Snapping
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Despite these practical beginnings, the notion of information remained one of the slipperiest concepts to hit modern science since the theory of relativity. Engineers in America tended to view information in terms of organization, order, and "organized complexity," while their British counterparts preferred to view it in terms of selectivity and "variety." The first formal theory of information was proposed in 1949 when Dr. Claude E. Shannon, a research mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, published a paper in collaboration with Dr. Warren Weaver, then of the Rockefeller Foundation, entitled "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," in which they set out the physical requirements and limits to the communication and transmission of messages. In this initial scientific attempt to give form and substance to that indefinable electronic flux coursing through Ma Bell's telephone lines, Shannon and Weaver introduced the concept of the "bit" (short for binary digit) of information, the simple on-off, heads-or-tails choice which they defined to be the smallest amount of information any message may contain. Then, armed with the bit and simple mathematical logarithms, they went on to derive a way of measuring the amount of information contained in any message. This scientific reckoning with the intangible provided no insight whatsoever into the value in human terms of any particular communication, but by avoiding the ancient, endless debate over the meaning of words and numbers, it offered engineers a new way of speaking simply -- and only -- about the math and physics of transmitting those messages as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Together, cybernetics and information theory led to major breakthroughs in engineering and technology. Once scientists could accurately measure the amount of information that could be carried through a wire of a given diameter or transmitted over a radio channel of a particular frequency, the door swung open to the mastery of the most immense and complex systems, from vast telephone and television networks to the lightning logic of the computer.
From the beginning, the new sciences helped technicians reduce chaos and complexity to order, but for the laymen these engineering triumphs seemed to increase the complexity and confusion of daily life. In only a few years, improved global communications and high-speed electronic data-processing systems began supplying people with ever-increasing quantities of information at speeds far beyond their human capacity to process and organize: instant news from around the world, intimate glimpses of remote cultures, and close-up images of natural disasters, wars, social problems, and political crises as they happened. Before long, in countless arenas, human performance was being pitted against the extraordinary capacities of the computer and the near-limitless speeds of electronic gadgetry.
No comparable effort was made to understand the personal side effects of these technological thrusts. Wiener himself repeatedly voiced his concern over the impact of this new technology on human beings. Yet little progress was made in relating information, this newly harnessed physical quantity, to the term in its ordinary sense: the massive outpouring of news and the rush of names, dates, details, and experiences which had begun to bombard our brains from all sides and through all our senses every day.
Even as the new sciences were developing, however, researchers began to explore the application of communication principles such as feedback and self-regulation to the study of human beings. The central nervous system was immediately observed to be a marvel of cybernetic engineering, converting every sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch into the common element of information. Every pinprick triggered its own distinct pattern of electrochemical impulses. Every printed word, every musical theme, every human experience sent its own unimaginably complex flow of information from the body's sense organs to the brain.
The human brain, however, presented insurmountable barriers to scientific understanding. Acclaimed as the most sophisticated computer in the world, it was generally assumed to process information in a manner similar to telephone switching systems and electronic data processors, although its exact information pathways were far too complex and minute for experimental observation. Research ethics prohibited tampering with the brains of living human subjects, and those neurophysiologists who, with scalpels and electrodes, explored the brains of monkeys, frogs, and other animals soon discovered networks of such immense biological complexity that they defied both human and computer analysis.
So, alternatively, at other levels of investigation, psychologists and other social scientists attempted to apply concepts of information transmission and automatic control to the activities of the human brain, borrowing notions such as "channel capacity" and "storage and retrieval" for their behavioral studies of the human processes of memory and learning. To their amazement, however, scientists who endeavored to "input" massive quantities of information to the brains of their test subjects -- in experiments designed to solve questions such as "How many letters and digits can a human being process at one time?" -- were startled to find that, through various techniques for aiding memory and simple methods of grouping or "chunking" long sequences of numbers, human storage and retrieval capacities appeared to be virtually limitless! Evidently, the human brain did not process information in the manner of a man-made computer. Yet, forced to treat the brain as a "black box," an engineering term for a sealed device with internal workings that remain inaccessible and unknown, experimenters were unable to explain the brain's underlying information-processing capacities.
Faced with this indecipherable complexity, psychologists had no alternative but to incorporate their black box approach to the mind into the prevailing traditions of psychology, simply layering their new concepts on top of the old models of behavior and personality. If anything, these technological ideas served only to support and enhance the robot model of man. In place of the behaviorist's notions of "stimulus" and "response," the black box approach substituted communication jargon such as "input" and "output," creating an illusion of new understanding. Yet these terms had little relevance to human beings or their psychological problems, and by the early sixties, cybernetics and information theory were no longer being acclaimed as powerful new conceptual tools for the study of human affairs.
