So what is the scientific mindset? And why is it so important? Why is it better than other mindsets like a religious mindset, or a traditional mindset? This post will seek to answer these questions. And as always, I hope it helps the reader better understand the world around him/her.

Science is the study of the laws that govern everything around us. From what makes us breathe to how your pencil will behave if released from a certain height above the ground, to how humans and other animals are shaped by their surroundings. In short, science is the process of “finding out”. Once that is clear, we can move on to how to go about “finding out”. Well, the first step is simple: saying, “I don’t know”. Only when you accept that you do not know how something works, or why something happens, can you begin your journey of finding out about it. And this step is by far the most important (and for some, the most difficult) step in moving towards a scientific mindset. If you have some preconceptions about a topic, which may be due to traditional beliefs or religious teachings, you are hindered in your discovery of the true nature of it, because you will always seek to affirm the belief you already have. So a scientific mindset requires an “open mind”: an acceptance of the fact that anything is possible.

The next step is to observe and postulate a plausible hypothesis. Observation here is key. It is very important to keep observing things that happen around you. A very good example is that of Isaac Newton. If it weren’t for his observational skills, he would have dismissed the fall of the apple as just another daily life event and moved on, and the law of gravity would not have been discovered. So even observation of daily-life events can lead to paradigm-changing discoveries, as in the case of Newton. Observation also requires a study of all the previous studies done on the subject you are studying. Remember that all discoveries that seem revolutionary are actually built upon previous work. In case of Newton, the work was already present explaining mechanics of heavenly bodies and terrestrial objects separately. All he did was unify the two behaviors in a single law of gravity.

Next is, ofcourse, accumulating evidence. Without evidence, there can be NO theory. All scientific facts must have evidence supporting it. Evidence has a special role in making the scientific mindset. Ever seen two scientists arguing? I bet you haven’t. Because all debates in the scientific world are settled through evidence. If a scientist asserts something and presents evidence supporting that assertion, then unless someone comes up with contradicting evidence, the assertion is accepted as the closest approximation to reality. There are NO debates in science, simply because there is only ONE objective reality. Contrast that with religion, for instance. A debate about whose God is better, will go on forever, because the concept of a God is not based on evidence. Such a debate can only be “won” if one side kills the other, which has been happening ever since religion was invented.

And then we come to the final point: the emergent nature of scientific discovery, which basically means that whatever science suggests, it accepts the posibility of being proven wrong eventually. Our understanding of the universe and of each other is constantly changing, and it is important for us to be able to “let go” of the old explanation in the face of contradicting evidence. Just as Newtonian relativity was replaced by Einsteinian relativity, so too all scientific understandings undergo constant change. The scientific mindset requires the acceptance of the fact that our understandings may eventually be updated, changed or eradicated; the fact that the only constant in the universe is “change”.

To summarize, these are the key features of a scientific mindset:

1. The ability to say, “I don’t know”, leading to what can be termed as an “open mind”.
2. The constant urge to observe and understand the nature of things around us.
3. The resolve to make all decisions based on facts and evidence.
4. The ability to let go of old beliefs and accept new explanations when evidence to support them is presented.

The scientific mindset allows us to be in harmony with the closest approximation to “reality” that we have. And when we acknowledge that, we will truly know how we can achieve World Peace. Because there can be only ONE objective reality.

Now, once you have understood the concept, some examples to show just how powerful this phenomenon is. A few days ago, I sat down to watch “Chak de India” with my family. And anyone who knows me, knows that I do not relate to either any single country like India, or to competitive games like field hockey. Yet, at the end, I had tears in my eyes. I could literally feel their anxiety, their ambition, their urge to prove themselves. I could relate to the people involved, even if they were involved in a meaningless game. That’s how powerful the mirror neurons are.

Advertisers use this to a great deal. From the “Kuch meetha ho jaye” which makes you think that everything is perfect in the world, even though its a shit-hole out there, or the “Darr ke aage jeet hai” that makes you want to jump of a cliff yourself, the advertisement industry thrives on these associations. Of course, the reality remains that you can’t get to date a girl by asking her for a piece of chocolate, but these ads manage to get us involved, and eventually make us buy shitty products thinking that we need them in order to survive, when we don’t.

