Mind Graph Theory! This is a segment of my imagination.
What are dreams? This was a perplexing question for me for the last two decades. How do I see random sequence of vivid visuals without any connections? Is there any logic behind this?
Brain is a huge information processing factory. It holds information in the form of a graph.
Like,
Tea--Coffee
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Morning--wakeup
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Time to office --Office--Work -- Work PC -- IBM
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Customer
Graphs consists of nodes and edges. The nodes in the above graph are artefacts. All related artefacts are connected directly in the graph. All unrelated artefacts does not have a direct connection with each other. These artefacts can be words, pictures, videos, audio, smell, feeling ....
As depicted in the above graph, when I think about 'Work' next thing which comes to my mind is either 'Office', 'Customer' or 'Work PC'. My mind has traversed from 'Work' node to 'Office' node through an edge.
The function of the brain is to traverse through the nodes in the mind graph. When the mind reaches a particular node in the graph we see a visual in the mind. If the visual is associated with a happy emotion then the body also responds appropriately. The brain send signals to the face to smile. Next thing the brain does is to wander to the nearest node in the graph based on the ranking of the nodes. The node which is ranked higher will be picked up next. Ranking can be based on number of previous visits to this node or based on the emotional intensity with which the node was created.
Consider we have two parts in the brain,
1. A subconscious mind
2. A logical / conscious mind
Subconsious mind will wander through this graph all the time based on the ranking of the nodes. It cannot stay in a single node of the graph. As it traverses through the graph, we see different visuals and we think about lot of different situations in our mind. The logical or conscious mind acts as a manager. It can be used to control the traversal of the mind through the graph.
This explains dreams. At night when we are switched to sleep, our conscious mind sleeps. But subconscious mind still wanders. It wanders through the graph. And as it wanders we see different kind of weird visuals in the dream. There will not be any logical mind to control the traversal. Hence the dreams will not have any logical meaning most of the time. Its like a screensaver which is activated when we go to sleep.
Now the question, In dreams how do I see things which I have never encountered before? Information is inputted to the brain through our five senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Every second huge junks of data are stored in thousands of new nodes which are created in the mind graph. Subconsious mind stores what ever data you give to it without filtering out the unwanted elements. This is unlike your conscious mind. In your conscious mind every minute you filter out unwanted elements. If you are reading a newspaper, you will not even look to the areas which will not interest you. But your subconscious mind acts differently. What ever you see or hear, whether its good or bad, is stored in your huge graph of nodes. Suppose, while you browse through a website you might have seen a specific advertisement. You may not have given enough conscious importance to this advertisement. But still the information is stored in the mind graph. At this moment if you relate this ad with any of your past event, then a new connection will be created between this past event node and the node in which the ad is stored.
A million dollar question. What is God? God is an artefact which is inputted to the brain during the early years of our childhood. This node 'God' is associated with the emotion 'fear' and emotion 'love'. If the intensity with which this node is ranked higher in the mind of a person, then the owner of this brain can be a God fearing person.
What is concentration? When we are able to wander through the graph through related nodes about a specific problem, we are concentrating on a specific problem.
What is meditation? If we are able to stay tuned to a single node in a graph for more than a particular time our mind starts to act differently. As meditators have mentioned, this is a splendid experience that cannot be expressed through words.
Footer Notes - The mind graph theory is not based on scientific study. This is a segment of my imagination. And the famous quote - imagination leads to actions.
There are lot of questions to be answered through this mind-graph theory.
This gives me a good reason to learn more about graphs - Traversal in graphs, comparison between graphs, shortest path in a graph etc...
