Of course, the brain does this daily in the form of dreams. Every morning when I wake up, I can recall between 10 minutes to an hour of dreams. The people who populate my dreams aren't static, but they're seemingly as real and fully formed as anyone else I meet. I've dreamt of fabricated people I love and feel I've known for years, and miss them when I wake up.
I've speculated about delusions and hallucinations quite a bit, particularly in the realm of schizophrenia. From an information point of view, how do humans come up with novel ideas, and how do they evaluate the utility of those ideas? The brain starts life knowing little about the world. Babies have to learn how to interpret their senses, which are initially an undifferentiated flood of information. Their experience is roughly akin to an LSD trip. Somehow, the brain begins to organize the input, and form associations between various inputs. It develops a preference for interpreting the environment, so that, by the time we're adults, our senses hold less ambiguity and novelty. When we see a basketball, we know it's not a face.
Adult brains are thus very constrained in how they process input, which chokes off novelty. Ambiguous input, such as an ink blot test or a garbled radio station can generate some novelty, as the brain finds multiple potential matches for the input. For the most part, however, our brains are pretty fixed in how they interpret things.
Schizophrenia exists worldwide at about a 1% incidence, which is fairly unusual for a disorder so maladaptive. I wonder if perhaps the mechanisms that underlie it serve the function of allowing the brain to interpret things in a more plastic, childlike way. It generates more novel ideas, though not necessarily good ones. It's creative, but unstructured.
Drugs can also allow individuals to perceive things in new ways. Hallucinogens seem to make the user examine their senses more acutely, and with less predefinition than usual. They take the brain off autopilot. Input isn't automatically routed to the same, established nodes, but instead given evaluation by different regions of the brain, resulting in novel experience.
The general tendancy of the brain is automatic confabulation. When confronted by something unclassified, it comes up with the closest interpretation it can find. We don't notice this happening, and it's usually pretty accurate. It can be remarkably off, though, as case studies of stroke vicitims show, and the person is still unaware of this.
Most of my thoughts on this are based upon the concept that the brain is no different than a computer. Computers cannot create information, only manipulate it according to fixed rules. The brain, being physical, is held to similar constraints. We'll never have a literally original thought, only a speciously original combination of existing thoughts. Fortunately, our environment and sociability allow us access to a horde of raw material to work with.
19 Nov 2007, 8:21 pm
