Math Mutation 48: Computers On The Brain
You may recall that way back in episode 6, we talked about a
phenomenon called synesthesia, where some people actually see
particular numbers as always having certain colors. This isn't a
metaphor, or poetic description of the numbers-- experiments seem to
show that this is a real pheonomenon, and these people really see
those colors, just as if someone had highlighed them with a magic
marker. No matter how strange it may seem, a small set of people have
different parts of their brains cross-wired somehow, where different
senses somehow get associated with numbers, letters, or concepts.
I was surprised to read in a recent issue of Chip Design magazine
about another form of synesthesia: certain engineers see different
parts of chip schematics in various colors! I should probably give a
little background first, for those of you who don't help design
computer chips for a living. When designing a microprocessor,
engineers use different types of basic symbols, or "gates", to
represent sets of transistors that perform common tasks. One example
is the AND gate, which has two wires coming in, and one wire coming
out. The wire coming out will have a value of 1 if both its inputs
were 1, and otherwise it will have a value of 0. Similarly, an OR
gate drives a value of 1 if either of its inputs was 1. A NOT gate,
or inverter, is even simpler, always outputing a 1 if its single input
was 0, and vice versa. When viewing a design schematic, an engineer
will typically be staring at a sea of symbols representing AND, OR,
NOT, and more complex gates.
According to this article, a synesthetic engineer who was
interviewed can see AND gates as yellow, and OR gates as green. At
first one might suspect that rather than reacting to the logical
function of the gates, he is simply perceiving the shapes used to
represent the gates, since a well known form of synesthesia associates
shapes with colors. But the engineer insisted this was not the case--
for example, the symbol usually used for an inverter is a triangle
with a small circle at the end. But similar shapes can appear as
parts of more complex symbols, and he doesn't see the same colors in
those cases, or when the same shapes just happen to be on a piece of
paper. So somehow, the part of his brain that understands the logic
of chip schematics seems to be cross-wired with the part that
perceives colors! This can be quite useful for an engineer trying to
read chip schematics.
If you think about it, this also might add a new dimension to our
understanding of computation and our brains. I had always thought
that numbers and shapes are directly inherited from the natural world,
so it's not too surprising that our brain can directly exhibit odd
behaviors like synesthesia related to these. Something about these
concepts seems to be fundamentally a part of nature; even if humans
had never evolved, numbers and shapes would still exist somehow. But
the logic gates used to design computers seem like a complex human
invention-- sure, they model basic forms of mathematical logic, but in
a way not easily found in nature. So it seems to me that the fact that
these forms are also subject to synesthesia says that, somehow, the
concepts of computation really are as basic to our brains as numbers.
Of course, I'm not really much of a philosopher or a neurologist, so
I'm sure you can find a thousand holes in my logic. Either way,
though, I think you will agree that circuit-schematic synesthesia is a
fascinating concept.
And this has been your math mutation for today.
References:
Article on circuit schematic synesthesia
Synesthesia at
Wikipedia