Your Brain Is Not A Computer. It Is A Transducer Discover Magazine
Your Brain Is Not A Computer. It Is A Transducer Discover Magazine
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Your Brain Is Not a
Health
Environment
Computer. It Is a
Planet Earth
Lifestyle
Transducer
A new theory of how the brain works
— neural transduction theory —
might upend everything we know
about consciousness and the universe
itself.
By Robert EpsteinAug 25, 2021 5:00 PM
(Credit: Triff/Shutterstock)
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She also hears music continuously, and it’s not the kind of
music that drives us nuts when we can’t get a tune out of ou
head. She mainly hears original music, and she will
sometimes try to hum or sing what she’s hearing. She says
it’s coming from "the neighbors downstairs," and it doesn’t
bother her, she says, because some of it isn’t bad and
because it helps her fall asleep. The fact that other people
can’t hear it doesn’t bother her either. She simply smiles
slyly and says, "Maybe you should get your hearing
checked."
The idea, which is quite simple on its face, is that the brain
is a bidirectional transducer.
But is Doris that different from the rest of us? After all,
even the healthiest among us hallucinate several times each
night — we call it dreaming. And we all have at least two
highly disorienting experiences each day called "hypnogogi
states" — those eerie, sometimes creative interludes
between sleeping and waking.
Where does all this content come from, and why do we have
so little control over it?
And another:
I knew it was me.... I was quite tall and thin at that point.
And I recognized at first that it was a body, but I didn't even
know that it was mine initially. Then I perceived that I was
up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird.
What am I doing up here?" I thought, "Well, this must be
me. Am I dead?"
And have you ever met a stranger who made you feel,
almost immediately, that you had known him or her your
entire life? And sometimes this stranger has the same feeling
about you. It’s a strong feeling, almost overwhelming. We
can try to explain such feelings with speculations about how
a voice or physical characteristics might remind us of
someone from our past, but there is another possibility —
that in some sense you had actually known this person your
whole life. If the brain is a bidirectional transducer, that is
not a strange idea at all.
But that scientist will never find the remote voice inside the
phone, because it is not there to be found.
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