Another example is the recent Anna Hazare campaign. Now, I’m not against the guy. I respect him, because he’s a passionate man who is doing what he thinks is best for his people. But anyone, who has taken a closer look at the Jan Lokpal Bill will halt to think twice before joining the campaign, as was done by many activists like Arundhati Roy (though her critique was very different from mine). The movement gained such a large momentum not because of the bill, but because the media associated with it appealed to the emotions of the public. The people quickly related to frustration they all face everyday due to corruption, and set out in protest, many not knowing what the bill entailed, but thinking that it will make everything rosy. That’s how powerful mirror neurons are.

So what does that prove, you ask. How easily manipulable we all are? Well, um, yes. And that’s the point.

So how do you get away from being manipulated? By gaining knowledge, because once I had watched the movie, I went back to my original stance about separate nations and competitive games. We need to learn how to make associations with things that are relevant. Like the billions of people starving around the world. We must learn to empathize with the underpaid workers who hate their boring jobs but must do them because of lack of education or opportunity. We must empathize with our environment: the plants and animals and the biosphere, which are undergoing terrible degradation everyday. We must empathize with the scientists, who are working days and nights to devise methods to improve the human condition, but are not able to implement them due to lack of funds, because no corporation wants to invest in solutions, because solutions are enemies of profit. And finally, we must empathize with our children, because the earth is a finite planet, and what we are doing to it, is going to hurt them in the long run.

It is when we realize this, that we see that our current system is broken. It is counter-productive and will ultimately lead to our own extinction. And no amount of new laws can fix it. We need a complete overhaul. A redesign of our culture based on empathy and cooperation, instead of competition and greed.

This forms the basis of memory. We remember everything based on the associations we can make with what we already know. That is, we remember new things by strengthening and weakening certain synapses. We do this by first finding the neurons responsible for something related to the things we wish to learn, and then, by manipulating their synapses, we succeed to remember something new. Also important to know is that one can make multiple associations of a single piece of information. So we can remember one thing in multiple ways, in multiple parts of the brain.

Now that is quite a fancy biology lesson. But what I really want to convey is: how does all this relate to what you experience in day-to-day life? It does. It explains the basis of what we know as “intelligence”.

If I tell you to learn something and ask questions from you about it a week later, some people will answer more questions correctly than others. Why? Since we didn’t know the answer to this till now, we said, “Maybe one of them is simply more intelligent than the other”. But what does that mean? What makes some people intelligent and some not at all? Yes, you guessed it right: it is something related to associative memory. So if I tell you to learn something, you will go through the data, in whatever form it may be, and try to associate it with something you already know. It may be some emotion, some sensation, some physical object or if the data is theoretical then other theoretical stuff that you already know. It happens unconsciously, so you won’t be able to feel the stages as I have described here. And it doesn’t matter what the association is. What matters is: how many associations you can find.

As an example, I will take myself. Most of my school-mates would agree that I have a natural affinity for classical physics. I answered most of the difficult questions in class. So how did I do it? To get the answer we will have to go to my childhood. Till I was about two years old, I lived with my grandparents, in Ranchi. We had a simple house and a huge lawn. And like every kid I was curious, but unlike many kids, I was given the freedom to explore. By exploring things around me, I learned the nature of the physical world. My favorite pass-time was taking rice out of a jar and putting it into another jar. And my favorite toy was a cardboard box. And when I grew up and went to the physics class, it was suddenly all so intuitive to me, because I could immediately make associations with the knowledge of the physical world that I learned in my infancy. For every law that I learned, I could find many many examples of it, and hence many associations to enable me to learn it. And so whenever I see parents discouraging a curious kid by telling him to sit down and shut up, or when I see parents gifting infants extremely complicated toys with lights and sound in them, I speak. Because unknowingly, due to a lack of knowledge about the human brain, they are depriving their child of his/her full potential. About why such people are allowed to raise children is a matter which can be discussed later. But lets move on.

So as I have demonstrated, the reason some people learn faster than others is because they can make more associations with the thing they are learning. And the more information you acquire, the better you would be able to learn new things because success of learning new data depends on the data you already have. And this is primarily the reason why you should learn actively. Not passively, actively. You should always be finding new information to learn.

