Home

                           Table of Contents

1.    Burry Your Time Sense and Relax 

2.    Cenglish , a New Computer Language

3.    A Human Computer Model  

Bury your Time Sense and Relax.....

' Time Sense ', the Root Cause of Hyper Tension :

We hear 'Busy Bodies' often saying ' Sorry, I am busy, I have no Time'. So much so, one wonders how these people spent ten long months during their gestation period without doing anything, or, how they 'wasted' their childhood days chasing little things in life. Should we make our life so busy that we do not have any time left to relax and enjoy small things in our life and become victims of Hyper Tension and Diabetes the two evil hall marks of the modern society ? After all what is the purpose of this life?

A peep into the Historical need for Time :

In the prehistoric days people used to live a Nomadic life wandering from place to place in search of food and used to stay in caves. There was no concept of time and the life was basically a struggle for existence. Then came the River Valley Civilizations when people got settled on the banks of rivers and mostly made their livings by engaging themselves in Agriculture. Agriculture gave them security of food and more leisure. People started using their brains to develop better tools useful in their daily life. Somewhere down the line, they felt the need to sequence their day to day activity and the the concept of Time came into existence. Sand Clocks and Shadow Clocks were developed to measure Time. From those early days, we have come a long way to the present Industrialised World. But in the process, we became more greedy and in our quest to conquer the world, we keep racing against time keeping ourselves busy all the time. Are we not attaching undue importance to our Time Sense?

What is Time after all ?, Does it really exist ?

We live in a dynamic world where Change is the only thing that does not change. Everything around us keeps on changing, the planets spin on their axes and also rotate around the star, seasons change in rotation, days and nights keep cycling, temperature, pressure, living organisms, all keep changing. Some of the changes like rotation of planets, seasonal changes and day/night cycling are all repetitive in nature. Also there are Periodic Oscillations of Pendulums, Electromagnetic Waves and particles of matter like Atoms and Molecules. So much so, that the French Scientist Louis de Broglie has proposed the theory of Duality of Matter. According to his theory, all matter in the universe can exist in two states as particles and waves. According to him, even a football in motion has its own wave nature , but its oscillating amplitude is so small that it is negligible compared to its physical size. It is as if the Greek God Atlas is still having fun by rocking the whole universe to his own rhythms.

In order to quantise the rate of change of variables, we have introduced the concept of Time. 'It is an abstract entity based on the elapsed duration it takes for some of the stable periodic oscillations in nature to complete a fixed number of oscillations'.

What happens if the Time stops?

If we remove the sense of time from our mind, we will still see the whole world around us changing as usual, but Time, ... no way, it does not change, at least I can not see it, unless I look at my clock, which is again an oscillating product made by us to give us a time reference. Time is 'Only important when we want to measure the rate of change of a variable or if we need to schedule our activity during our awakened state of mind'. Our mind has got a sticky nature. It binds itself to objects which it thinks is important. So, it is fully within our control to keep our perception of time the right way and avoid giving too much importance to it.

Switch off your Time Sense and Relax your Body and Mind :

For perfect relaxation of our Body and Mind, one should learn to switch off the Time Sense and give Time only due importance it deserves. Daily take some time out of the busy schedule, switch off the Time Sense and either fully relax doing nothing, or engage oneself in a nonroutine, enjoyable activity. By slowly and steadily convincing the Mind, over a period, one can learn oneself the process of enjoying a wholesome life of peace and tranquility and bid good bye to Hyper Tension and Diabetes which are triggered due to lack of relaxation in our daily life.

CEnglish - A New Computer Language

Back Ground:

We have today many Computer Languages like BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, C, to name a few of them. But, I wonder why nobody so far has thought of introducing a new 'Communication Language' that would have eased 'Text-to-Speech' and 'Speech-to-Text' conversions and could have been used for communicating with Robots. Unfortunately, the world we live in today is so much fragmented by multiple languages that it looks highly impossible to adopt any single language for computer based communications. However, with the increasing applications of computers in our day to day life, introduction of a standardized communication language for computer applications will ultimately turnout to be the single unifying thread for our present day world, torn into pieces by language barriers.

