Understanding the brain is the first step in helping you hack it.

Out of all the different ways we learn it seems that it can be boiled down to one, completely reductionist theory. When we zoom out and look, it seems we only really learn one way. Through association. The most important word in understanding human learning is “is” Yep! We’re gonna do the Bill Clinton thing and ask “what is is.”

Is is everything. Everything we learn will ever learn is a function of “is.”

Your high school teacher stands in front of the class, shows a picture of an atom and says “this is an atom.” You now know that that picture is a representation of an atom. The teacher says “An atom is one of the smallest building blocks of life. You know what “life” is you know what a “building block” is, because earlier in your life, those things had already been associated.

There seems to be only two parts of human learning, File creation and file linking.

Now if you read this blog, you’ll recognize the following analogy. If you’re familiar with it already, read again anyway because it fits into the puzzle.

Let’s take a 18 month old child named Michael. His mom pulls out a picture book and shows him a picture of a cat. His mom says “C-ah-TT.” Cat. Now the group of neurons that were responsible for the picture (visual representation) of the cat all fire at once and at the same time a group of neurons representing the sound “C-ah-TT.” Also, all these things are being recorded.

The two things we spoke about earlier happened here. File creation and file linking. It’s debatable if “file creation” even happens at all, since much of that can be attributed to linking as well. But for the sake of this post, lets say it does. Two files were created. One file containing the image of the cat. And one image containing the sound “C-ah-TT.”

After a few repetitions the sound “ C-ah-TT” then gets linked with the image of the cat. Now if that child were go to a friends house and play with a cat in real life, it will also get linked with emotions. Possibly warm cuddly feelings of a cute friendly little cat.

It’s a truism of neuroscience that “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Those two sets of neurons started firing together, which makes them fire together in the future. When Ivan Pavlov rang his bell and delivered meat powder, the dogs “bell file” neurons started firing at the same time as the “yummy delicious meat file” neurons. Those neurons fired together, wired together and you couldn’t have one without the other. Whenever he rang the bell, the dogs salivated because those neurons were wired together.

Now, going back to the cat example, I used this for a very specific reason. While you thought I was only reiterating, that was only part of my motivation. I also reiterated to illustrate the following: What if, in the last post I called that whole idea “The Theory of Relations.” Then in this post, instead of reexplaining it and retyping the 2 paragraphs, I could have simply referred to idea “The Theory of Relations” and provided you remembered, you know what it meant.

The brain really IS much like a computer.

If I had titled it, then when I mentioned “The Theory of Relations” you would pull up the file and know exactly what I was talking about without having to reiterate. If you wanted to dig deeper into that file, provided you remembered you’d be able to think of different details of it. You would realize it was actually made up of many smaller files. Files about what a cat is, about what words are, what emotions are. Possibly files about classical conditioning, files about psychology.

These are almost akin to a “Shortcut” or “Alias” files on your computer. The computer doesn’t need to store the same information twice, because a small representation is linked to the full file. So it uses a Thumbnails. As you’re going through your computer you can see a small version of the file without having to open the entire thing. If you needed to open the entire thing, you could.

Now where this gets interesting is we now know that memories aren’t actually stored as is a memory is reconstructed in the fly using bits and pieces of different information.

It’s almost as if your computer reconstructed every file on the fly.

Well, it actually does! See, on a physical level your hard drive is only a huge set of 0’s and 1’s. A laser shoots at your hard drive and either reflects light or doesn’t. These are understood as 0’s or 1's.

And amazingly, depending on what you’re doing, your computer pulls out exactly which set of “0s and 1” it needs at any given time. Every time you do something, it is literally reconstructing data. Certain files tell the computer exactly where to find the exact 0’s and 1’s it needs at any given time.

Now the brain works in a similar fashion. Certain ‘files’ which are made of sets of neurons tell the brain where to find the exact information it needs at any given time. These ‘files’ I speak of are referring to groups of neurons that fire together to make a coherent idea/thought/picture/concept that can be understood. The brain, just like the hard drive, doesn’t have actual files. The computer has the sets of 0’s and 1’s that tells the computer where to find other sets of 0’s and 1’s which is cleverly designed and combined with a monitor which results in you being able to see pictures of your Dog’s 7th birthday party (what were you thinking when you bought him that party hat??) And it all works flawlessly.

Lets say you remember last year’s thanksgiving dinner. One set of neuron tells another set or neuron to find the set of neurons to find the information on turkey. Then another set of neurons finds the set of neurons that contains information on your Aunt Suzie’s terrible sweater she just has to wear at every get together. Another set of neurons gets the image of the plate, and the gravy, and the mashed potatoes and it puts all these bits of information together to forma coherent picture which are linked together in a neural network.. But many of the sets of neuron are used for many, many different purposes. Your brain doesn’t need a different ‘file’ for every different idea of Turkey. Turkey is turkey. You know what it is. It uses much of the same data (neurons) as when you think about the time you had turkey for dinner with your family.

This is a video from the Blue Brain Project where neuroscientists are building a model of the human brain from the ground up. This video shows how the electrical impulses and how neurons fire during thought

If the axons of those neurons are myelinated through repeated use, the signal jumps across way faster, making things much easier to remember. Or behaviors much easier to perform.

So to illustrate another point going back to Thanksgiving, if you zoomed in on the idea of potatoes it would open up a bunch of different files regarding potatoes. Maybe data regarding how you like your potatoes (extra butter, garlic,) depending on the context and what’s important at that moment. Those same potato ‘files’ might be linked to a bunch of AMAZING recipes you have. But if you were cooking you, using your brain would access the recipes files because that’s what’s needed at the time. But if you were thinking about the memories of last years Thanksgiving dinner, those recipes wouldn’t be important or relevant for that.

Every thought is reconstructed using little bits of data and firing different sets of.

So lets zoom out a little bit. If neurons are the equivalent of 0’s and 1' on a hard drive, lets look at some of the software that’s written. We’re going to use the programming language R and even if you’re unfamiliar with the language you’ll find this section helpful in understanding how the brain encodes and stores information. Because coding works in much the same way as the brain.

In R or python(or most coding languages) you can set different variables to represent different things.

1000 -> Y

This equation would pump the number 1000 into the Variable Y. Or similarly you could put:

1000 = Y

But either way, whenever you used the code Y, it would be replaced with the number 1000.

Y + 5 = 1005.

Remember 18 month old Micheal who learned about cats?

Well this would be recorded as a piece of software on his mental hard drive

cat_picture.jpg + mom_saying_cahtt.wav + fluffy_cute_cat_AWWWW.emotion -> cat.pkg

So all those things are encoded together into the idea “cat.” And each one of those files, when opened up, frovide their own code.

turkey.jpg + aunts_sweater.jpg + uncle_jims_bear_shaving_story.pdf -> thanksgiving.pkg

There’s your memory of Thanksgiving dinner. The .pkg file tells the brain where to find each file. Each file can point to different locations too.

balancing.js + peddling.js + turning.js -> riding_bike.app

That’s one file that will never be erased ;) The brain bundles information so it doesn’t have to store all that info in numerous times. Sometimes it pulls bits and pieces from different files, sometimes it needs the whole thing.

Now with this new understanding of the brain, let’s go back and reread the first paragraph in this post:

Your high school teacher stands in front of the class, shows a picture of an atom and says “this is an atom.” You now know that that picture is a representation of an atom. The teacher says “An atom is one of the smallest building blocks of life. You know what “life” is you know what a “building block” is, because earlier in your life, those things had already been associated.

So there you have it. How your brain encodes and stores information. In later post we’re going to see how this information can help us hack the brain.