I'm sure you've all heard of and read - to nauseating levels in pop culture, sometimes - the saying that "variety is the spice of life." I'm sure at least some of you have read nerdlikejazzy's recent viral blogpost '18 Things I Wish Someone Would’ve Told Me at 18,' point number 4 of which elaborates on "exploring new ideas and opportunities often." In this post, which in all likelihood will be my last one for the next 6 months owing to my busy schedule, I'll add a few points to support the imperative of varied experiences in life. Don't worry, I'm not gonna get into any heavy-handed, pseudophilosophical discussions about the meaning of life or the "painful journey" we call life. I'll try and work it out from a scientific perspective only and skim the surface of the scientific basis that substantiates the claim.
The American psychologist Fred Attneave writes about the human brain:
"If there were just one brain cell to cope with each image that we can distinguish in all its presentations, the volume of the brain would have to be measured in cubic light years."
Meaning that there is just a tiny bit of information (information as in an image) that can be stored in and processed by one brain cell, and since we come across literally infinite images (well not literally!) each waking moment of our lives, each human brain would have to be the size of a galaxy to be able to successfully process all the images (or other information) we see at any given time, all the time. But we know this isn't true, since we know how big our brains really are - anywhere from the size of a coconut, for most of us, to the size of a peanut, for some people like Arindam Chaudhuri and his disciples. Despite the size that is really required of the brain to process information, our brain does it with extraordinary precision using a size that is only a billionth of what is required. How so, though?
The brain has a workaround trick to solve this, discovered independently in the 1950s by Barlow and Attneave. It has evolved a very sophisticated and complex system of erasing redundancy. Redundancy is the opposite of information; redundancy is a measure of unsurprisingness, information a measure of surprisingness. To illustrate this with an analogy, imagine what a worthless waste of paper it would be if the newspapers reported every single day that the sun rose in the east that day. It's redundant information, and everyone knows without being reminded that the sun rises in the east everyday. However, in the unlikely event that the sun rises in the west on a fateful day, that would be something of a news to report. That is a change from the daily routine of sun's rising in the east, and newspapers will not fail to report it the following day. The information content of it would be high, measured as the 'surprise value' of the message. The brain works in a very similar way, regardless of the body sense to which it is responding or the memory it is storing, as there is only a limited number of neurons for the brain to work with. In fact, the entire nervous system works this way. I'll explore two examples, of senses in particular.
The eye. Suppose you are looking at a black rectangle on a white background. The whole scene is projected on to your retina - you can think of the retina as a screen covered with a dense carpet of tiny photocells, the rods and cones. In theory, each photocell could report to the brain the exact state of the light falling upon it. But the scene we are looking at is massively redundant. Cells registering black are overwhelmingly likely to be surrounded by other cells registering black. Cells registering white are nearly all surrounded by other white-signalling cells. The important exceptions are cells on edges. Those on the white side of an edge signal white themselves and so do their neighbours that sit further into the white area. But their neighbours on the other side are in the black area. Using a phenomenon called 'lateral inhibition,' the brain can reconstruct the whole scene with just the retinal cells on edges firing. There is a massive savings in nerve impulses. The eye tells the brain only about edges and the brain fills in the boring bits between. Once again, redundancy is removed and only information gets through. Any image you see, including these words as you read as well as of anything else that is laying by your computer, is reconstructed in your brain through this same process of inhibition of redundancy.
You can see this lateral inhibition in action in this optical illusion below. Cover the central divide between the two shades of grey with your index finger and stare at your finger for a few seconds. Now both sides appear to be made of the same shade of grey, or very nearly the same. Now move your finger off the screen, and the difference between the shade drastically increases. Can you reason why?
The ear. Hearing, all audible sounds as analogous to images, works very similar to the eye as described above: by cutting down on the redundancy in the pitch of the sound, filtering in only the information about the variation in pitch, and then the brain processing and reconstructing the sound - all in real time. But with sound, there is an additional factor: of time itself. To explain just how dramatically the brain filters out redundancy, let me cite this study conducted by researchers at Rice University. Two groups of subjects were made to listen to two sound pieces respectively. The first sound, given to the first group, was of constant pitch whereas the second sound, given to the second group, was of varying pitch. The groups were not told of the duration of the sound they were listening to, and none of them had clocks or watches or any other way of measuring time. After both groups finished listening to the sounds, when asked to guess the duration of the sound piece they just listened to, all the subjects of the first group (the constant-pitch group) reported a duration that was much less than the duration reported by the subjects of the second group - despite the fact that both sound pieces were of the exact same duration! The first group subjects' brains not only cut down on the redundancy of constant pitch but also reduced the subjective perception of time that was associated with the redundant information. The second group subjects' brains, however, because of the variation in pitch and thus more 'surprise content,' were able to store not only more information about the sound but also more of the overall time associated with it.
Where I am going with all these illustrations and citations should be clear at this point. The reason why four years of college feel like four months is because of the same reason that the brain remembers a constant-pitch sound to be shorter than it is: repetitive, routine tasks are compacted by the brain into just a few, typical, representative prototypes and stored into memory locations where the subjective perception of time is also cut short in accordance with those compressed memories, thereby filtering out not only the redundancies of the experience but also much of the perception of time that the experience is made of. This essentially is the same way our brain retains boiled-down memories over an entire lifetime.
So, to counter this seeming 'drawback' in the design of our brain, to keep life from feeling short-lived and having passed in a flash, to avoid the perception of time having flown like an arrow, it's most advisable to have different kinds of varied experiences that the brain can perceive as information or 'surprise content', to try new things if only for the sake of the feel, to break the patterns of tedious, recurrent routine that come off as redundant, and also to collect as many photos, videos and souvenirs of the experience - because remember this: there's only so much the brain can remember.
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