May be in the olden days, Emperors and Kings used to encourage development of Regional Languages in order to establish their identity and to partly ensure security by isolating the people on language basis.But today, we are promoting the concept of 'Global Village' and the Governments are busy, trying to integrate the world resources under a single umbrella for the benefit of the humanity as a whole. Fortunately for us, the Computers, and Communication Technology such as Internet and Mobile Phones, have largely contributed their share for the cause of 'Global Integration'. The need of the hour is, therefore, to adopt a standard language for computer communication for the whole world.

Preferred Attributes of the Computer Language :

- The language should be as close as possible to a popular language such as English, say ' CEnglish' so that it is easy for majority of people to learn and use.
- The words used should have only one meaning per pronunciation of the word.
- The spellings and pronunciations should match exactly.
- There should be a standard way of deriving different usages of words, like singular, plural, past tense, present tense etc.from the basic words.

An Implementation Exercise for CEngligh Dictionary :

This exercise is only to explore the tip of the ice berg of the stupendous task involved in adopting a popular language such as English for computer communication purposes.

- Adoption of only single words with unique pronunciation :

Let us now take a simple word like 'write'. Since we want to avoid similar sounding words from our new 'Dictionary', we have to consider reassignment of the present word 'right' also. So, we totally reject the word 'write' from our dictionary and replace it with the word 'pen' as verb. Now, coming to the word 'right', it is used in many contexts. Let us consider two of them for the time being, viz., meaning 'correct' as in 'You are Right' and also for indicating direction as in ' Right Side'. So, in this case we will retain the word 'Right' to indicate only direction in our new dictionary and will decide to use the word 'Correct' to indicate the correctness of an action or a statement.

- One-to-one Matching of Spellings with Pronunciation :

This is a very difficult criteria to implement using a standard language. But if we have the will, we should be able to come out of our worm hole of mental block and find an acceptable solution to the problem. After all, CEnglish being a derivative of our well known English language, should be much easier for any one to learn compared to any of the existing computer languages. So, now let us take two words, viz., 'Cut' and 'Put'. If we decide to retain 'put' in our dictionary, meaning the letter 'U' will always be used as in 'put', we should either remove totally the word 'Cut' from our dictionary and use an equivalent word, say 'slice', or, we could add a new letter to our 'Alphabets', which in combination with the letter 'T' will give the pronunciation of 'UTT'. May be, to use one of the standard keyboard characters, we may decide to adopt '$' sign and the word 'Cut' will be spelt as 'C$t'. Alternatively we may use 'Kat' for 'Cut'. In any case, by doing so, we can keep the 'Cat' and 'Rat' intact in our dictionary.

- Standard way of Deriving Word Variants :

We decide to retain common usage for 'Nouns' and 'Verbs' as in the case of the word 'pen', since the usage of such words in a sentence can be easily interpreted as in 'I pen this letter' and 'This is my pen'. Also we may accept to make plural nouns by adding letter 'S' to noun as in 'Pens'. In order to get the past tense from a verb, we use the word 'did' along with the verb and to get the future tense, we could use the word 'will', uniformly for all verbs. For example, we may use the verb 'pen' in each of these contexts as follows:

'I did pen this letter' to show past tense,

' I can pen this letter in five minutes' for present tense and

'I will pen this letter tomorrow' for future tense.

One may come across many more requirements and restrictions for such a language and deriving it from a standard language is going to be a herculean task. But I still feel, it is worth while to spend time and efforts in this direction to make our future 'Man Machine Interaction' an easy process and to evolve a Universal Communication Language of the future. May be, we could design a computer program to automate this process of dictionary generation. After all, our forefathers have created a multitude of languages without having access to any of the computing tools available today. A modern language like this, with high level of clarity, will have great value in Legal applications also.

Readers, what do you think ?......give your views.

