Some believe one day a computer will surpass the capacity of the human brain, yet the mind is greater than any super computer or big data analytics processor could hope to be. David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of The Brain notes:
In a cubic centimeter of brain tissue there are as many connections as stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Our thoughts, our hopes, and our dreams are contained in these three pounds of wet biological material.
This three-pound organ in our skull… is an an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.
With infinite amounts of information that streams into our minds every moment of the day, our inner cosmos—our silent brain—fashions the rich narrative to our reality and identity.
Emily Dickinson says here what neurosciences on its own cannot:
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.
The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
Try It
Write a poem about your mind as a computer. The way you think, react, behave. Include your emotions and choices you’ve made over time or the course of a day. Can you envision your mind like a computer or not at all? If you resist the technological comparison, write how you feel about that.
Featured Poem
Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here’s a poem from Andrew we enjoyed:
A ray splits twice, then twice again
Divergent paths striking on the glass.
So too with you. So too with you,
Who I once thought to share in life,
Divergent ran, along the border of a knife.
Molecules dance in space, the void becomes
Their stately, mystic tango of the soul –
And so, with the light of ten thousand suns
I’d like to dance with you. I would be whole
If I could wake, content, from such an atom dream.
Please. Numbers…can’t compare. I’ve spent my life
Determining values, of sin and pi
But you just laughed and said
“I’ve heard some say it was a sin
To eat too much of apple pie.”
And so a world was broken, and a new
Based not on numbers, but on you,
Was made. What is this fire?
Is it the bunsen that I know so well,
Or does my broken heart now stir?
I shall be Keats in words for you,
I’d sacrifice my play with lithium,
My focus on Potassium.
Instead, I’d whisper of Byzantium
The city of a thousand loves.
So please. I do not beg – how could I?
But still… I wish to ask, if I could,
Whether you would consider me,
Whose heart, only now, is free.
—by Andrew H.
Photo by Hubble Heritage. Creative Commons via Flickr.
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How to Write a Poem uses images like the buzz, the switch, the wave—from the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”—to guide writers into new ways of writing poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology and prompts included.
“How to Write a Poem is a classroom must-have.”
—Callie Feyen, English Teacher, Maryland
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Andrew H says
Humanity
Stagnation…of the inner mind,
A heart that weighs as heavy as a cog –
Am I a part…of that thing called mankind?
I do not know. Some thought rises
In times like these…of crises.
No pain when grim deeds show themselves
Only a numbness, machine-like
An emptiness akin to dumbness.
When heart is shattered, we go reboot
Our system – is that a human thing to do?
I almost wish the spectres ushered pain
In through the threshold – old bosom friend
Who greets both man and beast the same….
But not machine. I do not feel, when I should reel.
Am I machine? Am I a man? I have flesh, blood and brain?
What am I? Am I even sane?
I stand and look on devastation,
And though I ponder my insanity
A tear – a very human tear –
Rolls down my cheek, washed in
Humanity.
I don’t feel this is very good – I just couldn’t visualise something good for the prompt. Still, gave it a shot.
Heather Eure says
I’m glad you did give it a shot. I liked it.
Andrew H says
Also, I forgot to say thanks for showing my last poem. 😛
Rick Maxson says
Andrew, I loved the word play in your featured poem: sin and pi; sin and apple pie. And how appropriate the path leading to Keats.
Rick Maxson says
I just read David Eagleman’s book “The Brain.” It is a fantastic journey into ourselves and reality. So happy to see it quoted here. There couldn’t have been anything more current or magnificent for this prompt.
Time and time again books like these bring me back to Wallace Stevens’s “Reality Is An Activity of the Most August Imagination.”
Heather Eure says
Thanks, Rick! I like those kind of books, too.
I haven’t read Wallace Stevens in a long time. Will definitely go back and read “…August Imagination” again. Thanks for sharing it.
Monica Sharman says
The trick is slick code to manage
all the if, for, and while statements
in a optimized number of lines.
Pass a list, fix the syntax, import all the variables.
Comment your lines and indent where necessary,
leaving line breaks and whitespace
for readability.
Rick Maxson says
Poet In the Land of Null
In the lavender evening,
when the clouds have lost
their mirrors, the poet,
in the land of Null, is driving home.
The business parks and white columns,
red brick facades, fall
and fragment in the opulent pools,
undulating reflections, in effect,
windows in a burned house.
Dense maps of winter trees, overpass,
the line of cars in silhouette,
like the spine of a dark beast,
abandoned by the light,
slouching toward the grayscale expressway.
Boxes of steel and glass cast
their forms on the tarmac in eigengrau.
In the land of Null,
the exquisite and defining
corner is gnawed away,
to feed time and the compilers,
for whom this evening was deleted,
now a palette in the poet’s head,
silently unfolding in the Rothko sky.
joshua joseph bissot says
beyond our reach
we see beyond the sky
through atmospheric aberrations
dizzy into the vertigo of our ever expanding heavens
where iconic echoes of stars past still lit with magic
once thought to be gods now ghosts
in silence remind us of our own mortality
-jOsHua joSepH bIssoT -al art(0+)