If you have read the well-known book, "On Intelligence", you would agree with me that our brain is actually not a unique brain. Indeed, it is a collection of about 100,000 (one hundred thousand) mini brain. Or 100,000 mini columns as named by the author of the book. What does that mean?
Our brain is a result of several levels of evolution. The first level is a part of the brain that controls basic needs such as breathe and eye movement. Sometimes we call this part the white matter. On top of the white matter, we have the so-called "gray matter", or neocortex. With neocortex, we can volunteerily control many muscles like walking and dancing. In AI, once we talk about human brain then that usually mean the neocortex.
The neocortex is a thin layer, maybe about one inch. It is divided as mini-columns. There are about 100,000 mini-columns that are interconnected. Each mini column has millions of neurons (aka nerve cells in brain) and plays a role as a sub-brain. We hypothesis that it is a fault-tolerance mechanism to guarantee that our brain still functions well if some neurons die.
For each event that comes to the brain, around 2% of the mini-columns are activated. Each activated mini-column will produce one decision for each event. Then all activated mini-columns will vote (simply majority voting) to have a consensus about an event. That explains why sometimes we see an object that is not clear and we guess that it can be a dog or a horse, since mini-columns cannot reach consensus.
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President Obama once said that the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" will be one of the most important book in the next 500 years. This book helps us aware about the "unawareness phenomenon" in our brain. The authors give us a simple example: we usually don't aware that we are driving, except when the street become strange or crowded. That is because for a task that we are very familiar, connections between neurons in the brain become fat (with lateral meaning) just like a highway of information. Signal from our senses to brain and from brain to muscles if transmitted on these highways will be super fast and does not loss on the way. In short, that is the mechanism for all of our habits, from walking to driving.
(We should note that there are two type of unawareness actions. The first one is innate that we don't learn, like heart beat. The second one is what we learn to be very familiar, like walking. The innate actions is from the white matter that connects directly to spine and muscles, and thus it has priority. In this blog, we always talk about the second type when we mention the unawareness actions).
The unawareness actions explain all habits in our life that we usually don't care about. Many of them are bad habits, like smoking or sugar addiction. Here is the interesting thing: some "diseases" are actually just bad habit. Which ones?
I am mentioning about sciatica and backpain. Don't you believe that sciatica and backpain are just another bad habits like smoking?
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