Alchemy and the Undercurrents of History

This word Alchemy comes up all the time.  It is probably most associated, at least in literature and cultural understanding, with the historical pursuit to transform lead into gold, or to transform other base metals into precious ones.  But there is also a conception among the populace that alchemy has something to do with transformation in general, with the appearance of novelty, and with the enhancement of some system by ingenious means, whether that system be physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social, technological, or whatever.

Now, among scientists the word usually comes loaded as, "Oh, alchemy is just what people practiced before they understood the real laws of chemistry, before they knew about the periodic table and the whole number combinations of atoms into molecules.  Alchemy wasn't really science.  It was just sort of perverse experimentation."  In a sense that is very true.  Alchemy as practiced was always tied into extraordinary notions of the world, of the spirits that operated within it, and of the potential for the human agent to cooperate with the spirits in order to attain the Philosopher's Stone, say, or the Elixir of Life.  But because of that very fact, because of the very extraordinary nature in which Alchemy was conceived by those who practiced it, it actually ran much deeper into the fabric of human psychology and culture than 'perverse experimentation' might suggest.  In fact, I'd like to suggest that Alchemy has formed the very undercurrents that steer the course of history.

In quite general terms, let us take Alchemy to be the processes of transformation that occur at the boundary of what is known and what is unknown.  It is here, at the frontier of knowledge, that the alchemist frolics as he mixes and matches, ponders and pursues, experiments in extravagance and boldly strides forth to adventure in experience at the bubbling edge of human perception, cognition, and control.  It is here that the mythological hero of each and every culture, the Prometheus of Greece and the Indra of India, the human individual in his infinite potential for creative exploration; it is here that he first encounters what was until then unknown to himself, to his society; here that he integrates this novelty into his understanding of the world, for the first time.  It is here that the capacity for cultural and psychological evolution greets him, bearing the sly but genuine grin of eternal creativity.

Now, the essential point for the connection between alchemy and history is this.  An investigation which was once considered alchemy, or equivalently, which had once taken place at the boundaries of current knowledge, becomes common knowledge and thus no longer the domain of alchemy once it is introduced to and accepted by the masses.  That is, as the alchemist's discoveries are integrated into society, society is effectively upgraded, and the boundaries of knowledge encroach infinitesimally on the infinite unknown.  The alchemist is forced to move on, into novel territory, once again.

A determining factor in the adaptability and evolution of cultures, then, is the capacity by which they can accept and integrate the investigations of alchemists.  Cultures which foster alchemy and which have effective means for integrating novelty will thus naturally be more adaptable to changing geopolitical conditions and more successful in the pursuits of civilization.  Free, open exchange of ideas is absolutely essential for a robust civilization.  On the other hand, cultures which suppress such investigations, which foster fear instead of praise, which price ideas and restrict their flow, will find themselves immobilized and stagnant on the world stage in times of crisis or unprecedented change.  They wont be able to attain the proper upgrades, so to speak, to interface effectively with the world in changing times.  And times are always changing.

So if we look back at history, we find this perennial pursuit, this drive to derive, this obsession with progression, this overwhelming impulse bubbling beneath the surface of cutural normality, disguised as a quest to transform base metals into gold, altogether steering the infrastructure of human civilization through the torrents of history, leading us to here, right now.  Today.

So what does Alchemy look like today?  Well, it looks the same as it ever looked - it looks like people pursuing near impossible problems on the edge of what is acceptable, what is known.  And while the devices and equipment look like they may have changed, and while we have technically fulfilled the age old superficial objective of turning lead into gold (ala nuclear chemistry), we find ourselves still very much faced with the same predicament: of consistently updating our cultures in order to adapt to changing environmental and technological conditions.  And that is what Alchemy has always been. 

So let us march this grand tradition of alchemical exploration into the future with us.  Let us be weird and wild, crazy and like-child, investigative and inspired.  Let us play merrily on the brink of knowledge and acceptability.  After all, it is our creative exploration that updates our civilization, that expands our realities.

Merry beings, dear Alchemist.

