Occams Razor

[Adios]

and the extremely thin line between genius and insanity.

Have you ever seen it first hand?

Could it be because the more the genius the more of the mysterious part of the brain is used? Connect this with the supposition that tapping into just a part of the unknown brain leaves us with conflicted data that confuses the brain on an unheard of level?

What if true genius could tap ALL of the brain. Can you even imagine the possibilities? I can't.

[Golden Applesauce]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NinetyPercentOfYourBrain

[Adios]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NinetyPercentOfYourBrain

I find the source of your link questionable.

[Adios]

It is previously known that highly creative abilities are somewhat more common in people who have familial history of mental illness and thus carry a greater risk of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Researchers at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute have now sought to explain this link by studying receptors in the thalamic region of the brain.

"We have studied the brain and a certain type of receptor, known as dopamine D2 receptors, and we have shown that the dopamine system in healthy highly creative people is similar to that found in schizophrenics," Dr.Fredrik Ullén, who led the study at the Department of Women's and Children's Health at the institute, told The Local on Tuesday.

http://www.thelocal.se/26708/20100518/

[Adios]

The study, penned by Ullén and Örjan de Manzano, and entitled Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box, indicates that certain characteristics, such as being able to make bizarre and unusual associations are common to both schizophrenics and healthy highly creative people.


From the same link as above. I find this supports my original supposition.

[Rumckle]

and the extremely thin line between genius and insanity.

Have you ever seen it first hand?

Maybe, I have a friend who is my age, but he was finishing uni when I started, so he was about 2-3 years ahead at school. Anyway, now he is at Harvard studying a PhD in statistics. Really smart guy, but pretty fucking crazy. I can never tell when he is being serious or if he is just joking.

Could it be because the more the genius the more of the mysterious part of the brain is used? Connect this with the supposition that tapping into just a part of the unknown brain leaves us with conflicted data that confuses the brain on an unheard of level?

What if true genius could tap ALL of the brain. Can you even imagine the possibilities? I can't.

Can you elaborate by what you mean by this? I'm not sure I get it.

I mean, if you used all of your brain at once you would have a seizure and probably die.

ETA: Just read your new posts, that seems to make more sense than the way I was reading it.

[Adios]

and the extremely thin line between genius and insanity.

Have you ever seen it first hand?

Maybe, I have a friend who is my age, but he was finishing uni when I started, so he was about 2-3 years ahead at school. Anyway, now he is at Harvard studying a PhD in statistics. Really smart guy, but pretty fucking crazy. I can never tell when he is being serious or if he is just joking.

Could it be because the more the genius the more of the mysterious part of the brain is used? Connect this with the supposition that tapping into just a part of the unknown brain leaves us with conflicted data that confuses the brain on an unheard of level?

What if true genius could tap ALL of the brain. Can you even imagine the possibilities? I can't.

Can you elaborate by what you mean by this? I'm not sure I get it.

I mean, if you used all of your brain at once you would have a seizure and probably die.

ETA: Just read your new posts, that seems to make more sense than the way I was reading it.

"You could say that this study proves that genius does in fact border on insanity, but people diagnosed with psychological illness can not be highly creative, this is important to underline," he said.

From the same link.

I can't believe using all the brain could cause what you described above. We have the brain for a reason, it is my belief that as we evolve we will learn to use more and more of our brains. It seems the possibilities are beyond what we know and understand.

Can you imagine someone in kindergarten doing advanced calculus?

[Captain Utopia]

If you only evaluate input data using the same sets of programs and habits and mental models you've created for yourself over time, then you are using less of your brains potential than if you are able to evaluate input data using many different mental models at the same time and still reach a useful conclusion.  Without going crazy, or falling into a useless mush of indecision.

So I don't think it is how many neurons you have or use, but the connections you create and maintain between them.

What do you mean by "using all the brain" Charlie?

[Adios]

If you only evaluate input data using the same sets of programs and habits and mental models you've created for yourself over time, then you are using less of your brains potential than if you are able to evaluate input data using many different mental models at the same time and still reach a useful conclusion.  Without going crazy, or falling into a useless mush of indecision.

So I don't think it is how many neurons you have or use, but the connections you create and maintain between them.

What do you mean by "using all the brain" Charlie?

Imagine being able to answer the question "Is the universe infinite?"

