Chew On This One

Here are some metaphors gathered from the Web related to information=eating:

• That information is hard to swallow
• I couldn't quite digest your lecture
• I'm still chewing on your words from last night
• You're full of shit!
• He's spouting a bunch of crap
• I regurgitated everything that I learned for the test
• It's food for thought
• He has a voracious appetite for science fiction
• Some teachers spoon-feed their students
• I devoured that book
• Raw facts
• Half-baked ideas
• Warmed-over theories
• A story that smells fishy
• Let that idea percolate for a while
• Let that idea simmer on the back burner for a while
• That idea has been fermenting for a year
• This is the meaty part of the paper
• He's hungry for some facts about this topic
• Put the ideas on the table
• I found that idea distasteful
• The generally bland lecture

Thinking in metaphoric terms may be useful when thinking about how minds really interact with the world to produce information. How do other, non-mental biological processes interact with the world?

How do ears work? Your ears detect pressure waves, which are pre-processed by the shape of your ear. Your middle ear bones get moved around by this vibration, amplifying the vibrations to the inner ear. Fluid in the inner ear vibrates, stimulating tiny nerve endings called hair cells, which convert all this mechanical energy into electrical impulses that can be processed by the brain. The cells themselves are inside a structure called the cochlea, and each cell is tuned to a particular frequency.

How do we see? Light is pre-processed by the mechanical part of your eye through image focusing and light intensity adjustment. Depending on the level of light, you might be processing mostly with your rod cells (low light, low color) or cone cells (brighter light, full color for most folks). The network of cells and neurons acts as a signal preprocessor on the incoming information: edges get enhanced, colors get differentiated, and the two images from both eyes are merged into one stereo view before the brain really starts to get the visual information.  

How do we digest food? Food is pre-processed through cooking and slicing outside the mouth, then we mechanically and chemically pre-process it further when we chew and salivate. Food spends some hours in the stomach getting further digested, again, both chemically and mechanically. The actual assimilation occurs after the stomach, once the food moves into the intestines. The whole process, from the time you eat until the time you excrete waste, involves a 25-foot path, and probably takes 20 to 30 hours or longer.

So, by analogy, other external-assimilation processes in the body follow this general path:

• pre-process the information, often in several stages
• create sympathetic responses to the input using structures in the body (in the ears, it's bones and hair cells. In the eye, it's rods and cones. In digestion, it's taste, smell, and activity in the stomach)
• Move from one system to another in the body; the first system activates the next system and so on, until the physical is assimilated into the body.

I've been thinking about the analogy of information as food, specifically. When we eat food, it goes into the stomach for a while. If the food is bad, we toss our cookies and that's that. The body has not absorbed it. Even if it gets further along, there is a sort of gestation period where the food is still not really part of our body. That takes time and energy.

Maybe information getting integrated into our minds is similar. Our day-to-day lives, interacting with information and the world, might be at a level of pre-processing only. Then perhaps our brains store away this pre-processed input for further digestion. Maybe sleep is the digestion process of the brain. It takes information time to become really internalized; what some call "knowledge".

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:22:46 AM.