If the reader has ever taught, or given a talk or a presentation, I am sure he/she must have encountered a tip saying, “Explain things by going down to the listener’s level”. If you are a teacher and you haven’t heard this, then I’m sorry mate, you’re not a good teacher. Anyways, now you know why this tip is so important. Because it comes not from higher cognitive levels of human thought, but from the core neurological functions of the human brain. Because the listener won’t understand or remember anything you say unless they can relate it with something they already know.

And this, my friend, is how humans learn. This is how you can make people learn. This is why some people learn faster than others. And this is why we desperately need to make some dramatic changes to our education system. Because lets face it, we are not exactly letting our children explore their full potential.

And so, when Steve Jobs said “stay hungry, stay foolish”, I really wished that those who heard will follow.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
-Lyall Watson.

And although we may never be able to fully understand its function, we have learned, through research, some very interesting things about it, which have given us a pretty good insight on how it might be functioning.

Following this post will be series of three more, where I discuss three key mechanisms on which the brain functions:

1. Associative Memory: This post will relate to how the brain learns new things by forming or weakening synapses.
2. Mirror Neurons: Also dubbed as “empathy neurons”, these help us connect to other people and explains how we are able to relate to our environment.
3. Conditioning: The most important topic, which explains most of the behavior exhibited by humans.

All these posts will be strictly from a scientific perspective, based on scientific findings. No spiritual voodoo going on here. I’ll take concepts from neurology, behavioral psychology and sociology.

But first, a few basics(for those who didn’t care to read biology in schools). From Wikipedia: The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. The cerebral cortex of the human brain contains roughly 15–33 billion neurons, perhaps more, linked with up to 10,000 synaptic connections each. The brain controls the other organ systems of the body, either by activating muscles or by causing secretion of chemicals such as hormones and neurotransmitters.

In short, it is probably the most complex and the most important organ in the human body. Without it, we would cease to function, to learn, to act, to react, to communicate, and to think.

Now what may be the purpose of this post? Why am I suddenly writing about the human brain? There has to a purpose, right? Yes, there is. The purpose is to educate. I always say that with knowledge comes understanding of the world around you. When we begin to understand how the brain functions, we understand why people behave the way they do. We understand our fellow human being. My sincere hope is that this understanding will help to create much needed understanding in the world. It will help us solve our quarrels. And ultimately, I hope that it plays a small part in building a better world for all, where one respects their fellow human not because of societal rules and norms, but because we have truly begun to understand each other. I would like to live in such a world, won’t you?

Also, in this introductory post, I would like to give a side-note for my more poetic friends. There is no ‘soul’ and your ‘heart’ doesn’t tell you stuff. There is no evidence to support any of these claims. Anything that feels like ‘soul’ or ‘heart’ is essentially emulated by your brain, nothing else. So stop getting brainwashed! Stop believing everything popular media tells you. Their main aim is to make as much money as they can, not to educate you. That’s the main reason they engage in lovey-dovey stuff – because it sells. If they started telling scientific truths, they wouldn’t be able to sell their movies. Believe it – that’s how sick our popular culture is.

Back to my upcoming posts. I hope they will play a small part in making people understand each other, see why discussion and active learning are better than debating and quarreling, and see themselves from a new standpoint. So, stay tuned, stay hungry and stay foolish (a slight modification of Steve Jobs’ statement).

EDIT: Updated the link to the first post. So you can click on it and get reading :)
EDIT 20110917: Updated the link for the 2nd post. Just one more to go :D

First student – my younger sister.

This is the first time I’m doing something like this. It’s gonna be an experiment for both of us.

They say that the first thing you have to do is to know your pupil. Know his/her background. Once you know their frame of reference, you can then go in and begin to widen the frame from the inside.

What I want to teach her is not taught in any school. You won’t find it in any school material. No school I know of even touches the important topics of ‘semantics’ and ‘the scientific method’. Schools are not there to make people critical thinkers. They are there to make people fit into the society they perpetuate. What I am going to try to do is to initiate that ‘bug’ of critical thinking in her brain.