Basically I mean being able to connect ALL the dots, not just the part we now consider 'known'. Take an example of only using less than half of the available power of your computer as compared to being able to take the same computer, add a supercomputer to it and being able to use every ounce of it's power to focus on a single issue at one time.

[Golden Applesauce]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NinetyPercentOfYourBrain

I find the source of your link questionable.

'kay.  I just posted that particular link because TvTropes generally does a reasonable job of making stuff entertaining and readable.

TL;DR: the "we only use 10% of our brain" myth is bull.  Every neuron in your brain is used for something; the connections that stop being used are pruned / recycled.  The brain uses so much energy (~10-20% of the human energy budget) that it can't afford to waste any on brain parts that don't do anything.  Huge heads kill babies and mothers; if the brain could be easily shrunk without losing functionality evolutionary pressures would have caused it to happen long ago.  Diagrams of the brain with the various lobes labeled don't have 90% of the brain labeled "Does Nothing."  In fact, we have pretty good idea about what specifically most parts of the brain do.  Humans use 100% of their brain.  If all of your neurons fired at once, the seizure would probably kill you by literally frying your brain.

[Adios]

While I agree with the 'we only use 10%' is myth can you agree we don't use our brains as we should or could?

[Captain Utopia]

Imagine being able to answer the question "Is the universe infinite?"

Basically I mean being able to connect ALL the dots, not just the part we now consider 'known'. Take an example of only using less than half of the available power of your computer as compared to being able to take the same computer, add a supercomputer to it and being able to use every ounce of it's power to focus on a single issue at one time.

Forgive me if I'm being too literal, but isn't that kind of what we do here?  As in, our computers run programs which we know doesn't fully utilise the capacity of the hardware.  So we test out new programs, tweak and debug, until we find something which provides better results.  Either by invalidating previous data or by creating a pattern which fits into the group narrative, and produces something which the group decides is valuable on aesthetic and/or functional grounds.

I'd say this is happening right now with the lesswrong wiki - it contains many programs, and some of them distill the essence of stuff we already believe in clumsy language into something which we can communicate amongst ourselves and benefit from.

Thinking further.

And I might be getting too far into this, but doesn't clearing out a dependence on old buggy programs help us think further and faster?  Isn't that likely to be a process which feeds back into itself, self-correcting?  Does "using our brain more effectively", such that as little time as possible is wasted thinking junk, get us closer to connecting ALL the dots?

[Golden Applesauce]

The study, penned by Ullén and Örjan de Manzano, and entitled Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box, indicates that certain characteristics, such as being able to make bizarre and unusual associations are common to both schizophrenics and healthy highly creative people.


From the same link as above. I find this supports my original supposition.

My theory (which might be completely wrong):
Real creativity requires both the ability to create new, bizarre, or unusual associations and the ability to judge those associations.  If you have every possible idea, but can't tell which ones are the good ideas, you have to act randomly, because you have no rational way of choosing which idea to act upon.  Then you get word salad, delusions, etc.

[Captain Utopia]

That definition works for me.

[Golden Applesauce]

Imagine being able to answer the question "Is the universe infinite?"

The observable universe is finite, with a radius of (speed of information) * (age of universe).

Basically I mean being able to connect ALL the dots, not just the part we now consider 'known'. Take an example of only using less than half of the available power of your computer as compared to being able to take the same computer, add a supercomputer to it and being able to use every ounce of it's power to focus on a single issue at one time.

I heartily recommend two science fiction books, A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, both by Vernor Vinge.  Both play with really interesting ideas regarding alien intelligences.  The first has (among other things) a human civilization which has developed the ability to induce an autism-like condition, IIRC called "Focusing", which focuses the subject on a single field (from linguistics to menial labor) to the extent that they devote all of their time and energy to that field, becoming useless in every other area.  The second has (among a whole panoply of strong AI and really alien intelligences) a species with modular brains.  That is, each individual is composed of 3-6 animals who brains are linked together.  So an individual can change by replacing one constituent animal at a time, or even create planned individuals by forcing a selected group of animals together.  Both are very well thought out, especially with regards to intriguing alien cultures, and have engaging plots and characters.

(Oh, and computers generally do focus all of their power on a single issue.  Modern computer processors use techniques to maximize the number of operations that are being carried out simultaneously.  Incidentally, the main power cost in server farms and supercomputer clusters comes not from powering the computers, but from keeping them cool so they don't fry with the heat of trillions of calculations per second.)