in reply to How do our brains work?

how you think your brain works in the Perl sense.

It doesn't. What's closest? Probably some form of non-binary tree. I can only recall some things after following certain mental routes ("Where did you see it last?").

But I don't think in terms of lists, arrays, or hashes. The brain is much closer to a network than an script.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: RE: How do our brains work?
by japhy (Canon) on Oct 17, 2000 at 20:53 UTC
    That would be associative, then. Let's say you were sitting at your desk, programming, and you thought of something you wanted to buy -- it was in your short term memory, and then you forgot it. It wasn't until you remembered you were programming when you thought of this object that you remembered what the object WAS. 
    %brain = (
  programming => {
    'things to buy' => { 'doohickey' => undef, },
    # ...,
  },
  # ...,
);

    [download]
    That's how I see my brain working.

    $_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval
[reply]
[d/l]
      Well, your brain would make more connections than that one:

      %brain = (
  programming => {
    'things to buy' => { 'doohickey' => undef, },
    # ...,
  },
  things_to_buy => {'milk' => '1 gallon',
                    'eggs' => {'amount' => 'dozen',
                               'color' => 'brown',
                               'size' => 'Large grade A'
                               }
                    'doohickey' => undef
                    },
  doohickey => (\$brain{programming}, \$brain{things_to_buy}),
   etc...

  # ...,
);

      [download]

      So, you would recall it in various ways. You may be at the store buying milk, you may be programming again etc... So, not that I disagree here, but the brain is more complex than any simple hash structure could illustrate.. it has triggers which will fill in other relations, according to various relations you have already made, and create new ones, remove some, blah blah blah.

      Cheers,
      KM

[reply]
[d/l]
        Yeah, I know, that's what the # ...'s were for, I didn't want to write out some sample connections.

        Teeks, eh? You're right down the street from my house.

        $_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval
[reply]
      Yes, if you wanted to represent that in Perl, that'd be the closest thing. But How do you express "This math solution _looks_ wrong", or the times that something you were thinking about something and gave up, and the answer comes to you out of the blue two days later mid-beer? Or how you have to navigate all of these associatives to get to something, but the next day it's the first thing you think of?

      You can express thoughts in Perl, and it's even kind of useful, but that doesn't mean it represents how you actually _think_.

[reply]

In Section Meditations