Metals and the Alchemy of Life

There's this awesome question about the origin of life, how it started or where it came from.  For all I really know, it could have come from anywhere; mushroom spores from another Galaxy or super advanced slug creatures laying eggs on our planet far from home.  Regardless, I think its a fun exercise to approach the problem using the constraint that life evolved wholly on Earth.  Then we are left with only the materials of the early Earth, and of course an abundance of sunlight.

The early earth had lots of water, lots of nitrogen, lots of carbon, and lots of metals.  These are the essential ingredients for life.  People often neglect the significance of metals in biological systems, but they are absolutely essential.  Your cells wouldn't get oxygen if it weren't for iron.  They wouldn't be able to communicate if it weren't for calcium.  Your brain wouldn't be able to maintain its wiring if it weren't for zinc.  Most of your proteins wouldn't function if it weren't for an arsenal of metal ions.  And so on.  But the importance of metals really derives from their relationship with electrons, that is, their knack for letting electrons flow.

Flowing electrons are behind everything in our civilization.  All electricity, technology, and power applications involve flowing electrons.  Not surprisingly, so do living organisms.  But living organisms aren't full scale conductors the way copper wires and platinum electrodes are.  They're semiconductors, like the transistors inside your computer, but based on carbon instead of silicon.

Electronic processes in the body happen in the form of 'redox' reactions, also known as REDuction-OXidation.  Your entire metabolism is a complex network of redox reactions.  A redox reaction is simply a reaction between molecules where there is a transfer of electrons.  One molecule gains electrons, one molecule loses them.  Redox.  The neat thing about them, though, is the energy associated with the electron as it hops from one molecule to another.  If you play your cards right, you might be able to harness some of this energy to do something functional with.  And that, my friends, is the secret of living systems.  It's also the secret to batteries and fuel cells, but in a less elegant manner.

So in the beginning there were places on earth that were both very wet and very dense, gel-like places with an abundance of metals and simple small molecules bumping into each other in confined regions.  Due to the heat of the early Earth and the incoming light, chemical reactions occurred that produced the first organic molecules and their combinations.  At the same time, heat, light, and heterogeneity were pumping redox reactions left, right, and center.  At some point, an organic molecule shows up that can participate in the redox reaction - it's no longer just between metals and water.

Then everything changes.  Now organic molecules are picking up and giving off electrons as they're pumped by the metals, facilitating even more reactions and molecular evolution.  They're also coupling themselves to the metal redox processes, offering an enormous space of possible pathways for electrons to flow.  This in turn increases the opportunities for other molecules to couple with the redox processes, and, potentially, to suction some of the electron's energy to do something interesting.

An explosion of couplings occur between metals and organic molecules to facilitate redox processes.  The earth is ablaze in early biochemical electronics.  Somewhere along the line a curious organic molecule shows up.  He's called RNA.  He's a chain of smaller molecules (nucleotides) that can bind to other molecules, break them, and combine them.  He can even bind other nucleotides and arrange them into a copy of himself.  He is a replicator.

Replication is certainly necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.  For a replicator to actually become something living, it must be replicating meaningful information; in particular, information that codes for the maintenance and functioning of a redox network.  Viruses and prions, two examples of replicators that are not defined as living, do not code for redox processes.  It turns out that RNA, in certain configurations, can bind to a plethora of small organic molecules.  In a sense, the region of RNA that binds the molecule also 'codes' for the molecules, and when the RNA is replicated, so too is the information for 'binding' to the molecule.  If the molecule of interest is involved in a redox process, then our RNA contains meaningful information.

RNA is awesome because it not only contains information, it acts on it.  It physically goes and binds to the molecule it codes for.  In so doing, it probably disrupts the redox process the molecule was part of.  This opens the floor for the redox process to explor other pathways, in other words to be modified by the activity of the RNA, which has done nothing more than bind a molecule that was part of the pathway.

