4 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
that the computer is also a tool which is used by the average person in
daily life. I have done my share of reading the specialized literature of
neurology and engineering and sometimes it appears as if some of those
writers have gills for breathing apparatus, for they never „come up for air.‟
What I have put together is a Programmer’s Guide to the Mind. It is
designed for the individual willing to take the effort to understand and to
program his mind in order to develop it to its maximum potential. What I
will be presenting in this book is a new theory of mind and personality
based in years of original research. Most of the material which you will be
reading has not been published before. While theories cannot be learned
overnight, especially ones about the human mind, I have done my best to
make the information as readable as possible. You will not need a
knowledge of advanced mathematics or esoteric logic to grasp this material.
An ability to think rationally, combined with a good dose of common sense
should suffice. Personally, I have found that when I am studying the mind,
what I need more than anything else is the ability to combine head and
heart. This is because when we and our emotions become the topic of
research, then the tendency is either for the heart to win over the head—the
approach of the User’s Guide, or for the head to suppress the heart,
resulting in a Reference Manual.
As the title suggests, we will approach the mind from a logical
viewpoint. While we will try to stick to the straight and narrow path of
rational analysis, we will also make a point of enjoying the mental vista of
understanding through which we are passing. We will stop to smell some
of the flowers of feeling which grow beside the trail and we will also slog
through mudholes of emotional trauma which we encounter.A
If the brain is so complicated, how can anyone figure it out? Over the
years, I have come to the conclusion that within this mass of complexity
are hidden a few fundamental principles which determine how we act and
think. It appears that these basic laws of mental processing can be
represented by a single structure which I call the diagram of mental
symmetry. This diagram is both a summary of mental interaction and a
highly simplified map of brain circuits: Each of the names corresponds to
one major section of the human brain, and the arrows between the names
indicate paths along which information can flow. So far, I have found that
this simple model of the mind can be applied to fields as diverse as
neurology, economics, art, music, politics, artificial intelligence, history,
mathematics, psychology, religion and philosophy.
A I personally have both intellectual and artistic training: I have a Master‟s
degree in Engineering, and I play violin professionally.