Decoding a Dream

I had a dream yesterday. Normally I am not the one to remember by dreams but for some odd reason, this stuck. It was not a wacky one too.

I was in a computer lab (possibly in my old college) wondering why the job was so boring but was still happy to get paid $8 an hour. There were only two other people in the room. One was possibly my supervisor when I worked in a computer lab during my college days (didn't see his face, but 'heard' his voice) and the other, my ex-colleague from around eight years back. I say something like "It's boring. I don't have anything to do." My supervisor responds - "In that case, why don't you go and run an anti-virus on all the machines to make sure nothing's wrong?"

Cursing myself for opening my stupid mouth instead of sitting on a console and surfing the Internet, I started with the one at the far end. It's a Windows machine (possibly '95) and I run McAfee (the software that's currently on my office laptop - not the one I used when in college, which was Norton). An old-time, text-based screen (like WordPerfect) opens up and it churns through files. One file gets marked - It's called Lexis Nexis Law. I woke up.

So, what's the big deal? It was a crazy, very geeky dream with potentially no meaning. Normally I wouldn't have bothered about it either, much like I do for most of my other dreams. However, what caught my attention was essentially the last part of my dream. You see, I have been working with some e-discovery stuff of late which involved Lexis Nexis Law, a software product that specializes in this area. I have been involved with the product giving it more attention fairly recently, while other parts of the dream happened way back. So, it was interesting to me how that got involved in the dream at all.

This has led me to a postulate that I feel nicely pull together a few disjointed thoughts I have been toying with the last few years.

Brain Connections

Many of you are vaguely aware and some of you have read a bit more about how our brain functions. In a simplistic model, the brain contains billions of cells called as neurons.

Source: http://learnyourletters.blogspot.com/

Each neuron (or node) is like a LEGO puzzle piece. It has a number of connections going out (actually one connection called axon going out which branches out to multiple segments) and has a number of receivers (called dendrites) for connections coming in. Our memory, thoughts, and experiences are defined by how the neurons are connected to each other. Along with the branches, together there are around a trillion or more possible connections - something that is roughly a million times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer - and this is in EVERY brain, even the one we consider the dumbest.

Source: http://www.utexas.edu/courses/bio365r/Images/neuron.JPG

Our memories are formed when certain set of connections are made between certain sets of nodes via electrical pulses. In order to make a connection, a strong electrical pulse must pass through the two nodes. Since the pulses have a way of fading over time, it is also essential to reinforce the pulse again and again, potentially with the same thought. This is probably what leads to the 'Where is my key?' situation - not enough emphasis is given to remember the key that it gets pushed to the back of the mind or in essence, the pulse becomes weak.
Finally, there are different regions of the brain that specialize in different activities.

Studies have shown that our memories are created when connections are made between the cells. The strength of the pulse, which in turn depends on how strong the feeling or experience leading to the memory is, decides how strongly we remember something. Such memories do not just stay there forever. In order to stay strong, they constantly need to be reinforced, probably till a tipping point when it kind of becomes permanent. This is probably why some of our older memories of childhood fade away and resurface only when triggered by certain actions or experiences.

Dreams

So, in general, we see that memories are created when an electrical signal passes through a bunch of neurons and as a result, connections are made. This is conscious thought. What about dreams?

Based on this theory, I would surmise that dreams are essentially nothing but random connections that happen within the brain. In essence, the brain goes 'berserk', exploring all sorts of pathways between the connections fairly randomly - regardless of the time when a connection was made or an emotion associated with it. I kind of equate this to sending a 'refresh' signal that freshens up the cells and keeps them healthy or active. When such a 'refresh' happens it is possible that a number of connections related to memories of the past, present, and future, are all affected randomly. This, to me, leads to the images or constructs in our dreams.

However, there is another part of the brain which does not really know that we are dreaming and tries to make rational sense out of the pathways (which typically occur due to normal behavior). Such behavior of the brain has been proved by a number of neuroscientists (such as by Oliver Sacks and V S Ramachandran). Thus what we see as a dream is essentially a combination of these two activities. The first goes about creating random pathways and the second goes about constructing a story that will make sense of the random pathway. Hence you get my dream that combined my 'lab supervisor' days at college with the software that I was working on a week ago interspersed with people randomly picked from my memory.

Since ideas are also related to thoughts and memories, which in turn, are connections made between the neurons, it might be possible that some of these random connections can actually lead to a completely revolutionary concept, something that we otherwise might not come across by pure rational thought. May be this is what leads to "Eureka!" moments by many eminent thinkers. Unlike the probability of a hundred monkeys typing out Shakespeare by means of random typing, I think this is more plausible, as our thoughts do have some fundamental meaning and our brain has the capacity to rationalize such disconnected thoughts to something more coherent.
For example, in my dream, all aspects of the dream happened since I came to USA and not before. So, in essence, they were a well-defined subset of my memories that was used to construct the dream and not just everything under the sun.

Meditation and Revelation

As a result, it may be possible to channelize these random thoughts and make it more focused. My cousin told me a few days back that Newton and Einstein were heavy contemplators. Contemplation is in effect trying out various pathways focused around a particular topic. great Indian mathematician Ramanujam used to say that numbers and theorems used to come in his dream. He attributed that to his Goddess giving him the insight. While it might very well be true that he had a gift to begin with, it might also be that his connections were skewed towards math that helped him make his random connections a lot more meaningful than others.

In Hinduism, yoga and dhyana (meditation) are heavily emphasized. Both of them are ways of channeling your thoughts in a more streamlined manner so that the mind becomes more focused. Maybe they realized that such streamlined thought helps creates more streamlined pathways in the brain which can eventually lead to us figuring out the right pathway that answers the question - Why are we here? And may be that's what they term as revelation or enlightenment.

Making of a genius

These postulates can also help put a framework around how a genius is made. Essentially genius becomes a combination of a) how many connections you are born with b) the distribution of the neurons, either by birth such as by makeup of your genes or by means of a congenital defect that may rob you off neurons in a specific portion of the brain c) the environment you grow up in and the interactions you have with the world, which in turn impact the connections made and d) the level of reinforcement you provide to the connections that are already made.

Thus, while it is true that in some cases genius is born, you can also see that you can cultivate genius. The latter can be made by exposing a child (since that's when connections happen at the fastest rate) to a selective environment, exposing the child to a wide range of environments that can lead to different possible connections, and selective reinforcement of some connections as a seed while also inculcating in the child the habit of selective reinforcement.