Article Summary: The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler — The New York Times
THE HUMAN BRAIN IS A TIME TRAVELER LOOKING TO THE FUTURE HAS ALWAYS DEFINED HUMANITY. WILL A.I. BECOME THE BEST CRYSTAL BALL OF ALL? BY STEVEN JOHNSON
Summary
REST state stands for Random Episodic Silent Thought.
The human brain resorts to one of its most emblematic tricks, maybe one that helped make us human in the first place: it time-travels.
When she interviewed the subjects afterward, they described their mental activity during the REST state as a kind of effortless shifting back and forth in time.
Default mode network = REST state
Andreasen noted that most of the REST activity took place in what are called the association cortices of the brain, the regions that are most pronounced in Homo sapiens compared with other primates and that are often the last to become fully operational as the human brain develops through adolescence and early adulthood.
“Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion,” she wrote, “it uses its most human and complex parts.”
Mind-wandering is now believed to play a central role in the brain’s “deep learning”: the mind’s sifting through past experiences, imagining future prospects, and assessing them with emotional judgments—the flash of shame, pride, or anxiety that each scenario elicits.
The power of prospection is what makes us wise.
In 1900, sponge divers stranded after a storm in the Mediterranean discovered an underwater statuary on the shoals of the Greek island Antikythera. It turned out to be the wreck of a ship more than 2,000 years old. During the subsequent salvage operation, divers recovered the remnants of a puzzling clocklike contraption with precision-cut gears and symbols that were corroded beyond recognition.
We now know that the device was capable of predicting the behavior of the sun, the moon, and five of the planets. It could even predict, with meaningful accuracy, solar or lunar eclipses that would not occur for decades. Also known as an “ancient computer,” it was a prediction machine.
The predictions we rely on with weather forecasts are a range of probabilities.
Human beings are famously bad at thinking probabilistically.
The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedules—and perhaps even in our schools—to let our minds drift.
Right now, it seems inevitable that A.I. will transform our prospective powers in meaningful new ways, for better or for worse. But it would be nice to think that all the technology that helped us understand the default network in the first place also ended up pushing us back to our roots: giving our minds more time to wander.