Inside the Mind

I am convinced ( I believe I’ve gone on the record with this but, if not, I will now) that there will be an absolute explosion of knowledge, maybe even of brainpower, within the next couple of years.  It may take the form of new supercomputers, or some  sort of AI, it may take the form of some man-machine hybrid, or the key may lie within the human brain itself, which we are learning more about all the time.Scientists are exploring the mind more eagerly than Spanish conquistadors explored South America in the 1500s.  The pace of discovery is so fast that there are two major developments on the science page today.  Two on one day.  And probably more tomorrow.  These things used to be decades, even centuries apart.  The pace is dizzying.

First is this story, about how they wired babies’ heads (the more docile babies.  Lots of babies were kept out of the experiment for being “too squirmy.”  I think that should be accounted for when analyzing the results) and showed them photographs to see if they were responding to the outside world, i.e. if they had awareness of themselves as something distinct from the rest of the universe, and they found that 5 month old babies are pretty well conscious.

The Future

This is about where most parents probably figured.  It’s about the time when they start recognizing individuals, trying to grab  people’s fingers, turn over by themselves and make sounds that aren’t just screaming at the top of their lungs, which is an instinct we are apparently born with.

So, on the one hand, they are proving the obvious.  Still, it’s pretty amazing that they can  read the brain well enough to prove that scientifically.

Second was this article, in which scientists have discovered that when people drink beer, a neural transmitting chemical called dopamine (why do you think they call it dopamine?) is released in the brain, thus causing pleasure.  So, people drink beer because it makes them feel good.  Again, the experiment seems to be proving the obvious.

The weird thing is, though, non-alcoholic beer can have the same effect.  The addiction may have more to do with the dopamine than with the alcohol.  This means it could be possible to devise a test, that everybody can take before they take their first drink.  A little non-alcoholic beer, test your dopamine level, and a doctor can tell you before you have your first drink if you will be an alcoholic or not.

I don’t know how much this would prevent alcoholism since most alcoholics become alcoholics because they really enjoy drinking and they don’t even necessarily see alcoholism as a negative condition until they’ve tried it out for a while.

It might help some people, though.

In any event, these are two very different studies, but they converge in a way – together,  they give us a more complete view of the brain.  And what a magnificent piece of work it is.