The method of counting the number of ideas opens a window into the "black box" of the mind.
Reading other people's thoughts - what could be more interesting ?! Today, decoding the electrical signals of the brain, scientists in the most general terms are able to distinguish the content of thought - whether a person is in front of him someone's face or a multi-storey building. However, professor of psychology at the Center for Neurobiological Research at Queens University (Canada) Jordan Poppenk decided to go the other way.
Brain punctuation
“For a long time, the only window into our minds was introspection - that is, thinking about our own thoughts,” says Jordan Poppenk. “But this is not a very reliable method. The breakthrough came the moment we stopped trying to figure out what a person was thinking, and instead focused on how to determine when a thought was in motion. Figuratively speaking, we skipped vocabulary and began to study brain punctuation.
Poppenck is confident that you can literally capture a thought, because each idea is a new combination of neurons. Comparing the images of brain activity obtained as a result of MRI, one can fix the moment of reorganization of the network of neurons - at this moment a new thought is born!
On the benefits of like-mindedness
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While unanimity has not yet been introduced at the state level, people think in the old fashioned way. And such disorganized amateur performance greatly interferes - at least for neurophysiologists. Therefore, in order to control the process of the emergence of new thoughts, Poppenck decided to use the great power of cinema. "The most important of the arts for us is cinema!" - said another thinker, about the same thing.
The fact is that previous studies have shown that properly made films cause the same activity in different viewers in the same areas of the brain. True, from the point of view of scientists, a good film is not Tarkovsky or even Tarantino. Fiction films leave the viewer room for different thoughts to wander. Someone, seeing Monica Bellucci on the screen, will admire: what a feminine! The guardian of morals at the sight of a sex symbol will be indignant: what a harlot - no shame, no conscience! And the shopping lover immediately recognizes Monica's dream shoes, on which her faithful squeezed money.
Scientists, however, find it easier to track changes in the state of the brain using simple and perfectly understandable templates. Therefore, the participants in the experiment (and there were 184 of them) were shown short fascinating stories that did not allow for ambiguous interpretations: Earth”… The plots alternated with 20-second rest pauses. At the end of each “run,” the volunteers were shown an 84-second “tuning” clip. So it was more convenient to sort through the piles of thoughts of different people, whose brains have been scanned with functional MRI all this time. Observing changes in blood flow in different parts of the brain, scientists recorded the birth and extinction of thought.
The thought worm of doubt
- Each new thought corresponds to the transition of the map of brain activity to a different state, - explains Jordan Poppenck, - If you visualize the process of thinking on the diagram, you get a kind of "thought worm" - it is formed by adjacent points denoting the activity of neurons. Thanks to our technique, we can determine when a person has switched to a new thought. But we cannot yet decipher the content of this thought.
Scientists estimate that about 6,200 thoughts are generated in the average person's brain per day. Not all of them are capable of changing the course of human development. For the most part, these are ideas like: should I drink some tea? Or - why is Friday still so far away?
According to the author of the study, understanding the laws of birth and extinction of new thoughts gives us the opportunity to look into the “black box” of our mind, the structure of which is still a mystery. The new technique not only brings us closer to solving the mystery of knowledge, but is also useful for solving a number of practical problems. For example, the speed of thinking - the speed with which transitions from one thought to another occur - can help in the early diagnosis of schizophrenia, ADHD, or various manias.