Oh my. What if I'm right?

A friend of mine (Tim) asked “What causes a path way to carry a charge in the first place?”.

I think that he is asking is what is the ‘control mechanism’ that causes a pathway to carry a charge since without one, nothing really works.

And honestly….I have an idea but not a factual one.

Let me step off on a rant real quick, I’ll come back to the point…I promise.

Software programs are very complex and over my career, I’ve often had to correct or modify someone else’s program.

I’ve learned that the best way to approach this situation is to ‘assume’ that the original programmer knew what he was doing and try to think of myself in his position.

In other words….if I needed to do ‘X’, I would design a system like ‘Y’ and then look for clues that the original author did actually design a system like ‘Y’.

So for the ‘rant’ part...Intelligent Design.

It appears to me that a great many scientists refuse to even consider the idea of an previous ‘author’ and that they are blocking the possible advancement they could make.

Ok…end rant.

Back to the point….if we look at the brain as the perfect (at least for now) neural network and how it works…it seems to me that pathways are triggered by 2 things:

1. A sensor (touch, sight, sound, etc) causes a initial pathway to fire (in the computer world, an interrupt)

2. ALL connected pathways are fired but most die out before completing and like in nature, the strongest survives.

a. The pathways gain strength with use…the more it’s used, the more it will be used.

If I remember correctly the brain maintains a 3 connection limit to each ‘node’. While this makes some sense, I don’t see why not allow as many connections as possible.

it does make some sense if we consider noise control or optimization may be is in play.

ADD moment: Is this what make man MORE than other animals? Is it that we (humans) can ‘force’ a neural pathway to fire through thought?

1. If we consider the real world for a few minutes, it would seem so…just look at the insane. What if, for whatever reason, they forced the same neural pathway to be used.

a. That would lead to someone doing the same thing over and over again, not because they are expecting a different result (like the popular saying goes) but because that pathway has been the most used

i. If that is true. Then the way to treat insane people is to break-out that pathway by adding more branches to it.

I need to think about this some more but I like where it's going.