The Mind

How does the mind work? In a recent preaching that I attended, it was told that the mind is a computer that God invented, and instead of using that computer to the fullest, we use an external computer and worry about its well-being. That may be so, but it still is fascinating how those grey cells work up there!

One of my previous posts was named Random. The other day, I was eating Idly-wada in a fast food with 1 bowl of chutney and 2 bowls of sambar. The mind was processing randomly and I was dipping idly and wada, one after the other, in one of those 3 bowls in no particular order. The hand was just going from one bowl to the other, sometimes using logic (the preferred bowl had more content than the other 2) but most times with no real logic. It sort of reminded me of a function commonly called random() which many software languages support. Perhaps the mind too has this kind of a function!

The other day, I was seeing a TV show called The Mentalist on AXN. The host of the show, I forgot his name, was an ace in reading people’s minds. And not just that, he was making one person from the audience to read another person in the audience’s mind as well! It really was mind blowing in fact. The icing was when he got onto the stage a single (marital-ly speaking) girl and asked all single guys to stand up. The girl was asked to choose one among those single guys standing and mentally think about his features like hair, height, build, etc. She was asked to choose the one whom she felt most attracted to. Once this was done, she was asked to face the Mentalist while he started reading her mind. He knocked off the single guys one by one by asking them gracefully to ‘Please take your seat’ and finally chose one guy and asked him to come and stand behind her. This the guy did and when the girl was asked to turn around, she was stunned to see that the guy whom she had mentally selected was the one standing in front of her. The guy and the girl hugged one another and one does not know what happened next but it was nice to hear when the Mentalist said, “What other shows take weeks to achieve, we did it in 3 minutes!”

It really is quite a thing, our mind! The more fuel you add to it, the more it stores! There really is no end to the amount of storage capacity that it has, if we really test it out. Like in olden days, we used to memorize so many of our friends and relatives telephone numbers. But with the advent of mobile phones which act as a telephone diary as well, hardly any number is memorized.

The same with the calculator. Even when a simple math is done in the mind, to double check the mind’s efficiency, either the mobile phone’s calculator is used or a physical calculator or the calculator on the computer. Or worse, the simple math is done on either of those without even using the mind!

So what does this mean? While the technology has eased Man in using his brains, it also has made Man lazy and incompetent enough to think. And ‘thinking’ was what Man was credited for in the first place, when compared to animals. Which brings to the point:

Has technology which was invented primarily due to Man’s intelligence now making Man less intelligent? Are we humans, who are said to have evolved from animals, evolving back into animals again?!

But then thats just a negative way of thinking. For Man continues to churn out one new technology after the other. Couple of decades ago, a 1 GB hard disk had to be carried in an airplane. Now it can be kept in a wallet. While the earlier man thought of fossil fuels for energy generation, the later years saw solar cells to generate energy using Solar energy. The current man is now thinking of going one step ahead with artifical photosynthesis and electricity generation.

The mobile phones are getting shorter and smarter. Communication from one place to another has become as easy as learning A,B,C. Mode and speed of transportation is changing gears so often that the day is not far when package trips to Moon are organised with add-ons of nearby planets! The slimness of the Television and laptops is remarkable. The mobile banking and shopping has made life even more safer and easier. And so on and so forth.

Technology is growing at such a rapid pace that although lives are getting easier, the only thing thats getting tougher is to be continuously abreast and aware of the technology thats now surrounding us!