WHAT IF...

DISCLAIMER – This is a college magazine article; so, if at times, it sounds patronizing with vague and generic statements, please know that I didn’t intend it to be so. Again, apologies for the minuscule amounts of actually experimented physics and cosmic amounts of incoherent speculation. Kindly do not focus on the massive length of the write-up. I was asked to write 1500 words for the article, but simply ran out of stuff to rant, thank heavens! :-D

I bet there’s not one among us who hasn’t explored the intricacies of “WHAT IF”. Wouldn’t it be the most fascinating discovery of the millennium if you or I discovered the time machine?

We’d sure as hellfire not go to 802702 A.D like some other dolts in the past. We are way cooler than that! The possibilities are many. Like for example, why should Mr. X get the credit for inventing the time machine in 2078 A.D? Why don’t I go back to 1990 and gift myself the formula for time travel, making me the greatest theoretical physics genius of the 1900s and giving me the fascinating distinction of being the first ‘minor’ to win the Nobel Prize! Or else why not invest 1 pound in the Royal Bank of England in 1500 AD under my name? The compounded growth of my petty investment would have made me a billionaire by the time I was born!

But I digress.

I BELIEVE that we need not go looking for answers to the ancient question of time travel to Einstein.

I think we have all that we need, right here in our heads! I say TIME TRAVEL can happen in our minds itself! For those who have started shaking their heads in disgust, let me offer you a simple argument; none of us know the full extent and the limit of the power of the mind, so how can one be so sure that such qualities don’t exist? The enormous untapped power of the DNA computer stands testimony to the limitless power of the most complex machine known to man – the human brain!

Let us examine some details. All of us have felt intuition and instinct. What if tell you now these phenomena are nothing but the mind’s abilities to travel into the future? You may also have realized that in many cases, logic, reasoning and intelligence may fail but instincts and intuition never fails, though many of us fail to interpret it. Then why is one unable to experience such phenomena at all the times? Who knows? It may be that these phenomena require and consume enormous amounts of energy and since we have stopped on our daily dose of Horlicks, these ‘flashes’ come only during important tasks, like while taking important decisions and so on.

Now let’s think about memory. Let me see if I can put forth that memory is nothing but our mind’s ability to travel into the past!
Here’s an example. You must have visited a waterfall. Picture it in your mind.

Okay? Now read on…. You may just want to remember the water in the falls. But I bet that you’ve pictured the entire panorama. You have also visualized the surrounding rocks, the trees et al. Inconclusive enough you say? How about this time, you force yourself to remember only the water falling. Don’t you still remember the whole picture including the moron who kept coming in the way while you were trying to take a snap? How about this then?

I now ask you to remember a person of your choice. I doubt highly that you’ve got just the face of that person. It will always be accompanied by the background - the memory of the place from where you have actually remembered the person!

We also know that conservation of energy is the ultimate goal of any natural system. Assuming memory to be bits and bytes of photons and electrical impulses and the brain to be a processor following our conventional understanding of how a processor could work, then why should the brain allow wastage of energy by returning useless bits of energy like the rocks, flowers and that moron blocking your view, when the water falling to ground is all you want to remember, especially when conservation of energy is the law of the nature. Let’s see if we can work this out…
I say that when you tried to remember the water falls, a series of very complex processes which I don’t profess to understand has ensued. Any incident is stored not as a complete video/image representation but as a memory address location of that particular incident or a marker, something similar to the Paging concept present in the Operating System of any computer. First, for retrieving the information, the mind picks up this marker and actually travels back in time and then imprints a temporary, erasable picture of that ‘incident’ in some part of the brain. This is comparable to a photo film. This ‘picture’ is then processed by the brain and perceived as memory.

Every event in your life has some kind of a ‘log’ akin to the Paging concept again! I prefer to call it an “event address”. Sometimes the address the address of a particular event gets lost!? Quite natural actually. So when you try to remember that particular event, the mind is lost without the log and it aimlessly remembers all other ‘events’, which may or may not be concerned with the event it ‘wants’ to remember. This can be particularly irksome at times when it happens during all ungodly hours (like remembering your favourite song in the middle of an exam).[All of you must have felt it ‘coz I certainly have]. That can be explained as the reason to why we don’t remember everything.

Conditioned actions do not require memory because it has been conditioned (or fed) into the conscious brain. The abilities that I spoke of purely subconscious. You might realize that I always spoke of the ‘mind’ while referring to them as not as the brain. That’s exactly the reason why one never remembers how to walk, to bicycle, to tie a lace and so on.
While writing exams, there’s too much to remember so memory is not a good option (Remember the energy factor). Ergo, we must study so hard that the exam matter becomes a conditioned action, thus improving our result. (I’ve tried to keep this statement as non-condescending as possible).

Just think about it, there’s so much we commit to memory; so many names, so many phone numbers, so many faces, so many places…even if every morsel of information is attributed a bit of energy (photon), our brain would become unstable with the accumulating information. This would ultimately lead to a startling conclusion that there is a limit to what one can learn! (i.e. till the energy level in the brain just reaches the threshold unstable level). What a fine excuse science has given to the lazy Joe!! C’MON MOM, if I study even 1 word more, my brain will explode).

But you might tell me that we need to remember the logs that I spoke of. Well, remembering logs is better than remembering kilobytes of pictures and information, don’t you think? Still, even if our mind doesn’t work in terms of bits and bytes, there must some way in which our brain stores information, which science would be able to explain. OR we may have to invent a new branch of science or invent new mathematics to describe the wonderful phenomenon that our mind is. But first, we must try to pose questions and find answers, get curious. After all, all major scientific discoveries and inventions have arisen out of curiosity. As a parting thought, don’t forget, remember to remember!