Now here's a unique point.  If an RNA can bind to a molecule, then it isn't too much of a stretch for us to suppose that the same RNA might be able to build that molecule itself.  In fact, we've recently discovered that some modern RNA sequences do just that (well, they actually code for a protein which builds the molecule that they bind to).  So now suppose you've got an RNA which can bind to a molecule and make that same molecule.  So it can only do one or the other.  If its bound to the molecule, its not making it, and the redox pathway is broken since the molecule is unavailable.  If its not bound to the molecule, its synthesizing it, and the molecule can participate in the redox reaction.  But if it makes too much, it'll start binding to it again, and slow down the redox process.  Suddenly we have controlled feedback regulation of a metabolic circuit.  BAM! - get a bunch of those interacting, and you've got a living system.

Of course now there's all the problems of the origin of protein and DNA, their relationships with RNA, origin of the cell membrane, and so forth.  That stuff would be fun to discuss.  So too would considerations of entropy and the free energy storage of these systems.  But the key milestones have already been overcome: replicators that encode meaningful information about the construction and modulation of metabolic circuits.  That's the essential.  And I'd like to emphasize that the entire thing was built around metals and water.

It's interesting to consider our evolving relationship with metals.  As the posterchildren of material strength and functionality, they've been integral to human evolution since the beggining.  Not only do they make respiration and our bodies possible, but we organize human history into the stone age, bronze age, iron age, and so forth.  Now we are in a silicon age.  When you cosider that stone is really composed of metal (metal oxides, actually), then you realize that our history is characterized by the metals we used, which shaped everything about our lives.  This is true still today.

And especially today, with new technologies involving the curious quantum properties of metals constantly evolving, metals become an ever more significant and scarce resource.  Rare metals are used more and more frequently in high tech applications involving lasers and magnetism, powering our gadgets and our clean energy future.  They are the cornerstone of our reality.

Know your metals.  Alchemy never ends.

Vegetable Spirits

 In "The Botany of Desire", Michael Pollan breaks down how four plants, apple, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes, have shaped and manipulated Humanity in profound ways.  In each case, we find a bivalent relationship between man and plant, showering it in praise when times are good, and condemning it when times are bad.  But in each case, bad times are the result of human overindulgence. 

Apples: apples, hailing from Kazakhstan, are normally bitter when planted straight from seed.  Only a select few of the apples might be sweet, and these have to be cloned, as they have been for hundreds of years now.  Bitter apples, however, are perfect for making cider, and hence the primary use of apples in America before the last century was as booze

Tulips: Tulips are prized, obviously for their beauty.  In the seventeenth century, tulips made a huge splash among the Dutch, driving them into what is now known as Tulip Mania.  The price of a single tulip could be as high as that of a coastal estate, or what might now be $10-15 million.  The most beautiful tulips were those with wild colorful designs on their leaves.  Such heady designs were caused, unbeknownst to the Dutch, by viruses.

Cannabis: The cannabis plant is perhaps the most pampered plant on the planet.  Though it is technically a weed, the oily resin produced by females to catch male pollen contains high concentrations of a psychoactive compound, THC, which modulates human consciousness in a (usually) desireable manner, rendering this weed highly desirable.  The plant also has a variety of medicinal effects.  By growing females only, growers put the plants into a state of sexual frustration, a whole group of sexy ladies clothed in dark greens and purples and flickers of red looking hot for a lay and finding none, causing them, in effect, to layer up in more and more sticky jewelery, those cannabinoid dense jewels that glisten on the surface of their buds.

In the late 1980s, it was discovered that there exists a receptor system in the brain that binds THC.  It was later found that there are other molecules, made by the body, that bind to these receptors.  One of these, called anandamide (taken from the Sanskrit 'ananda' = 'bliss'), is a crucial molecule in brain cell communication and has been found to play a major role in the art of updating memory - in some sense, the art of forgetting.  Sound familiar?