A Human Computer Model

Introduction :

Here is a simplified 'Brain-Centric' model of human beings as a computer system. The main purpose of this model is to analyse the role of the 'Subconscious Mind' and its interactions with the 'Conscious Mind' and the human Brain, supported by various physiological body parts interfacing with the physical world. The subconscious mind and the conscious mind are considered as two processor units of differing speeds performing defined tasks. The input - output devices consist of the five 'Sensory Organs', of which, except the tongue,remaining are only input devices and the two output only organs -'the Hands and the Legs'. All other body parts, mainly of physiological interest are not shown in the model. The 'Brain' provides the memory for the 'Human Computer' and works at high speeds. The proposed model differs from the conventional computers due to its 'Brain-Centric' architecture compared to the ' Processor-Centric' architecture of the conventional computers. Here all communications between the peripherals and the processors take place through the brain as per our physiological understanding of the human body, where as in conventional computers, the peripherals and memory devices are interconnected through the 'Central Processing Unit (CPU)'. The model also considers brain as a source of 'Thought Waves' with built-in antenna and in conjunction with the subconscious mind, it may be capable of 'Telepathy' based transactions as reported by many people. More details of the proposed model are given below :

The abstract Mind - Conscious and the Subconscious :

Whereas the interactions between the human brain and the sensory organs are well defined in the physiology books, the human mind is very difficult to understand due to its abstract nature. One can not really specify where it resides in the body, nor can one write off its existence because of its invisibility. You may see many nonbelievers of 'God' because of the abstract nature, but , everyone seems to be convinced about the existence of Mind. We know that the mind exists and is dominantly characterised by its 'I" factor, the 'Ego'. Let us now consider various attributes of this abstract entity - the Human Mind.

Attributes of Human Mind :

- The human mind is highly self centered and continues to build up the 'Ego' of people mostly on false and imaginary inputs.

- When person is awake, it keeps itself busy by continuously switching from one object to the other. The various mental objects are created either using the past data and images stored in the brain, or using the instantaneous data collected and stored by the sensory organs in the brain.

- It is the toughest form of locker provided by Nature to hide one's secrets from others.
- Arithmetic calculations and Logical reasoning are handled by it.

- It plays a major role in learning of Languages. It conveys ideas by stringing of words in proper order. Similarly it interprets ideas from an orderly string of words.

- It performs various functions in a step by step sequential fashion at a relatively slow rate, matching the speed of the sensory organs, the person being aware of every bit of its activity.

- In short it involves itself in all the activities performed by an individual in an awakened state. When
an individual is sleeping or under the strong influence of any intoxicant, it remains dormant, the ego breaks down and the secrets hidden in the fathoms of the mind gets exposed to others.

The Evasive Subconscious Mind :

So far we have discussed the properties of human mind as a sequential, arithmetic, logical and language processing unit, working rather slowly, in unison with the slow sensory peripheral units, keeping the individual fully informed of all its activities. We call the model of the Mind we have considered so far as the 'Conscious Mind', whose activities are fully registered in one's memory at each stage. But, a careful analysis of the complex activities of the mind will clearly show that not all transactions of the mind are registered in the Conscious Mind and therefore the individual is not fully aware of some of the intermediate activities of the mind. It is as if a fast ' Shadow Processor or a Coprocessor' is handling bulk of the high speed transactions and only the end results and slow speed transactions get recorded in the Conscious Mind. We call this fast coprocessor the Subconscious Mind. We will now analyse some of the activities performed by the Subconscious Mind without our knowledge.

1 - Performing a simple arithmetic:

Let us consider the micro steps involved in a simple multiplication, say 7 x 8.

Our mind proceeds by first registering the above two numbers and then gets the multiplication result as fifty six in a flash and again registers the answer. From where did we get the answer so fast? We know that we have stored the complete single digit multiplication table in our memory during childhood days by repeated recital of the table. It is as if our brain stores all those tables as a 'Look-up' table in it and makes available to our mind on demand. It is as if the result has reached our conscious mind through the subconscious mind and therefore we are not aware of the process involved in fetching the result from the memory. We become aware of the answer only when it reached our conscious mind.

2 - Creation of Ideas from a Statement :

When someone makes a statement by stringing a few words in a proper order, our mind creates a detailed 'Idea' of the statement . For instance, if your friend tells you that he ' enjoyed the beautiful sun set at the beach ' your mind immediately brings before you the image of a beautiful evening sky with all its splash of colours and the huge red disc of sun sinking slowly into the waters of the ocean. Where from you got such a vivid image of the evening sky so fast ? It should have come from your past experience, mostly as an integrated result of multiple experiences, and stored somewhere in your brain. But the picture was brought to your conscious mind, subconsciously, without your involvement.