For starters, I need to get her to want to get taught by me. The challenge is to get her trust and to get her attention. Once I have her trust, I hope she will be comfortable to share her background with me. Note that I haven’t seen her for the last 2 years. So I practically know nothing about her. Also, as self-righteous as most teens are, she doesn’t want to be taught by me. So to do this, I am going to ask a number of people, who have some credibility with her, to try to convince her to give it a try. These include her father, her bhabhi and her best friend. The formula here is not to be coercive, but to try to establish a sense of mystery in her head, to get her curious, to make her think that her brother knows something that is going to benefit her greatly. Once that is established, she may agree to sit with me for a lesson.

Next up is for me to get her to tell me everything there is to know about her. This is essential because I cannot even think of beginning to teach until I know her frame of reference. And this can only be found by getting to know her background, something only she herself can share with me. The method I am going to use is to try to make her comfortable about talking to me. Due to unknown reasons, she has closed herself off from most of her family, including me. I don’t know the reasons, but I think I can make a guess. I think it’s because she thinks none of us understands her values, her hopes and dreams, etc. So I would have to make her understand that I ‘want’ to understand her, and that it cannot happen without her support. I would have to tell her that I think she is a very intelligent person and that I think I can also learn something from her experiences. Or maybe something like “if you cooperate, you might be in for the ride of your life!!” Lets see.

As I said, I have no experience at all, and I have taken, as a first assignment, a ‘very’ difficult student. I do not know if I will succeed, but I know that if I don’t try, my sister will not grow into the truly creative and intelligent human being that she is capable of becoming. Wish me luck!

What is Technology? Technology is a pencil, that lets you solidify ideas on paper. Technology is an automobile, that lets you travel faster than feet would allow. Technology is all around us. From ceiling fans to power plants to computers. Technology is the only tangible thing that has improved the standard of living of humans ever since the first human walked on earth. It is Technology that solves the problems mankind faces. From providing light in the nighttime to preventing buildings from collapsing due to earthquakes to traveling faster than the speed of sound.

We, as engineers, have been trained in Technology. We are supposed to be at the forefront of technology and, through it, at the forefront in solving the problems mankind faces today.

It is sad to see what people think of engineering today. They are told that engineering is a ladder to success. It is portrayed as a ladder to become rich. They are told that if they study engineering in an IIT they can get into a better B-School or do PhD abroad or get a high pay job. Do they realize why? Do they realize why engineers are valued thus? It is because engineers are the only people that have been trained in tackling the problems of the world. They are the puzzle-solvers of the human world.

The problem is that the engineers don’t realize this. I live in a campus containing around 2500 engineers and to-be engineers and never, in 4 years of living here, have I come across a single one who so much as talks of solving the problems of the human race.

Part of the problem lies in our lifestyles. Usually, engineering students get their laptops in the beginning of their period of study. What then? It is a nonstop marathon of movies, games, soaps, sports, and other forms of entertainment. The problem is that the “entertainment industry” has grown so large that people have forgotten what entertainment is supposed to be about. Entertainment is what you pursue when you get time out of doing the “actual” work. But right now, people are so engrossed in entertainment that they don’t believe there is anything else worthwhile in the world. Consequently, we have a whole “industry” that just produces entertainment.

Wake up my fellow engineers. You are the ones who are supposed to take the human race to a standard of living so high that even millionaires today cannot imagine such luxury. When you realize the knowledge and the potential you have, you will sit and wonder at how distracted you were that you could not see the possibilities of an intelligent race that is known as the Homo Sapien. For it is you, who will, through technology, solve problems like the energy crisis and climate variability, and then, through technology, improve our standard of living, like automation of boring jobs, producing abundance of food, eradicating diseases, and thus, building a system that is sustainable and efficient and environment-friendly.

A new awareness is required. A new lifestyle is needed. A renewed effort is called for. For it is a new future that awaits us. A future of prosperity, for all people.

But I came across something. Something that offered to explain this inconsistent world to me. This was the Zeitgeist series of motion pictures, and the Venus Project. I’m not writing this as their propaganda, but these people gave me a lot to think about.

They presented to me a different way to see this mad, tangled world. To see what was missing, what exactly was inconsistent, what exactly made me retract from it.

From the day we are born, we are given a separate identity. We are given a name, a family name, a religion, a caste, a nationality, and everything else to make us unique. We are told that we have our unique identity. And this is what forms the core of our society today, the feeling of being a unique individual.

