Thinking is Physical

... that is the source of its beauty.

We can’t see it happening. It doesn’t make a sound. Nor do we feel anything moving. But thinking is physical.

The most obvious illustration of this is fatigue. Lacking sleep, the brain re-directs its energy from critical thinking to just staying awake—and, lacking resource, we make mistakes of judgement. The impact is easy enough to illustrate. Pit two bunch of students against a driving simulator—one hasn’t slept for 24 hours, while the other is over the alcohol limit—and the drunk proves safer than the sleep-deprived. Fatigue is implicated in most industrial accidents (including the Global Financial Crisis of 2008) because we fail to take seriously what engineers call Asset Integrity; repairing the equipment we work with, before it gets worn out. Our brains need sleep.

Thinking is also implicit in reading. After all, we aren’t just parsing words; we are absorbing meaning. When our reading is distracted, we remember and understand less. This is one explanation for the superiority of book reading over screens.

The same is equally true of writing. I mostly take notes by hand. I can’t write as fast as I can type, but I can remember what I’ve written better. The idea and my body are better connected. Experiments show that when schoolchildren create letters by hand (as opposed to typing) they remember the words and meaning better. Why wouldn’t they? What are called ‘graphomotor movements’ help imprint letter shapes and word structures into memory. With both a mental and a muscle memory, the word becomes more securely integrated into their experience.

Just as words on paper occupy defined physical space when reading, and thus may contribute to better recall, so the letters we put on paper contain more personal and implicit markers to enhance memory. Writing by hand also makes doodling an alluring option. I doodle frequently—sometimes because I am bored but more often because it helps my concentration, memory and creative thinking. My doodles don’t require much cognitive effort but they aid focus and prevent distraction. They also prevent my deviant behaviour in tedious meetings. The same research that favours doodling suggested that, in helping you look away from a problem (however briefly) drawing and doodling provides a cognitive, and frequently creative, break.

No wonder schools around the world are starting to regret their enthusiastic embrace of tablets and screens. How did educators forget to be sceptical? The Google/Chrome sales machine offered such deep discounts, Apple products were so cool, everyone seemed to forget that giving candy to babies is frowned upon and taking from Greeks bearing gifts comes with fatal consequences. And all of these companies upped the ante by doing what tech companies always love: wrapped their products in virtue, arguing that at last the dyspraxic could write and the dyslexic could spell. Some of these advantages were real for a few, but they was never determining factors in design or strategy. As for the claim that laptops for all would democratize education, quite the opposite occurred as the latest, ever pricier models generated yet another social status contest for young people already drowning in them. Such altruistic posturing proved just the propaganda the industry needed to get legislators on board in an industry too arrogant to imagine that precautionary principles might apply to them.

But the deeper question that nags me is: wherein lies the attraction of the artificial, the virtual, the non-physical? If it isn’t as simple and sad as self-loathing, wouldn’t it be safer and more inspiring to admire with appropriate awe the evolution of the human mind, what our brain is and what it can do? Why are we so excited by artificial intelligence instead of in love with our own? Below is my favourite description of that organ sitting at the top of your neck; I find it more thrilling than any AI pitch I’ve ever heard. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the neuroscientist Peter Hamlyn, talking about music.

“A neuron is a bit like a tree. If you take hold of the base of a tree, you’ve got an axon which is the trunk and that goes up to the top of the tree and that has these branches. If you pull it out of the ground, you’ve got all of the roots. And the branches touch the roots of other trees. At each point where they contact the next neuron, there is a thing called a synapse. And that synapse is a gap and what goes on at that gap is communication: one cell passes on a message to another. And it does that by something that is a bit like an orchestra: it communicates, by something called vesical transmission, or chemical transmission: little pockets of chemicals eject from the transmitting neuron go across the gap and those chemicals then excite or inhibit receptors on the next neuron. Now there are multiple chemicals that go across; it’s like paintballing Some of these chemicals go across very quickly, some go slowly, some last for fractions of a second in their effect, some last minutes.

You have something like 100 billion neurons in your head. And something like a quintillion synapses, each making a communication as complex as an orchestral piece. A quintillion is one with fifteen naughts after it : 1,000,000,000,000,000. That degree of complexity—1,000,000,000,000,000 orchestras playing at once—is what is going on in your head right now. And that thing as I say is either where you live or it’s what you are. But whatever it is, it is insanely complicated. And way more complex than anything we have managed to generate yet in terms of AI.’

If You Want to Go Deeper

Liten to Peter Hamlyn’s Private Passions. This is a BBC Radio 3 programme in which thinkers, inventors, musicians and other notables discuss in some detail the music that is meaningful to them. And the music comes in big chunky extracts. A treasure trove. (And if you haven’t had enough of me, here is mine.)

For the Love of It

You know by now that I love physical books. Online I buy these from World of Books, a B Corp which recycles and resells books. I can even sell the books back when I’m finished with them! This is deeply satisfying as a means of keeping my office navigable.

BUT physical books stores still offer delights that even World of Books can’t match. The other day I went into Hatchard’s in Piccadilly to use using my London Library discount buying a big expensive book for my husband, But once inside, I browsed. I discovered their 18th century British history section, holding a book I didn’t know I wanted—on a topic adjacent to a subject that may turn into my next book. Online, my choice is determined by what I know I want, or by what the online business wants me to buy from them. Online has neither curation and nor a chance for serendipity. A wholesome reminder to keep browsing in the real world. Thank you Booksellers of the World.