Potatoes: Originally cultivated in the Andes by the Inca, potatoes changed the course of history in numerous ways when they were brought to Europe.  On the one hand, they provided a dense bundle of calories that could grow in the harsher conditions of northern Europe, eradicating periodic famines that were known to occur.  On the other hand, countries like Ireland, for example, became so reliant on potatoes that they would practice mono culture, ie. growing only one crop.  So when a ship shows up one evening in the early nineteenth century with a bug that Ireland had never seen before, the country's potato stock got wiped out in a few days.  And since they were growing nothing else, they went very, very hungry

In the modern age, a similar mono-culture excersice exists with regards to potatoes (as well as many other crops, unfortunatley).  McDonalds, an enormous potato buyer, is interested in only one type of potato, the Russet Burbank.  This lone variety is monocropped consistently across the continent, often obliging the use of heavy pesticide coverage.

Farmers who choose biodiversity and organic farming practices can grow a variety of different potato types and employ natural methods to protect plants (like ladybugs).  Since they don't have to spend millions on chemical pesticides and since they can fetch higher prices for the quality of their products in the market, organic farmers are more and more able to keep up economically with their more chemically inclined competitors.

Hats off to you, organic farmer.

This Is NoT Echnology

Nanotechnology drops nanobots
    within the cantaloupe pots.
Nothing is ever the same

Nobody saw, she swept souls with her paw
    she held her melody taught.
Nothing is felt to be sane

Nirod the great, had to care for a state,
    we all knelt for his fate,
Nothing is something in weight

Nilch means the sum, of what would never become
    Nuts, we've only got one ..

Hey! Quit blowing bubbles in my marmalade!

On Wishes and Western Walls

It seems to me that humans have a profound preoccupation with wishing, and I find it interesting because it's probably something other animals don't do.  It's unlikely that a dog or a cat or a rabbit or a mouse or a lizard or a bird or a donkey or a rattle snake will sit back on a rock or a tree and think to themselves, "damn, I wish I had some bubble gum to keep my mouth busy while I hunt for food.". Not because they don't know anything about bubble gum – they’ve probably seen plenty of the stuff in places they shouldn’t - but because they are so damned caught up in the present and the reality of what's given and what needs getting that they haven't the time to devote to wishing.  So instead they set out doing.

Humans, on the other hand, walk around wishing all the time. We happen to be lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on your perspective) to have been endowed with the capacity to step out of the present, to reflect on future and past, and to formulate in abstract sound symbols (language) our desires.  But there's a particularly interesting thing about Human formulations of desire, or wishes: namely, that some wishes are more prestigious, shall we say, than others. And its not that they are made prestigious by their content, or by their contender, but rather by their context.  

So we blow out candles with a wish on our birthday.  We huff on daffodils and sleepies, kiss wishchips and sing to shooting stars. And we humble ourselves before some Lord Almighty on particular days, get all nice and dressed up, and truck our asses down to a building designated for prestigious wishing, or praying, as some have come to call it.

Now, it’s undoubted that there's some sort of relationship between the content of the wish and the seriousness, say, of the context.  Thus, birthday candles are hoped on for presents, shootings stars for romance, and places of worship for health.  But in the end its all the same phenomenon, and you have just as much right to wish on your birthday candles for world peace and ecological health as you do to wish in synagogue for the new Samsung Galaxy S3 Android phone.  Its totally up to you.

However, there is a certain place, equipped with a certain object, that in my cultural tradition of Judaism holds the highest prestige of all wishing platforms.  It is the Western Wall, a two thousand year old stone structure that lies at the heart of half our planet's global politic and cultural air.  For thousands of years, this has been the cornerstone of Jewish wishing, the pinnacle of context.  More psychological energy is spent on that wall than probably any other on the planet.  And I'm not the type to suppose that material objects present in human perception are immune from the influence of psychological energies - that would be completely absurd.  These things gobble up our psychology, and spit back goblets and philosophers’ stones, and an entire tradition of alchemy and interface with the physical world.  

So here we have a wall, a collective stone of philosopher, priest, prophesier, poet, and pious, imbued with the spirit of a race that wants nothing more than to secure its future, and to maintain its home. A structure that attracts people from all over the globe in stone dry white and grey blandness, cooking under the beating sun.  An assembly of stone with absolutely no importance and absolutely all the importance that a group of individual humans could agree to bestow on a physical object.  The pristine prestige of the holy of holies, the sacred haven amidst a world of profane.

