Way back, I had read Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden". And I remember how he talked about topics such as anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science to give a perspective of how human intelligence evolved. His language was quite simple. I really enjoyed reading his books. Years later many other authors had success in works of popular science like Stephen Hawking, Robert M. Pirsig and others. But I have never enjoyed any of them as much as I enjoy Carl Sagan's books.
Lately I found Hulu.com had some videos on Carl Sagan's series called the Cosmos. I started watching them and today's blog is about one of them called "The persistence of memory". All his episodes start with a violin. Further on, he narrates his findings while sitting in a spaceship shuttle cruising different planets and galaxies.
In this episode, Carl tells us that an intelligent being has two kinds of memory storage, first one being the genes. All the intelligent beings have propagated their entire life lessons through the genes. Handing strands of genes down to a future generation is like giving them an operating system(OS) . OS has the most basic operations that a human being requires. We know the operating system do not change frequently and the same way the genes are less frequently altered. May be once in few million years.
A virus has about 10,000 instructions or strands coded to do its job. The job being to reproduce and infect. Bacteria, 1 million instructions. Amoeba, 400 million instructions. But human beings, about 5 billion instructions. But when the environment is changing at a fast pace, 5 billion instructions may fall short. And hence we have second memory bank which is much larger than the genetic database. The second data bank is the brain. Brain fundamentally is made up of network of neurons. And here in the brain all the day to day memories are stored like an orchestra or past events, pictures. Not only does brain have memory storage but also the capacity to generate ideas and test their validity.
Lastly if there was an Extra Terrestrial life form may be they could be just like us or may be more advanced than us. May be their neurons were superconductors which would allow them to think faster than us or their neurons could communicate over a radio communication channel allowing them to form a collective intelligence.
Lately I found Hulu.com had some videos on Carl Sagan's series called the Cosmos. I started watching them and today's blog is about one of them called "The persistence of memory". All his episodes start with a violin. Further on, he narrates his findings while sitting in a spaceship shuttle cruising different planets and galaxies.
In this episode, Carl tells us that an intelligent being has two kinds of memory storage, first one being the genes. All the intelligent beings have propagated their entire life lessons through the genes. Handing strands of genes down to a future generation is like giving them an operating system(OS) . OS has the most basic operations that a human being requires. We know the operating system do not change frequently and the same way the genes are less frequently altered. May be once in few million years.
A virus has about 10,000 instructions or strands coded to do its job. The job being to reproduce and infect. Bacteria, 1 million instructions. Amoeba, 400 million instructions. But human beings, about 5 billion instructions. But when the environment is changing at a fast pace, 5 billion instructions may fall short. And hence we have second memory bank which is much larger than the genetic database. The second data bank is the brain. Brain fundamentally is made up of network of neurons. And here in the brain all the day to day memories are stored like an orchestra or past events, pictures. Not only does brain have memory storage but also the capacity to generate ideas and test their validity.
Lastly if there was an Extra Terrestrial life form may be they could be just like us or may be more advanced than us. May be their neurons were superconductors which would allow them to think faster than us or their neurons could communicate over a radio communication channel allowing them to form a collective intelligence.
