is what we do not know about it, and that is about everything.

Scientists have isolated regions in the brain that take care of different functions like visual input. They have noticed that those regions show more activity when these functions are performed. But that is about it.

We do not have any answer to the following really fundamental questions:

How is information stored? It could be stored with one bit per brain cell. There could be several bits by cell. Information could be stored using quantum physics. Or it may never be stored at all as discreet information, but only as fuzzy clouds that stretch over large areas of the brain. If the last thing is true, it would be impossible to tell when we have truly forgotten something. Let's say I see a rose the 1st of January, and I notice it is white. This information may be stored more or less densely over a large number of brain cells. After one week, the trace of this information may be diminished by 5%. If asked, I can still easily recall that it was white. After one more week, the trace is diminshed by another 5%. I can still recall it, but with a little more difficulty. After two months, I have really big difficulty to recall it. After ten years, the information has come so close to 0, that I to all intents and purposes have forgotten it. However, there is no fixed moment, where one can say "that was the moment you forgot it".

How is information identified? Currently we have no idea how information is recalled and identified. If I see a picture of a rose, I immediately know that it is a rose. However, no one knows how the picture is recognised. How does the brain know that a plastic red rose in your hand and an abstract painting of a white rose both are roses?

How is information processed? When I see a rose, I stretch out my bare hand to pick it, but I suddenly pull it back, realising that roses have thorns, and put on a glove first. No one knows how I connect the rose with the glove. And even less so, if I have to do something completely new, like using a sock instead of a glove, as I do not have any glove present.

How is information retrieved? The eye receives much more information than we get from standard internet connections. Just check the quality of the pictures of streaming video, and compare it to the quality of what you see, when you watch the view of a valley from the top of a mountain. How is all that large amount of information retrieved, filtered and stored? No one knows.

What is really frustrating is that we can simulate a lot of those things fairly well with computers. However, we know that we use completely different methods from the brain, and we do not know how the brain does it.

This ignorance of ours, I think is remarkable. The discovery of a gene that perhaps may have something to do with humans is not.