I happened to be lucky enough this week to find myself in this presence of our object of discussion, our pristine piece of poetic plain - the holiest of holy walls.  And, indeed, never in my life have I experienced such a powerful place for placing a wish.  Granted I sometimes shiver when I reflect in front of birthday candles on the state of the world and ecological degradation, the demise of Human dignity and intelligence, wishing for a future in which forests and rivers and havens of natural beauty are protected en mass from the onslaught of industrial destruction and noise heavy polluting machines.  But standing in front of that wall sent more than a shiver down my spine. It sent a thunderstorm and an earthquake.  Here was the place where hundreds of thousands had come to stick notes in a wall and cry out to the sky for salvation and good fortune, for themselves and for others, for the end of time.  Here was the place that thousands of young men and women had died for – the place that symbolized the history of an entire Human race.  And here I was, and I could feel all of it.

 I felt the massive energy that poured into that object on a regular basis. I marveled at the capacity for a single material structure to handle such psychological pressure.  Granted, the piece that is wished upon makes up about 1/1000 of the total mass of the wall, the rest being hidden behind houses and other structures, but the outpouring of human will and desire that descends into that place is no less astounding. So I hugged the wall and felt 2000 years of Human History and Wailing. I felt my body become one with the wall, one with history, one with God.  My Being flowed in and out of this great stone structure as I looked within and reflected on the world, and on my position in it. 

I reflected on the hate and the greed that surrounds us.  The misfortune and violence that penetrates so much of our planet.  The despise and demise that is perpetrated by such a large fraction of this giant rock ball’s inhabitants.  I felt the pain that rings out from thousands of years of Human suffering.

I felt the screams of the Earth – her crying.  I felt her shiver and tremble below the immense and unsustainable consumption of her most blessed inhabitants.  I felt her forests and animals disappearing.  Her oceans succumbing to acidity and pollution.  Her skies turning multi coloured in a dazzling array of dis-ease.  Her beautiful, luscious body being raped by The Man, gouged from within, torn from her own soul.  I wept for her, and kissed the wall.

And then I felt the possibility, the opportunity – the meaning of hope and the joy of Becoming.  I felt invigorated and empowered, as if I, a measly Human child of the Western-not-so-wild, might make a difference.  I felt meaning – I felt the power of collective human consciousness, the capacity for a community to agree to bestow in physical objects immense symbolism and psychological energy.  I felt meaning – I felt the capacity for a community to agree.  I felt Humanity.  I feared Humanity.  I loved Humanity.

And then I prayed.

But I prayed not to an abstract figure whose identity is defined by an old book.  I prayed not to a man on the mount with a tablet and a ten-count and a scepter and a beard that flows.  I prayed not to a giant cock commanding lightning shocks and howling at those who disobey.  Nor did I pray, to the Commander of Days, to the Father, to the one who Knows.

But I prayed to myself.  I prayed to an infinite energy.  I prayed to the Way – the Dao.  I prayed to my soul, which is eternal and old, and equivalent with the Universal in every which way.  I prayed for the power and might to know what is wrong and what is right and the courage to act accordingly.  I prayed for our future, for my children and their children, for the generations of Humanity that will follow.  I prayed to find within myself the capacity to lead, to work by example, to be the best damn Human I can be.  And I prayed that others would follow suit.  I prayed that we might all, under the influence of some collective consciousness, be swayed to make better choices – to consider the impact of our actions on the world at large when we make decisions.  To live not just for ourselves, but for the entirety of Life on Earth.

This is our Space Ship.  And we have only one.

Before I had sufficient time to close my prayer, to seal my thoughts, to chant my OMs and wrap my wish in symbolism for insertion into the wall, I was torn away – by the hustle of the tour I was on.  So I walked back to the bus with my grandfather, and erupted into tears.  But these weren’t tears of sadness.  These were tears of energy, of power.  So much energy had descended into my body in those few minutes at the wall that before it had time to flow back, before I had the opportunity to discharge, the connection was severed.  And so I discharged with an outpouring of tears – tears that symbolize the greatness of Human compassion for all Life on this planet.  Tears that symbolize the power of a wish.  Tears for our Future.

