Chaos Theory and Avalanches: Your Brain Is Like A Pile of Sand

So you think your thoughts, you say? Well, if you do, what will you think thirty seconds from now? One minute from now? One hour? Where is this thinker you claim yourself to be?

What about space? You know what that is, right? Show me space. You are wrong if you say it is that which is occupied by the chair, the wall, and your computer monitor. They occur in relationships and are put in something termed space to explain the relationships. In fact, pure space is an illusion. What you call space is instead a sense impression used to filter the relationship of objects.*

When you think about it, you realize that many of our intuitions about the world are only a way for us to make sense out of it so we can get along within it. Making sense out of it is not the same as the way things are within it.

So when I say that the brain--your thoughts, your reason--works in a kind of chaos, don't dismiss the idea out of hand.

Formulated by Edward Lorenz in his study of weather patterns, then applied to population growth by Robert May, and later developed into the fractal geometry of nature by Benoit Mandelbrot, Chaos Theory now has entered the field of neuroscience.

According to those who apply the theory to consciousness, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Moreover, disorder is essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

"In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence."

When sand piles reach a certain height and mass, they unpredictably begin to avalanche. "The brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable." More

*Einstein folded Newton's classical space and time into curved spacetime.

Are We Living In A Cosmic Hologram?: Gravitational Wave Detector & Limit of Spacetime

Haul out your wallet. Take a look at a credit card. Notice the hologram. The image was taken by holography, a kind of lensless photography achieved as an interference pattern on photothermoplastic. Looking at the hologram, you see an image exhibiting parallax. Move the image around, and it changes appearance depending on the angle. Then there is this: every part of a hologram contains the whole. One corner, or a spot in the middle, reveals the entire image.

Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft, both physicists, say the holographic principle might apply to the universe. You are reading this now, which was started somewhere in distant space. Or you are you inside you inside you. Etc. It's deja vu all over again.

Which brings me to my story.

Driving through the countryside near Hannover, Germany you will see some plain, unassuming buildings. Were you to ask a local, he might not know that at the site the German-British gravitational wave detector GEO600 is housed.

As you can tell from its name, the detector looks for gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime. Neutron stars and black holes would cause such ripples. But GE0600 has not found any gravitational waves so far, and it has been looking for seven years, not long in cosmological terms. It has caused waves of a different kind.

The detector was causing problems, so the people inside the buildings thought. Members of the GEO600 team were frustrated. Their giant detector was making strange noises and they couldn't figure out the cause.

"Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into 'grains', just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. 'It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,' says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: 'If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in giant cosmic hologram.' . . .

The 'holographic principle' challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe." More