Check out this Ted – visualizing 1’s and 0’s by Chris Domas.
The idea of taking arbitrary data and visualizing it leads very deep and wide. Images, code, music and text produce different patterns, recognizable from each other. I immediately thought of a string of the A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s (adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), cytosine (C) ) composing our or other DNA, instead of 1’s and 0’s. (I was not the only one to ‘see’ this ). Visualize patterns here – code for eyes look like …, code for muscle looks like …, and so on. Perhaps we can visualize DNA code and find: here is muscle production. Then we can maybe distinguish muscular dystrophy when the pattern is visually different. Similarly, going further, mental disease patterns vs “normal”.
It would be interesting if protein manufacture instructions had similar patterns to computer program code.
Similarly, as a string of phonemes, we could visualize language. Do we use printed text or audio recordings? – both are strings of 1’s and 0’s. We could look at patterns of disturbed people’s language for health and healing, as well as better communication. Their DNA too of course. When we communicate the same content but in different languages (two cups of coffee please vs deux tasses de cafe s’il vous plait) – are the visual patterns similar? When are they? Yields translation ideas.
We are rapidly developing genome technology. Speaking of the dark side: design a DNA string, inject the string into a cell via a virus. Blow up a phone by interfering with its instruction set, ??? a person by interfering with his/her instruction set.
Similarly the “glitches” in DNA, especially during embryonic development, can result in profound effects. These ‘glitches’ can be caused by radiation, hormones (especially endocrine disrupters such as 2,4,D and other pesticides and plastics – Bisphenol-A, for example), pharmaceuticals (Thalidomide probably being the most famous one!) – all lead to errors in our code. It’s only recently that the Human Genome Project has been completed, and that is still in its infancy.
Anything we allow into our body has the potential to alter our genetic code.
Is this the same for perceptual and/or sensory input (or sensory data in its binary form)?
For sure, the Arts (i.e. music, painting, singing, dancing, writing – ANY creative process) can profoundly influence not only our psychological pathways (by stimulation of effector hormones and cascades) but also our physiological ones.
Would it then be safe to postulate that anything (or anyone) we interact with invokes the same cause/effect mechanism?
I agree Julie. Though I think the mechanism is much more subtle. It is not physical. I can (if not today, very soon) code up some DNA, eg improve oxygen uptake in a muscle, and inject it into your body. I understand this will get integrated into your own DNA and get replicated and become part of you. (I assume the Olympics Committee already has a policy on this.) This is physical. However when I hear music, there is a current reaction and subsequent integration in my neural memory (nm). This nm is already coded in my DNA and it has built the structures to contain and process nm and its experiences. So it won’t change my DNA, art experience for e.g. is in the nm. I think only when the stimulus is strong enough and it meets needs and it repeats often enough etc. will the nm effect a change in the coding. The nm is quite powerful already. The nm for me is not just in my brain but all over my body and things like “muscle memory” make perfect sense. Music moves me to tears. This is certainly not thinking.
So there’s a difference between the direct adjustment to the code and the long term experience of things which change our chemistry, but require other criteria before the nm code changes itself and we have the response hard-coded for future generations.