Let's get quantum

So I’m doing research of the writerly kind, which in this case involves reading a book on quantum mechanics called What the Bleep Do We Know? You may have heard of it as it’s based on the documentary. You don’t need to know ANYTHING about quantum mechanics to understand this book, which is good because I didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics. Because quantum mechanics asks more questions than it answers, I probably still don’t. If you’re really interested, I’m putting my notes on my writing blog. Otherwise, here are some mind-sparking highlights for my casual blog readers.

(Quantum simply means small. It’s the study of things smaller and subtler than what classical science studies. In a way, it brings spirit and science together the way it was before Descartes came along and separated them. It basically states that because there are multiple answers to every question, you can never confidently say that anyone is incorrect.)

• Probing deeper into matter, they find that matter is actually made of energy. And energy may be made of something even more subtle, such as information or consciousness.

• The brain paints the picture, not the eye. A person with a stroke lost the part of his brain that recognizes noses so he always saw what his brain thought people’s noses should look like. He wouldn’t be able to see a clown nose or if someone had a huge nose. How much of what we see is just brain interpretation and not real?

• They put kittens in a room with no vertical lines. When it grew up, they put it in a normal room and it kept running into chair legs—unable to see the vertical lines. We can’t see anything we don’t understand. Students have to be taught how to see cells in a microscope because they are blind to them before they understand what to look for.

• Brain activity is exactly the same whether you are looking at an object or imagining it.

• Are brains the tool to read memories that are stored in the universe?

• Consciousness is made of 40 ah-ha moments per second.