MindScope: A Digital Tool to Nurture Your Mind by Dr. Prasanta Pal

 

There is simply too much information around us. With that great freedom (enabled by gadgets), our mind machines constantly munch on one piece to the other without even noticing! We are almost forced to jump into different states of our minds with every burst of information intersecting our path. We know so much likes or dislikes of every celebrity on earth through social media feeds, but we don't have the minutest idea about the workings of our own minds! To make it even worse, we got into an unexpected era of information diarrhea triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Every single digital device and the blizzard of information is breaking the fundamental evolutionary integrity of the structure our minds.   

MindScope is a quantitative neuroscience research based novel piece of technology that directly interacts with certain cognitive layers of our minds to open up and enhance primarily three untapped dimensions of our minds. The basic hypothesis and motivation behind this technology is  that, enhance cognition would help us have better command over our own lives and wellbeing.

Remember solving the first sudoku puzzle or the look-and-find game of your childhood days? As part of our developmental process, we acquired a lot of skills like math, music or the tennis game! Do we really need anything more?

Just for the sake of argument, if we are dropped in an alien planet where no one understands sudoku, math, music or the game of tennis, what are skills that would transcend beyond the range of earth's gravity! 

For those who don't consider death or getting lost to be a great alternative, they can develop some universal cognitive skills that are universal in nature to help them become good survivors of any alien planet as long as it is physically hospitable!

Development of alien planet proof cognitive abilities

Potentially, there are many universal cognitive skills but to make it tangible let us discuss three most important ones!

1) Focus or attention

2) Curiosity

3) Comprehension from partial and low resolution spatial information

It doesn't matter whether we are the CEOs of large corporations or hunters of the amazon forest, wise old men or silly little kids! These three fundamental skills transcend beyond human civilization. So a first step towards making ourselves alien planet proof (and by corollary pandemic proof) is to nurture these three fundamental skills!

 MindScope technology is developed to foster cultivation these three universal mental skills through subtle, mathematically crafted, controlled information-exposure mechanism grounded in the theory of probability, computational geometry and fundamentals of visual cognition.

 The very simple assumption to be able to make use of this tool is to have a bare minimum level of focussed,  stable "mind" to see things that you won't see otherwise. Closing the eyes while taking a deep breath helps! Remember we see through eyes but recognize through our brain and mind! Also some of us think, bare recognition is good enough! But how about the resolution problem of the higher level of cognition?

Figure 1: Low and high (respectively) resolution image of Cinque Terre Vernazza, Italy

As an illustrative example, let us have a look at Fig. 1, where the image on the left is low resolution image of the famous Cinque Terre Vernazza, Italy and the one on the right is the same view with higher resolution. Well, with camera we have the choice to have different resolution so easily. How about the same with our mind? Just seeing and recognizing things do not equate to optimally utilizing the our huge brain capability to process subtler modes of information. Its sad but true, the crude impulse drive recognition ability is often misunderstood as having optimal level of cognitive ability.  Just the way, image resolution is defined as our ability to differentiate two distinct points but can we say the same thing about our mind? Can we enhance our resolution to differentiate subtler information with better clarity?

The obvious scientifically sensible philosophy "Seeing is believing" is often taken for granted. But seeing and perceiving may not necessarily be the same thing and in fact, at times, can be completely different! You know how amazing the same world looks after a shot of tequila! There are in fact a significant number of dimensions of cognitive realities that are out there but without getting noticed by our audio-visual or other perceptive senses unless trained or tuned properly. MindScope would give us an opportunity to play with those dimensions. Additionally, there are dimensions of external physical world that are perceivable only when we are in certain mental states. MindScope would help us resonate with those states and if needed get trained through scientific methods in conjunction with our experientially justified cognitive reality.

If we ask the simple question, is it true that we see different things depending on the state of our mind or with different level of mental engagements? MindScope technology would help us answer those kinds of  questions while having fun discovering our own mental dimensions.

Why do we Need Another Technology?

Well, MindScope in  true sense is un-technology. It is about getting the ownership of our cognitive faculties back to our senses from the clasp our devices. It is about nurturing our inner faculties rather than getting stimulated by more and more information. 

Some Applications

1. Every app should start with a MindScope screen so that we first invest a small amount of time to nurture some very important cognitive faculties to offset for whatever follows afterwards.
2. School curriculum should introduce MindScope as a standardized program to develop cognitive faculties on the top of math, language, sports etc.
3. Child development can be monitored through MindScope interface.
4. If you are a bit mentally scattered it can help you get back to focus mode

Some Serious Applications

1. Alzheimer, Schizophrenia, Multiple Sclerosis and any other neural disorder monitoring and treatment evaluation through quantitative, scientifically validated cognitive scales
2. Business applications like Zoom should start with a MindScope test so that all participants start with a daily dose of cognitive nutrients.
3. MindScope can be repurposed for a far more advanced next generation scalable re-captcha generator than the existing ones

Clue 1: Cloud, Animal, Waterfall, Tree, Geometry, House, Vehicle

Clue 2: Take a deep breath, look very carefully. There may be things beyond the obvious. Focus yourself on things beyond the trivial.

Clue 3: Take a deep breath again and follow Clue 2

Clue 4: You may brighten your device screen or clean the screen if necessary.

You may use this google form survey to answer your question.

© 2021 Dr. Prasanta Pal