3 - Image Recognition :

When you met your friend in the morning and wished him a good day, little would you have thought about the sequence of activities done by your mind. In the first place your eyes took a series of images of your friend and stored them into your brain. Your conscious mind, being always busy searching for events in the brain, gets these processed images from the subconscious mind and you become aware of your approaching friend. By doing a comparison among various stored images in the brain, the subconscious mind also recognises the person and passes the information to the conscious mind. Now your conscious mind places a request to the 'Impulse Processors' of your brain to put up a smile on your lips, express the idea of good morning in words, and prepare your hands to extend a 'shake hand' to your friend.

4 - Emotional Expressions :

The conscious mind always tries to suppress the emotions, keeping us continuously aware of the environment. It is always the subconscious mind that brings out the hidden emotions within a person. When a person's conscious mind subsides under the influence of an intoxicant, his ego breaks down and he is unable to contain his emotions and secrets within him.

5 - Access to Fleeting Events and Images stored in the Brain :

High speed events and images that flash in front of our eyes get stored in our brain. Since our conscious mind takes time to register, such information will not be available to an individual in an awakened state. But these are accessible to our subconscious mind, which supports our thinking that processing of high speed data even during the conscious state of an individual is a function performed by our subconscious mind. As we know, there are now well developed techniques available in 'Psychiatry' to get such information from an individual by putting him into a state of 'Hypnotic Sleep'. Investigating officers of police department use this technique to collect details about the accident from accident victims, who are not aware of it in their conscious state. In the medical field, the technique is useful for treating mental patients.

6 - Intuition :

Intuition is a classic process handled by the subconscious mind. Many of our intuitions arise out of an integration of our past experience. Everyday example of intuitive judgement is traders buying bulk items based on intuitive estimation of volume or quantity of an item without really measuring it. But, the process of intuition is not limited to one's experience alone. The past experience serves only as a spring board for new intuitive ideas. Intuitive knowledge stems out of one's concentrated activity in any field. It is as though the subconscious mind fetches new information from the universe when a knowledge seeker concentrates his conscious mind on to a specific subject of his interest. The Subconscious Mind acts as our 'Inner Eye' that links us to the rest of the Universe, where as, the Conscious Mind continuously connects us to the current 'time and space co-ordinates' of our Physical World.

7 - Telepathy :

Even though it has not yet been scientifically proved, the subject of telepathy is of great interest to people. Telepathy is the process of mind to mind communication between two persons without involving sensory organs and other physical means of communication. May be, we should think that when two minds are in synchronisation with each other, they will be able to communicate, at least their soft feelings, over the 'Thought Waves' produced by the brain and transmitted over the body's 'Antenna'. The subject of Telepathy involves a very high level of mental tuning and concentration and therefore is difficult for scientific studies.

In the block diagram given above, the conscious mind interacts both ways with the brain at a slow rate, as shown by the dark blue arrows. The subconscious mind operates at high speeds and interacts with the brain bidirectionally, but only uni directionally to output information to the conscious mind, as represented by the direction of the violet arrows. It is assumed that for processes involving high speed and bulk data transfer, such as image and idea handling, the conscious mind only places a request to the brain and the subconscious mind in turn responds with the required information to the conscious mind. For passing down large amount of processed information to the conscious mind, the subconscious mind may be using some common memory area in the brain as ' Shared Memory'.

The Brain and its Interface with The Physical World :

The human Brain, along with the peripheral organs consisting of five Sensory Organs, Hands and Legs form the physical (hardware) blocks in the Human Computer Model. The brain acts as the physical interface between the peripheral organs and the abstract mind. The 'Impulse Processors' of the brain collect and process images and data as electrical impulses from the five sensory organs and store them in the memory for subsequent use by the mind. They also send impulses to the tongue to produce sound and to the hand / leg for physical communication, as desired by the mind. Impulse processors also send impulses to actuate muscles of other body parts like lips, mouth etc. ( not shown in the block diagram) to interface the body with the physical world.