So what happens when everybody wants to be a unique individual? They compete. Conflicts arise. Almost all the conflicts we see in today’s world arise from this very feeling. Hindus vs. Muslims, India vs. Pakistan, My college against another college, companies battling for market share and so on. And when these conflicts arise, growth stops.

Let me first define growth since it is used in so many metaphorical senses, one can be left boggled. By growth, I mean enlightenment of the mind. For it is the ultimate goal of humankind: to know and to understand the nature of everything around us.

You see, true growth cannot occur alone. We grow as people around us grow. What we see and experience in our lives is the amount of knowledge we have. Compare a single person’s knowledge with the collective knowledge of a group of, say, 100 people. No comparison, right? If these 100 people share their knowledge, all of it, with each other, then each individual will have a knowledge worth 100 people. Now, imagine this on a world scale.

The problem is that all of us have been taught from the beginning that we are separate from everyone else. Believe me, it is the biggest lie you have ever been told.

An extra-terrestrial visitor examining differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.

The truth is that we are all the same. We all are connected in such a strong way to each other as well as everything around us, that when you would realize it, you would gawk at how you had been concentrating on the differences when the similarities were right in front of you.

Now let us talk for a moment about religion. What does religion stand on? We all have an innate urge to be part of the oneness, and that is what religion exploits. They call it God, and they say he has rules. And I think that’s cruel. I think that this oneness can be achieved absent religion.

When we are able to see ourselves as everything around us, and everything around us as ourselves, only then can we truly understand the symbiotic nature of the universe. Only then can we achieve true enlightenment.

Notions that divide us, like religion, state, race, even peer groups, are inconsistent and irrelevant. We are but one entity, one organism, if you will. We are all children of our mother Earth. And like all its resources, knowledge, is the common property of each human being. Knowledge should not be withheld, but shared, so that we all may benefit from it. “Patents” are one such thing that hinder such progress. These must be discouraged.

We must all strive to work towards our collective well-being, not by being selfish, but by sharing, by working together to solve problems that face us today. For only then, will we grow. Only then will there be true prosperity. Only then can we advance into the next era.

By becoming part of the Oneness.

Two days from today is Valentine’s day, my first with a “real” valentine. And I couldn’t be more ecstatic. Today, I received what is supposed to be my first Valentine’s day gift, ever. So “Patri” comes to my room and announces that I’ve got mail. Yeah, I know, he’s not a real patri/mailman, but at times he makes me think he is. All the mail I get, he’s the one who informs me about them. A perfect example of “true to his name”… :D

Anyways so I rush to the security desk, and excitedly ask the guard about the courier. He opens the cupboard on his right, and takes out an envelope. And, ahem, the envelope’s got pink hearts all over it. He gives me a look that says: “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”. Unable to look in his eyes, I quickly sign on the register and dart towards my room, dialing her number as I go. She doesn’t pick up, but that’s Ok.
I reach my room and see her online on my GTalk client. I ping and tell her that I have received it. She’s happy too, and tells me about the little Ganesh idol she sent in the package. But wait…

The envelope is really thin. There can’t be a Ganesh idol in it!!

I tell her that. She’s like: “Stop it! No jokes about the idol”. I say I’m serious. And then I notice it, a small opening in the envelop. Just big enough for a small idol to slip through. She’s aghast. I open the package and find everything else intact. Just the idol missing. She’s on the verge of tears now. It was supposed to be her lucky charm and she had sent it as a token of her undying love. I run back the way I came, searching the floor for anything that looked like an idol, all the way back to the guard, and ask him to check the cupboard. He opens and I scan the shelf. Nothing. I ask him to contact me if he sees anything like a small Ganesh idol and run back to my room. I tell her that I’m sorry, that I couldn’t find it. She’s upset, VERY upset. What had been going as a really good day had turned wrong. Really wrong. It makes me sad. This was supposed to be a very good first for me. It had turned disastrous.
On futher inspection I find out that she was already having a bad day, a bad day that was made worse by me. I try to cheer her up, telling her how I loved the rest of the contents of the envelope. She smiles. But I know she’s still hurting inside. It is one of those times again when I wish I was with her, holding her in my arms, making her forget everything, and then I kicked myself for having no funds whatsoever to do so.

