Imagine
you are at a crowded airport waiting for the boarding call. You pick up a book
to spend your time wisely. It isn’t difficult to visualize the din around,
people chattering with each other, cracking jokes & children laughing
aloud, automated announcements blaring across the hall.
In spite of these
distractions, you get engrossed in the book. Now the obvious question hangs in
front of us – how does this happen?
It is
a well-known fact that we interact with the external world using our sense
organs.
In this context it is logical to think that one or more of our sense
organs have been shunted out to achieve a purpose. We know the purpose – to
read the book.
But who was responsible for taking this action? The answer
“Brain” immediately pops out.
Researchers have proposed a new theory about how our brain makes a distinction between the relevant and irrelevant information. Based on a
computational model, it suggests that within the complicated structure of
brain, a gating mechanism must exist in order to block specific sense organ
inputs and route only relevant information for further processing.
The
researchers also comment that brain has mechanism to learn through experience
and thereby improving upon the ways such situations are dealt with.
It
seems the human brain is possibly capable of selectively blocking information
flowing from specific sense organs. Pondering over its enigmatic nature, we may
visualize that it can also be possible that based on one’s needs all of the
information flowing may be considered irrelevant.
And when this happens the
external world as we see it now, will not exist. At that moment, our life force
will be directed inwards. This leads us to think if this is the approach that
one should take to realize the inner self?
And is that relevant or irrelevant?
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