| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Our Brain as information processing system |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Johannes Schade |
The main interest in our research field was actually man-machine interaction. We have been talking a lot about creativity, a lot about other things. But our brain always has to process all the information. And the brain is a very wonderful machine because long before we started to talk about digital processing of information, the brain already had as a basic principle a digital information processing system of about 250 million parallel channels to process all kinds of information that it is exposed to. The main line of research in the U.S. project was the following. The Time Warner people were extremely interested in what the effect of interactive television is as compared to linear television. So if you can manipulate your images, the contents of your system, does it add anything to brain mechanisms, in the sense of can you use television as a learning channel? Can you use television to add something to the already powerful mechanisms of the brain? A brain is a very, very special machine because actually we have two very separate brains. One of them has a rather synthetic, holistic nature and the other is more of an analytic system which works with digital information in a very specific sequence. Now by looking at the way we process information, I can tell you all the right-handed people, most of the analytical-sequential information is processed in the left part of the brain. So reading and writing and listening to people. And as you see on the left hand side, there is a lot of information processed there. Still not enough, because we fill the brain up to about 45 percent and there is still 55 percent in all of us which hasn't been occupied by senseful information. The second part of the brain, in right-handed people the right hand part of the brain, is actually more of an holistic-synthetic system. All of creativity, all the three-dimensional pictures are stored there. And Western people - let's say Europeans and Americans, who have a lot of sequential and analytical information - we have a rather underdeveloped brain system of that particularly holistic type. Now the experiments were actually aimed at the following: we were submitting rather large groups of people to linear television images, and to a system with the same content but in a more multi-medial, dynamic, interactive way. This is actually one of the PET scans we did. You have to realise that contrary to beliefs, the brain does not contain a keyboard. We have no 'ABC'in the brain and we don't even have rather simple calculating system. Our brain works with concepts, or 'gestalt entities', as they have been called. The brain has to have a kind of a meaning, a meaning in a whole perspective of what we are seeing or what we are perceiving. So Doors of Perception actually means that the 250 parallel channels that we are using to process the information; they are not single channels. They have to work with 1,000 or 10,000 together, and we have to stimulate the brain in a rather structural and very creative way in order to maintain the structural integrity of the brain. Luckily you are all creative people so you're losing less neural cells than people who are reading newspapers or have to listen to dull speakers. Still, we need a lot more structural creativity in the brain. Why? Because, on average we are losing about 52-54, 000 neural cells - the small little computers we have in the brain. Luckily we have about 95 billion of them. But due to the fact that we have a lack of proper, structured creative interactivity inside the brain, we are losing if we are adults over 80 or 90 years of age, we are losing about 50 or 52,000 of these cells. Now, this is, happen to subject the younger people, adolescents, adults and seniors, to structured information. And if you subject the brain just to words or to alphabets or to numbers, no particular activity is being recorded. This is a PET scan - all the little dots are recordings of a very particular activity, then you can see the way the brain actually is recording the (results of) 250 million parallel input channels, the very specific elements as concept as entities from the outside world. Now what we have been doing actually was, in the first place, we found that we have to divide mankind into four very specific groups as regards the way we process information. So our digital processing system within the brain reacts in a different way according to age. The first group is between the ages of 2 1/2 to about 8 or 9. The main way the brain can be stimulated is by exploration. And what we did is we subjected one group to linear information and the other group to the multimedia information, and to our surprise the difference in learning capacity, the difference in how the young children memorise the information was not just four or five percent better, but was up to 47 percent better. So by subjecting the brain to a very innovative, creative , structured kind of information, you're getting an increase in learning capabilities but also in memorising mechanism of up to 47 percent. The IF - what you see also in the left hand side is the Interactivity Factor, ranging from 0 to 100. That means that the young children are extremely eager to play with either a computer system or a television system. But the interactivity factor is rather high. The second group, let's say the adolescents starting from about the age of 9 up to about 18. There the prime stimulus for the brain is excitement. That's the reason why such a huge percentage of these younger adolescents are interested in Nintendo or Playstation and similar gaming systems. Sometimes it is difficult to have a learning or memorising system built in a gaming system. But the games would be more and more worthwhile if you could build in a kind of educational platform within the system. The interactivity factor is very high, ranging from 30 to 187. So the children are extremely eager to work as a basic brain mechanism system with gaming and with a lot of excitement. Even the learning factor is high. So if you built into the gaming system, let's say a kind of an educational mechanism, that automatically stimulates the brain to learn more about the subject. Even in the two other groups, the adults and the seniors, there is a rather large interactivity factor. We have been comparing groups of 4-500 so we could have statistically-valid results. The Interactivity Factor in adults is around 39. And you find a Learning Factor of up to 30 percent, meaning that if you are passively looking at television screens of reading the newspaper, and if you are able to have the whole system in a creative way interactive, you're getting an increase of more than 30 percent. The same thing is even true for seniors, because they have an Interactivity Factor of 21, and a Learning Factor of 17. And we did as a comparison in the Netherlands - a very nice experiment. We took a group of elderly people (average 72), half of the group we gave a computer, gaming computers, and the other half were just making conversation and things like that. And after three months we could prove that the people who had been working with the gaming machine, they had an increase of short and long term memory of over 30 percent. As a joke we tell people that if you want to prevent elderly people from having a serious dementia you should give them a gaming computer, because that's the best medicine you can have. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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