Nevertheless, since the early days of communication science, its technical concepts have filtered down to the popular level, giving rise to a great deal of loose falk along communication lines and a blast of pseudoscientific verbiage about "failures to communicate," "negative feedback," "channel overload," and so on. In addition, the introduction of these terms into the vernacular has been accompanied by a raft of miracle techniques and therapies with names like "psycho-cybernetics," "hypno-cybernetics," "biofeedback," and "mind control." Although some of these applications, most notably biofeedback, have proved of value in enabling people to gain control over aspects of their biological machinery that normally function automatically, such as heart rate and blood pressure, for the most part these simplistic popular comparisons of man's brain to his machines afford little insight. They succeed instead only in reducing the human mind to the level of mere hardware. Human beings, however, as one engineer informed us, are not electrical circuits, and the brain is not simply a big computer. Rather, it is something much more wonderful and complex: a living information-processing organ!
Within the last decade or so, with the arrival of a new generation of electronic technology and the development of mathematical and computer models capable of extraordinarily complex modes of analysis, the study of the brain's living information-processing capacities has grown into a specialized science of its own. In a handful of universities around the country, whole centers for the study of "bio-information processing" have begun investigating the unique manner in which human beings order their daily fare of information. In taking its first steps, this infant science has set out to discover how people interpret their sense impressions, selecting vision, which accounts for almost ninety percent of human information processing, as the best sense for scientific inquiry.
In their initial investigations, bio-information scientists have determined that the
eye alone has 128 million information receptors. They have traced the bulk of those signals along the optic nerve to deep within the visual centers of the brain. Using advanced methods of computation specially developed for the task, they have begun to understand how the brain converts the bombardment of photons on the retina into shapes that change in space and brightness over time and then forms those patterns into objects -- chairs, people, and so forth that have some meaning for the individual.
What the new science has yet to learn, however, is how all these signals and patterns come together to create the phenomenon of human awareness, how the individual registers the meaning of what he sees. Bio-information studies have made the first discoveries concerning how our nervous system transforms everything we experience into information, but the field has been unable to connect the hard physical facts of this information in its cybernetic, biological, and, ultimately, electrochemical form with the phenomenon of consciousness, an individual's private experience of the world, which has eluded investigators throughout the spectacular course of Western science.
Early in our collaboration, while developing the framework for our investigation, the two of us found ourselves confronted with this same dilemma. We had been observing and hearing about extraordinary spiritual and emotional experiences which produced profound changes in people's awareness and personalities. Our extensive background research had convinced us that regardless of their personal religious convictions concerning the origin of spiritual revelation, and contrary to popular assumptions which tend to attribute the extraordinary or "supernatural" to the intervention of mystical or cosmic forces, these experiences were natural products of the organic workings of the human brain. For even in its most miraculous feats of consciousness and spirituality, the brain's only known function is one of information processing. Our goal was to account for these extraordinary experiences in concrete, everyday communication terms and to determine whatever impact these experiences might have on the brain's information-processing capacities. Nevertheless, we recognized that even the most careful, thoughtful speculation would draw us to the edge of current scientific understanding, to the frontiers of physics, mathematics, and neurophysiology -- and beyond to our own emerging communication perspective on the mind.
In our travels, we contacted a number of prominent scientists around the country, people who have spent their lives studying the human brain, new researchers in the field of bio-information studies, as well as some of the most respected figures working in the "hard" disciplines of math and physics. Nearly all of them encouraged our efforts to make accessible to the general public exciting knowledge that has been confined to scientific arenas for years, in some cases decades. At the same time, nearly all confessed that much of what is known continues to defy interpretation in human terms. We talked with one world-famous engineer who told us that, despite everything he knew about the science of communication, he remained baffled by such accepted practices as speed-reading, which caused him to question how an individual could grasp the meaning of an entire novel in six minutes. "Not as threatening as the cults," he said, "but what does one make of it?" He was deadly serious, however, as were the many other scientists we spoke with who expressed a more far-reaching dismay over what they saw as the enormous gap separating the latest knowledge in math, physics, and biology from an equally substantial understanding of the day-to-day activities of the human mind. The space between, they said almost unanimously, was filled with irreconcilable contradictions, facts of everyday life that collide head on with the laws of nature and modern physics.
Our most fascinating view of these contradictions came out of a conversation we had with Dr. John Lyman, professor of engineering and psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Lyman is a new scientist of the human mind. He began his career in the hard sciences, then went on to apply his knowledge of both engineering and physiology to the practical matter of developing new ways for using technology to extend man's human capacities -- a field known today as bioengineering. In his study of the mind, Lyman approaches his all-encompassing subject with the rigor and integrity of a physical scientist, yet throughout he remains a generalist, congenial and refreshingly down to earth.
