When asked about the origin of my thoughts and decisions in my brain I began to create analogies to my brain. This weekend while staring at the ocean i also began to make connections to waves. Analogies between computers and the brain are many but the wave analogy really helped me understand. As a child i always wondered where waves in the ocean came from. This subject was especially difiicult because no matter what i could not trace the origin of a wave to the shore, much like i cannot see the origin of my thoughts turn in to an action with my body. In computers, tracing an input to an output seems more possible. The fact is because i cannot look inside my brain, I have difficulties understanding where and how my thoughts originate.
After falling asleep on a plane I began to comptemplate when do i have thoughts? Why would i have a thought? With this line of thinking, I began to see my thoughts as reactions to the world surrounding me. While I am known for being highly tangential, in my mind my thoughts all follow a clear and logical chaing of reasoning (at that moment). Like how something happens and my brain is “reminded” of a analogous situation and begin churning out ideas. (Please note on the plane I almost said omg my brain works like Metacat! )
Furthermore, on the plane a baby began to cry. Besides thinking to myself how that baby should shut up i began to think does the baby know how to do anything but cry. Besides being cute, babies, at first, cry, eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. But as babies mature they begin to ask for food, learn how to use the toilet, and play. This thought process lead me to the idea that just like how language is learned so is thinking. Babies initailly cry whenever “something” is wrong. I do not know if babies know whether they initially know what is wrong but they cry. Because we learn to communicate and function on higher levels , I thought just how language was being “taught” in Elman’s paper and to Metacat, functioning is being taught to babies. Intially all they know how to do is cry, but after a while they learn how to function based on given situations.
Initially this question really perplexed me becasue i was thinking of ideas as spontaneously generated objects but now i see them as reactions to the internal and external stimuli i experience. So much like a computer, inputs are given and throught a network of neurons the brain returns thoughts and ideas for the situation. While waves aren’t quite as analogous, they gave my brain an input with in combination of the prompt an idea of how my brain creates thoughts. (Now I am relatively certain that there is no little dude in my brain that controls me 🙂 ).