The Ghost in My Brain Read Online Free Page A

paragraphs along to find the exact location of the information about that front door you haven’t seen in twenty years? How did you know to look there? How did you do that in less than a second? Because that is typically how long it takes us to retrieve that long-disused information . . .
    What holds us in the greatest awe is not merely the hardware, but rather the design of the truly elegant system that runs on it, giving us the human mind.
    And when we start talking about our
minds
—that which really makes us human—the numbers get even more staggering. At the University of Leicester, James Nelms, Declan Roberts, Suzanne Thomas, and David Starkey calculated that capturing everything that could contribute to a human’s mental state would require 2.6 tredecillion bits (2.6 followed by 42 zeros). * In their fun paper, they note that to transmit that much information using a
Star Trek
–like teleporter, but athigh-speed Internet bit rates, it would take . . . several hundred thousand times the current age of the universe.
    To simulate concussion damage to a human brain then, we’ll need to gather together those 50 million desktop computers, the 500,000-mile-high stack of paper, and the almost inconceivable amount of information it takes to construct a human
mind
, then loose a hurricane on the system, ripping out network lines, laying waste to vast sections of memory, and sending landslides to smash hundreds of thousands of computers.
    In this way we can imagine the size of the problem we are trying to address: with a single blow to the head—in that moment of impact from concussion—we’ve caused staggering losses in computational power to the unimaginably complex systems that go such a long way in making us human.
    Fortunately, this magnificent device is also largely plastic and able to reconfigure itself over time, borrowing a little here, and a little there, and in this way able to restore much of its lost functioning—though, as we will see, not always without a little clever jump-starting of the stalled processes.

THROUGH THE KALEIDOSCOPE
    . . . My time was running out, but I was still stuck in the middle of Grant Park. And now, not only was my brain fatigued, but my mind was also growing dull from the onset of hypothermia. My body was giving up. I could not feel my toes or my fingers. I was fading away.
    The question was,
How do I get moving before it is too late?
    Then magic happened. I swayed in the wind and tipped forward. My left foot moved on its own to keep me from falling, then my right foot, then my left again.
Stump, stump, stump.
I stared intently at the now inconceivably distant horizon where I knew my car was.
There is where I am going.
My jaw dropped farther, and my tongue hung down in my mouth. I could not feel the soles of my frozen feet. My index fingers popped out again, to help with balance, and I walked with abent-kneed, shuffling gait—like a zombie. I willed myself toward my car a few inches at a time.
    Within each unfolding moment, my world was made of fractured images: little scenes of blades of grass poking through the snow, of darkened tree branches, lights in the distance, and night shadows. Nothing was whole. The Dolly Zoom Effect was in full force, and though I knew, intuitively, that my car was just up ahead—thirty feet away—it still
looked
an impossible half mile distant. My feet were again coming . . .
to . . . a . . . stop. . . .
Out of desperation I changed tactics, and just
reached
for the car, let my feet walk toward the
feeling
of it, almost within my grasp. And then at last, from within the chaotic tunnel of my senses, my long journey—the first stage in the gauntlet—was finally over.
    Now began the second stage. I still had to unlock the door, get in, and turn the car on. But I couldn’t work it. I’d lost the concept of
center.
I had no internal