Anyways, so I try to divert her from the topic, speaking about myriad, senseless things. In time, she’s feeling better, and I’m relieved. What a day, I think. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. A reminder that life is not always what you want it to be. That yin and yang are, and will forever be, inseparable.

Anyways, thats not the topic of today’s post. I want to talk about this wonderful game I came across.

Braid.

I came across this game quite luckily. Its an interesting story. I was trying to start video chatting with her through this software called Pidgin. But I didn’t know whether the Windows version had that feature, coz the Linux version did. So, I went to one of my friends who is an avid user of Pidgin, and caught him playing this game. So basically, it’s thanks to her I came across this game [just like I'm indebted to her for all the other things in my life, thanks jaan :) ].

So, in the game you’re this guy who is out to look for his princess who got kidnapped. It comprises a series of stages where you collect puzzle pieces and then put ‘em together to form a picture. But collecting those pieces is a puzzle in itself. It happens often that you come to a level that is seemingly impossible to solve. It seems to be impossible to get that puzzle piece. Coz there is one thing about the game: you can turn back time!! And you know what comes with time manipulation: Perplexity!!
There’s too much of that in the game to get you frustrated and shut it down. There’s the fundas of time reversal, alternate futures, variable time speeds and objects that are exceptions to all of these. All these combined can give you a quite a hard time. But then, the joy when you complete a level and finally collect that puzzle piece, cannot be spoken of. You feel as if you have conquered the world. Ah, i miss that game. Wish it had more levels to complete.
Another interesting thing was the manipulation of enemies. In most games, you just kill the enemy off and be done with it. But in Braid, you have to use them to your advantage. May it be a using it as jumping pad to get to a high ledge or getting it to survive multiple traps just to get it to retrieve a key from an inaccessible area; it’s a hell lot of fun. I never knew a game where you have to utilize your enemies to this degree.
The game is a masterpiece. I heard it took the developer 3 years to make it. That’s quite a lot of time for a 2D game. Also, the storyline is supposed to be a metaphor to nuclear warfare, with the princess being the metaphor to an atom bomb, although I didn’t get as to how that works out. Maybe you can! So try it out.

‘Braid’ is a once in a lifetime game. Believe me when I say that if you complete the game, you will be considered as a genius. People who know about Braid are so astonished when I tell them I completed it in just 2 days :D
I’m loving it.
So get out there and try it out. The game’s got excellent reviews from everywhere, with people suggesting they haven’t played a game like this in 10 years!! There’s a cracked version on the Internet if you don’t wanna buy it. But as a tribute to its hard-working developer (his name is Jonathan Blow I think), I would recommend that you do. It’s available for Xbox 360 too, if you’re interested. The official site is http://www.braid-game.com/. Happy Gaming!

We read many papers, searched the internet for hours, downloading here ‘n there, trying to figure out what we wanted to do in the project, but to no avail. We realized we dont have either the expertise or the resources to even get started.
For one, the VLSI lab at IITG CSE department has got TWO FPGA kits. In all the designs we studied, they needed three or more. Furthermore, we barely know how to operate one FPGA, let alone running many of them in sync.
We studied more than 25 papers, and none of the designs were feasible to apply in the real world, except for one, which was actually implemented in an autonomous robot. See, the reason why its not feasible is this: Our brain has nearly 10¹⁴ (1 hundred thousand billion) neurons. The highest number of neurons built by the best of research labs is 10¹² i.e. a hundredth of the number of neurons in a single human brain. With our 2 FPGA’s we wouldnt even have built 10⁶ (a million). There’s no way we could have built something application-based.

There was also the concern of the neuron model to use. There are numerous neuron models out there, from very simple to really complicated. The complicated ones are more accurate, but the simple ones take less space. So, in hardware, where there’s always a fight to reduce space usage on the chip, we have to trade off accuracy, which is not a good idea, since a neuron with approximate attributes can work in a totally opposite way from what we expect. And this is main reason why hardware ANN models haven’t been used in many applications.

Anyways, so the project is dropped for now. We’re gonna concentrate on the one we left incomplete (really boring one, you know) before we got into this project. For all those readers who were expecting positive updates: Really sorry people…but I can’t help it. I’m dissapointed too.

With this I sign off, hoping to update the blog more frequently. Good day!!