Brain = Computer. It’s a pretty simple equation, one kids have been learning for decades now, and it does offer up a pretty clear idea of the basic function of that marvelous, squishy mass of stuff inside our skulls.
Well, the website PhysOrg.com is reporting that one new study hints that Brain = Wireless Hub might be more accurate.
Here’s the gist: At any given time, your brain is the destination of an incredible number of signals. Some of those signals offer conflicting information, or suggest courses of action that are mutually exclusive — the article at PhysOrg suggests grabbing a hot platter, where one signal is telling you to drop it before your fingers burn, while the other is telling you not to drop it because your dinner will wind up all over the floor.
The article quotes Ezequiel Morsella, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University and the study’s lead author, who says this means the brain is less like a single computer and more like “a set of computers that control different tasks, consciousness is the WiFi network that allows different parts of the brain to talk to each other and decide which action ‘wins’ and is carried out.”
Furthermore, PhsyOrg reported, “The study finds that we are only aware of competing actions that involve skeletal muscles that voluntarily move parts of the body, the bicep for example, rather than the muscles in the digestive tract or the iris of the eye.”
There is actually a Fun Home Brain Experiment you can perform along these lines. It’s called a Stroop Task, and it works like this: Print the words GREEN and YELLOW, one over the other, on a piece of paper (or go to this web site). However, use yellow letters for the word GREEN, and green letters for the word YELLOW. Show it to a friend (because it’s always more fun to experiment on your friends) and ask them to name the color of the top word. There’s a very good chance that instead of saying “yellow,” which is the color of the ink, they’ll say “green,” because they’re conditioned to read the word.
The study was released in this week’s edition of the journal Emotion.