Input / Output Buffer Memory :

In the block diagram, a separate block is marked as 'Input/Output Buffer Memory', acting as an interface between the brain and the input output organs. It is shown for the sake of clarity only and it is in fact, an integral part of the brain. Its main function is to serve as a buffer storage between the fast acting brain and the slow sensory organs. It also stores the instantaneous data collected by the sensory organs. The subconscious mind in turn stores the data in specified locations of the brain for subsequent use and then only the conscious mind becomes aware of it.

Functions of Brain :

The brain functions as the physical 'Data Storage and Control Center' of the body. It has a very large capacity to store data, ideas and images. It also handles logical and emotional aspects of one's personality. The 'Impulse Processors' of the brain collect data and images from the sensory organs as electrical impulses. It also sends electrical impulses to various body parts to actuate them. The information stored in the brain starts fading away unless constantly refreshed at periodic intervals. It appears that the processed data is stored in a 'Stack' which follows a 'Last In First Out' logic. This logic makes it easy for a person's conscious mind to recover the most recent data more effortlessly compared to those stored in the past. Refreshing a data brings it to the top of the stack.

Data Storing and Retrieval Mechanism of Brain :

Most of the data is stored in the brain with an associated attribute, for future recovery. For instance, when a digit say '9' is stored, the image and the sound pattern of pronunciation of the numeral also get stored, as otherwise the digit as such has no relevance to any other entity. Next time when one sees this digit (gets an image of the digit), or hears the pronunciation of it, using an associative search on the attributes, the conscious mind retrieves the numeral from the brain. A sequence of digits such as a cell phone number also gets stored as a sequence of images in the brain. Continuous data retrieval process also involves the rhythm of the sound pattern, if any, used while storing it in the brain. The elementary arithmetic tables stored by tagging the sound pattern produced while reading them aloud, is mostly recovered by first initiating the sound pattern by the conscious mind. Similarly, when we suddenly forget the continuity of a speech or a song, we can recover it by repeating the previous line once more. It clearly shows that the brain stores data with its associated properties. Manufacturers of 'Educational Toys' and 'Teaching Aids' for children include eye catching colours, ample lights and appealing sound in thier products to make them more functional.

Input / Output Devices :

The Sensory Organs and the Hands and Legs serve as the 'Input / Output' devices for the brain. Of the sensory organs,the 'Eyes' the 'Ears' and the 'Tongue' together perform most of the interfacing functions with the physical world. While the eyes and ears are mainly used for recording of images and sound patterns in the brain, the tongue is mainly used as an output device to produce the sound patterns. There is an audio feedback from the tongue to the ear as shown in the block diagram using an yellow arrow. As we have already discussed, this audio feedback has a crucial role in the process of recording of read out information in the brain. The tongue also has an input function to sense the taste. The taste is again an abstract entity and probably is stored in the brain as an image of the object when we tasted it last.

The hands are trained from childhood onwards to be used for written communication, even though, the legs could also be used with some difficulty. The eye in conjunction with the hand helps in storing hand written information in the brain. As one writes, the eyes record the image of the written matter in the brain and it is well accepted as one of the silent modes of learning. Retrieving the data stored in the brain by writing is more effortlessly done once again by writing. This is how we often find it difficult to spell a word orally, but is easily done by writing.

The other two sensory organs, viz., the Nose and the Skin also function as input sensing devices to the brain.The nose senses the Smell and the skin the feel of Touch, like soft, coarse etc.. Just like taste, the properties of smell and touch get stored in the brain in association with the object as these are also highly abstract in nature, even though gradations of surface roughness can be quantised better using the images seen by the eye. An alternate function of the skin is qualitative sensing of temperature.

In conclusion, we can say that our brain with the associated sensory organs gets information only from a very limited spectrum of electromagnetic radiation viz., the visible light and a small spectrum of heat radiation. The only way for the human species to explore the secrets of the universe is by developing the intuitive properties of our brain by continuous searching of the unexplored faculties of our brain itself.

The Author's Comments :

This blog is an original contribution from the author and is copyright of Bharathyeju. The views expressed in this blog are strictly the views of the author and may not be supported by any scientic proofs. The author also believes that the model of the human computer presented here in is by no means a complete model and is expected to undergo changes as it evolves further. Readers are welcome to post their valuable comments freely so that your feedback will help to improve our understanding of a complex subject like the 'Abstract Human Mind'.