Last Friday, like usual in the middle of jum’at prayer, I am usually listening to the khotib, but when the talk is rather boring, same content but different package, I started to think a lot of things. Yes, a lot of things, usually random thing. This time I am thinking about how the brain works.
So, lets talk about brain.
In my conscious time my brain think about how exactly the brain works. How the brain works exactly? is it calculating or memorizing. This is what I am thinking during that time.
Do you know what is the sum of 9 + 9? Do you know after adding 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 … until 18 times or you just know that the sum is 18?
What about 9 * 9? What about 10000 * 9876? The last two question is very simple for the one who graduates from junior high school. Maybe.
What about 1234 * 4321? How many seconds do you need to answer that? It is the same time when find the answer of 10000 * 9876? or not?
How do you find the answer for 1234 * 4321? This is one of the solution to find the answer that I has been learned in school.
1234
4321
------- *
1234
2468
3702
4936
------- +
5332114
We, human that has been in formal education, has been learned to remember basic thing in school. The basic thing that can help us to solve the complex thing with a little bit of work.
I know the result of 4 * 3, 1 * 4, 3 * 3, and 6 + 2 + 2 because I remember it. But, I did not remember the result of 1234 * 4321. Why? Because maybe I think that is useless or I did not want to remember it, why would I?
And then, how about the "genius", where is it come from?
I, for one, never and never will call some one a genius, smart, stupid or moron; except for the purpose of a joke :) I believe that every human has the same brain, the different among peoples it just that some man do their works with the brain more than the others, in others word: man that work out their brain. I prefer to call some one genius with the-man-with-more-experience-than-others and the stupid one with lazy.
Many of people call that Einstein is genius but I prefer to call him a human that can memorize more than other people plus he has more experienced than other in physics and math. Not because other people cannot memorize like him, but some human brain have a standard of acceptable thing that they can memorize. There is a many many reason for that, the simple reason and most reasonable I can think right now is that some time our brain "reject" what we see and what we learn. And why our brain do that, I don’t know. Maybe it was like why we like food A but does not like food B.
After a couple of minute thinking and remembering, I come to conclusion that our brain is never do any calculating, but what its doing is memorizing. How stupid of me, sorry, I mean is … how lazy of me.
Brain: a gift and a curse.