It was time to board the bus, to go to a counter-terrorism shooting range, to learn some of the skills used to protect the people of this incredible country so that they can return, once again, to the Wall - so that they can make their wish.

Israel.  A hell of a time.  A heaven of a country.

So I Just Smoked Some DMT

So I just smoked some DMT.  I haven't done that in nearly a year now.  I can't really say why.  To some extent it has to do with fear - fear of the power of this substance, the power of my own mind.  But the last few days have been so wholly engaging and rewarding, so filled with joy and the thrill of living that today I somehow found within me the courage to take a toke.  I wonder if it has something to do with all the time I've spent in the woods this past week, searching for mushrooms?

It was a small dose, no doubt.  The motor hardly even turned on, if at all - no vroom vroom eery cranks turning high flying hereitisgetreadyforblastoff.  No high pitched squeal.  No waterfall of colours.  Simply a heightened sense of things.  Eyes closed, I could hear the whistles of the wind and the sounds of the Guelph city life a little more clearly, a little deeper.  Within myself, I could see the shapes and flow of the waves that make up the underlying layers of my consciousness.  They are so beautiful, and so reminiscent of the patterns I find in natural systems, in fractals.  My hands felt weird.  It dawned on me - not in any kind of intellectual sense, but in a very tactile fashion - how truly weird and wonderful it is to exist, at all, let alone as a Human Being.

I sat still, breathing.  I could sense the profundity of what it was to take a breath.  To inhale air into this fantastically complex holistic being is to ignite the process of creation itself.  It is the very act that sustains life.  And I could feel the air as it swirled into my lungs, twirling off in vortices, embedding itself in the geometry of my consciousness, nourishing body and brain.  I envisioned spiny spiky things.  They reminded me of neurons, with their countless membrane extensions, the dendrites and axon terminals that coordinate the bursts of electrical signals that govern my existence. 

And so I thought about my brain.  Not in any kind of intellectual sense - it had become clear by now that classical, sequential reasoning using linear linguistic structures was a furiously futile endeavour in the face of this beast of beauty we call the Universe - but again in a tactile sense.  I began to really feel my brain.  To feel what it means to be me, subsisting by way of neurochemical geometries.  To feel the countless projections and connections and interwoven circuitry that pervades my skull, and underlies my thinking.

And again I thought, isn't it marvelous that we can communicate at all?

I think I'll have to smoke some more DMT.

Memory vs. Novelty and the Impact of Belief

The human memory system is a profound process that encodes environmental information as physiological signals.  In doing so, it must employ an encoder which manages the task of actually converting the information, which comes in as electrical signals from sensory organs, into a form that it can store, long term, and access with relative ease.

This is a profound task.  Anyone who has ever worked with an audio file knows a thing or two about this task.  Music comes out of a musician in a continuous, analog stream of pressure changes in the air.  Technological equipment must somehow capture these pressure changes, using some sample rate (to catch changes every thouandth of a second, or 44 thousandth, since it cant catch allll of them right down to ultimately small time), and encode the changes as a digital signal, which is stored as a .wav, for example.  This file, despite the losses of information that occurred when the analog signal become digital, is considered lossless.  But the problem is its huge!  The human brain does not have room for lossless data.

Computers have a handy solution for dealing with .wav, namely, to convert it to mp3.  If you take a look at the file sizes, an mp3 is about a tenth the size of the .wav it came from, despite both having the same song and for the same amount of time.  The difference lies in the concept of 'compression.'

The basic ideas emerged from a man named Claude Shannon in the middle of the century.  Shannon was an electronic engineer.  His master's thesis, which was published in 1937, demonstrated that Boolean algebra could be used to build computers, and has been considered the most significant master's thesis ever written (consider that when you're studying the subtle effects of protein A on the localization of protein B's less prominent cuzin, Protein Ba, in some subcompartment of the nucleus in the presence of chemical C and D at room temperature in rainbow trout because it may have something to do with cancer).  But the important ideas about information came out a decade later.