In the course of two meetings with him -- one in his office and one at his cliffside home overlooking the San Fernando Valley -- we discussed our investigation of sudden personality change and our communication perspective. He told us that in the early sixties he had the good fortune to meet almost daily for several hours with his long-time friend Norbert Wiener during the last summer of that great scientist and philosopher's life. In many of their conversations, he and Wiener debated the question of what they called "epochal" or life-changing events in human development. As Wiener told Lyman, the subject was of great personal concern; a diabetic, he frequently battled the sudden reversals of emotion and mood characteristic of the disease. Both men recognized, however, that the complexity of the problem extended beyond their learned speculation. Lyman was frank enough to share with us some of the questions that emerged from their discussions, questions which continue to confront scientists working in his field.
"The human being is more than just a sort of super computer," Lyman told us. "The principles from which computers have been developed are certainly very similar to the way in which human beings process information, but human beings do a lot of things that no one has found out about yet."
According to Lyman, human information processing takes place at chemical speeds of roughly 300 feet per second. These neural speeds are far less than the 186,000 miles per second which is the speed of light and the upper limit of any electronic device. Yet human beings regularly perform feats of memory and recall at speeds so extremely fast they cannot be duplicated on a computer. The brain's capacity to search among vast amounts of information and locate specific bits with lightning rapidity is unmatchable by technology.
"We don't know how it's done," said Lyman. "We have some ideas involving hierarchies of information-processing levels, but this is something that's just beginning to be worked on in computer design."
Lyman noted that science has already developed ways of compacting tremendous densities of memory through microfilm techniques and improved technologies of computer memory-bank construction. But he pointed out that computers conduct exhaustive searches through material that must be examined in detail, however swiftly, one item at a time.
This problem of time, Lyman went on to explain, is another dilemma that continues to plague science in both physical and human terms. In human information-processing activities, tot example, there are numerous instances where the brain seems to function independently of time altogether.
"When you start measuring dream lengths in relation to their content," he said, "you observe much more dream content than would seem possible in the length of time sleep is going on. The rates of dreaming don't seem to be time-bound literally, in sequence. The brain appears to restructure things simultaneously. Another example of this phenomenon is when a person sees his whole life flash before him when he's drowning."
To help us understand this peculiar simultaneity of the brain, Lyman offered the analogy of a motion picture reel. Every frame of the picture sequence is already present on the reel, and when the film is run, the images appear to occur in time. The activity of the brain would be equivalent to slicing up the film and spreading out all the pictures side by side. The illusion of motion disappears, and all the information is present simultaneously.
"I don't know it it's true," said Lyman, "but it's possible that when you tell somebody your dream, you may be describing the dream as a sequential thing, whereas when you had the dream, it was like that, like a snap " -- and he snapped his fingers.
Our word again, but we hadn't even mentioned it to Lyman.
"I can't give you any of the details," he continued, "except that dreams and the time they cover don't match up very well. Most evidence is that dreams apparently covering hours or days of detail t
ake place in a few seconds."
Lyman doesn't see time as much of a factor in the basic functioning of the brain. The time element matters only when the functioning of the brain is translated into action.
"We are time-bound by our ability to express," he said. "Everything we do requires muscular activity, including the movement of our vocal cords. All our outputs to the world are muscular in nature, and the very nature of muscular response is that it has to be temporal, it has to occur in sequence."
Beyond the chemical and cellular levels which underlie its basic information-processing components, the brain has no moving parts, and its activities need not be stretched out over time. As a cybernetic organ, however, the brain has its own set of built-in structural limitations. According to Lyman, rather than being time-bound like the rest of the body, the brain is space-bound, or unable to imagine anything outside its three dimensions.
This dependence on space puts us into a perplexing quandary. Exactly where, in any sense, do these complex processes and extraordinary phenomena of mind occur? The majority of information-processing activities are generally conceded to take place in the brain, but beyond that our subjective experiences cannot be located. Certain specific activities such as speech, motor response, and the regulation of biological functions can be traced to particular regions of the brain, even down to small subsections within each region. But neurophysiologists have been unable to establish precise information-processing pathways similar to those that man wires into his computers. They have only been able to trace brain function down to vast "aggregates" of neurons and interwoven "nets" of organization. In fact, scientists have found that the complexity of the brain appears to be irreducible. Minute dissection leads not to clearer understanding of how the brain works but to greater confusion at the most elementary levels of chemistry and physics, and the deeper science delves into the fundamental processes of neural activity, the less it can observe about the brain's most spectacular accomplishments.