256 Steps Of Consciousness

My thinking about thinking had come to an impasse. It was time to collect some data. I needed a portable (walkable) way to measure brain activity, so of course I contacted Wyatt. He told me to check my mail. In a padded envelope I found what looked like a walkman with spiked headphones. I went to the local park and put them on my head. They only hurt for a moment. Then I started walking.

I closed my eyes, took eight steps, opened them again, kept walking. I continued this process for about 15 minutes, then I went home. I noticed the walkman had a USB port, and eventually figured out how to download the data from it. It was just a lot of numbers, 256 rows, each row containing 817 numbers. 817… that could be the number of seconds I had been using the machine. And 256 looked to be about how many spikes were coming out of those earphones. The numbers themselves seemed to range from 0 to 255, which reminded me of something: web colors. It was simple enough to program a 16 by 16 grid (256 squares) that would hold all the "colors" that came from my brain each second. By updating it with the next numbers in the series every second, I could recreate the exact pace of my brain activity, and so I did.

My first attempt was too hard to follow. At first, I thought the arbitrary line break at every 16^th square broke up any pattern I might see, but putting all the color squares into one line instead of a square didn’t help either. I realized that the entire order might be arbitrary, or contrary to whatever sort of pattern I was looking for, so I decided to do an educated fudge. I took a random sampling, about 30 seconds in (at which point I still had my eyes open), and arranged the colors in the grid until they looked like a pattern. I decided to be as simple as possible, putting reddish colors in the center and having them radiate outward through orange to yellow to green to blue and then some purple in the corners. It ended up looking sort of like a picture of a sphere cropped to a square. I then fixed the squares in that order on the grid, and restarted the "slideshow."

I was almost astonished at how well my ad hoc sphere was keeping its shape. It merely seemed to pulse a bit for the first minute or so, the colors shifting slightly, but then the center started to vibrate and stretch. I was reminded of mitosis, but the process didn’t complete. It just went back to its pulsing circle. And then it happened again, at which point I realized, these must be the eight steps. This vibration at the core, this threat to split, must be occurring during those times when my eyes are closed, when my brain is slipping into full projection mode. I had what I was looking for: physical evidence of a difference between these two states.

For my next experiment, I knew I had to take things further…