Basically, Shannon defined the entropy of some amount of information to quantify the extent to which one piece of the information could not be predicted from the others.  The higher the entropy, the less predictable the information.  But the power of the idea emerged as a consequence: if there is redundancy in a set of information (parts can be predicted from other parts), then the information can be compressed into a less redundant form.  The entropy of the information is then equal to the entropy of the information compressed into its smallest, non-redundant form.

With music, instead of encoding every piece of the music as it came in through the microphone, we can represent those parts that are similar to earlier parts (say, the same guitar note) by pointing to the earlier instance of the part, instead of actually storing it again.  Naturally, it is far easier to store a 'pointer' in memory than it is to store the whole thing we're 'pointing' to, and thus the file can be compressed significantly.


If you speak to an audiofile, though, you will find that they want nothing to do with compressed music.  It is too 'lossy' - it is missing information, they say.  Naturally, they are right.  The guitar tone that was repeated, that we compressed by pointing to the original instance, may not actually have been exactly the same each time.  In fact, it probably wasn't.  The subtle differences, be it in the way the note was picked, or the way it flowed out of or into other parts of the melody, are lost in the compressed version, and those with trained ears can literally hear this loss in the way the track plays - it doesn't sound real enough.

For most of us, the compressed mp3 file does just fine.  It is efficient and effective in re-presenting a piece of music.  What can we say about the way the brain stores information about itself and its environment?  What algorithms does the brain use to compress such information?  Is the compressed version sufficient?

Information comes into our brain by way of neurons (brain cells) linked to sensory organs (eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue).  It travels as electricity down neuronal wires and flows through complex neural circuits, the structure and dynamics of which 'process' the information.  What this actually means is a raging mystery, and understanding this mystery sits right up front in the auditorium of science's goals.

Lets gloss over the technical neuroscience and consider how we remember things.  By the time we're an adult, say, we have experienced numerous contexts and objects and processes, have assimilated them into our understanding, structured them relative to one another, assigned associations between them, grouped them under labels and classifications, regrouped them, redefined their associations, restructured them, and so on.  The net result is our psychological person - the sum of our memories, valuations, expectations, and opinions.  Any new information comes into the brain through an already established network comprising an individual psychological person.



So how should information form the environment at this stage of the game be remembered.  Ideally, if the information is identical or particularly similar to other memories (to other experiences), then we need not store them twice, and can simply refer to the previous encoding as part of the memory of this 'new' experience.  Similarly, if we expect certain things to happen, and our expectations are corroborated by the outcome of events, then perhaps we need not even remember the new event at all, simply our expectation, and the fact that our expectation is true.


Now, I hope you can see the danger in this last assertion.  Indeed, this fact lies at the heart of all Human bias.  We see what we expect to see, we hear what we want to hear, we feel what we want to feel.  More often than we might suppose, we witness something which does not adhere to our expectations.  Nevertheless, we massage into being a new memory that supposes it actually did happen according to the way we expected it to, and thereby save energy on memorizing new and unexpected information.  Partial neglect breeds higher efficiency.


It seems reasonable that the brain should evolve like this - to be able to store new experiences using less energy by assimilating them into old, expected, experiences.  To compress information by squeezing it into a framework, a belief system, a system of expectations.  To consolidate one's perspectives and confirm one's own biases.  To be right.  It is easy to know you are right.


But to be wrong?  Novel information is energy expensive.  It requires more activity, more attention, more Being, to assimilate the new.  It suggests that we were not, in fact, completely right.  Suggests that there is more to learn (that there is infinite to learn), that the world is dynamic and we must be too.  Suggests that stagnation can corrupt the soul.  Does it suggest that we should just forget the old?  Let go of memory of past and future?  Be entirely open and aware of the moment, only memorizing with perfect accuracy what Is, Now?