“This was a portrait of the dynamics of the mind, the crown of evolution. I gave it a name – the ‘face of thought’…” – THE PLACE OF QUARANTINE
So, the concept of deterministic chaos put everything in its place. The main principle of the dynamics of the brain was now completely clear. I knew, I felt: a thought, a memory is a “strange” attractor and it cannot be otherwise. And of course, I wanted to look at the thought-attractor eye to eye. I set out to re-create it on paper or on the monitor screen – to get a phase portrait of the process underlying intelligent life.
Of course, this was a very ambitious task. A consistent whole would need to be deduced from fragmentary, incomplete specifics. I began reconstructing the phase space from data sets – combining and comparing the amplitudes and phases of the neural waves at different moments in time. And I made a bold assumption, which turned out to be correct: I proposed that the form of the attractor should be the same at all levels of the brain’s functioning – when responding to stimuli like smells and sounds, when converting memories to words, and when abstracting, generalizing. That helped; similar structures started to appear in the streams of data. For a long time, I could not visualize them properly, but I finally found the solution – the coordinate structure in which the encephalograms obtained from different patients under different circumstances were projected into similar curves. Taken together they formed a picture – an attractor, localized in an enclosed space.
I investigated this as far as was possible – and yes, indeed, it was “chaotic,” it was “strange”: the system never repeated itself; the line did not intersect but gradually filled a certain region, interwoven in the most complicated way. This was a portrait of the dynamics of the mind, the crown of evolution. I gave it a name – the “face of thought.” I printed it, hung it over my desk and looked at it for a long time as if trying to reach even further, deeper. And then I got on the tram and went to Bern University…” – THE PLACE OF QUARANTINE
Image credit: gonzalu
“This book may well change our perception of life itself!” – Readers’ Favorite
He didn’t expect to wake up dead. Now he wants to prove the afterlife exists. Is there any hope that our memory and consciousness remain intact after death?
Read The Place of Quarantine today to open your mind to destiny!
SEMMANT and other books by Vadim Babenko 