Over the past few weeks, I’ve made it a point to attend several lectures at Carnegie Mellon by the various guest speakers and faculty candidates that come in to present their research. Today, I intended a talk which talked in which the researcher was talking about using MRI data in order to try and better understand the functioning of language comprehension. Now, before I go any further, please note that I am not in any way trying to knock the research this person was doing. I do not know much at all about it and half of the time had to revert to my newly found principle of “translate the jargon” in order to develop a better understanding of the matter being discussed, since I lacked the benefit of basic familiarity with both the medical and the psychological lingo.

If I understood correctly, basically the research was focused on looking at the amount of bloodflow in certain parts of the brain in order to try and hypothesize what parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions (I am fairly confident that that lay explanation would probably hold its own). Now, I am definitely no expert in neurology or cognitive science, nor do I have much background in psychology. So what I’m about to propose may be downright stupid and possibly offensive to people who do work in the field, in which case, I do not intend any such offence.

I have a fundamental problem with how cognitive scientists and psychologists for that matter are trying to understand the working of the human mind and understand human behavior. It seems to me that most psychology experiments targeted at understanding the functioning of the human mind are using an approach in which the chances of success are so incredibly slim that they would be bordering on being futile (I take part of this back later on in this passage). Let me explain, but giving an example. Lets say I give you a box. This box happens to be a computer (only because it’s the closest thing I can think of to a human brain). Now, lets assume for a moment that you have absolutely no idea about what bits and bytes are, you do not know what a transistor is, you do not know what a logic circuit is, what a chip is. Now, can you, by simply designing experiments in order to exercise this box, determine how it is built. Can you really understand how a computer works – RAM (short-term memory), storage or ROM (long term memory), Arithmetic Logic Unit, caches, buses, and all that stuff that we understand today, because we built is ground up…. is it really possible to design experiments such that we can understand these fundamental building blocks of a computer? So then why should we expect that we can understand the workings of the human mind by conducting experiments on how people react to certain stimuli?

I’m not comfortable with how well I’ve been able to communicate my point above. So let me try and state it again… I feel that the probability of being able to understand the functioning of the human mind based on the type of “experiments” conducting in cognitive psychology today is infinitesimal. And therefore I’m questioning whether it is worthwhile.

Of course, I will also be the first to admit that I do not have any better proposal for trying to solve such problems. If you are given a black box, and you can interact with the black box, or cut it open in order to reverse engineer it — well, then the scientists of today are doing all the different approaches I can think off of the top of my head. So I don’t see a better way. But I think what I’m slowly leaning towards convincing myself is that I may prefer the approach of cutting open the black box and trying to break it down to its fundamental components and work up from there to try and understanding how the mind works as opposed to trying to devise experiments which just work with the black box. But, I guess there is some value in both and so doing both makes sense.

Now generally, whenever I come up with crazy arguments like this one, I like to discuss it with other people who have the capacity both for rational thought and for entertaining wild ideas and critiqing them objectively. I don’t get that opportunity often enough, but this time I was fortunate that in the midst of my composing this blog, I got a call from a good friend who completed his Ph.D. from Caltech. (And yeah, I’ll make his head grow a little bigger by acknowledging that he is amongst one of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with). And so he gave me a reasoning which I can accept. Basically that though he agrees that the approach being used today is probably not going to lead to any direct answers, all we are doing in research today is making minor advancements. With each lifetime of effort, we gain an epsilon of knowledge, where hopefully epsilon is greater than zero.

So I guess now that I’ve had the chance to dicuss this at length with my friend, I’m not as agitated about it as I was when I first started.

So we established today that I’m certifiably nuts, because at dinner earlier today with two of my apparently single friends when we were talking about asking people out I made the analogy that asking a girl out is like raising money from VCs (and yes, I have had a little bit of experience with both in order to qualify me to make this analogy, fortunately or unfortunately, my track record with VCs is a little better!).

Of course that comment caught the attention of my friends and so they asked why. At dinner I had only a few points. But now at 3:00 AM on the morning, I have a full Letterman-style Top 10 List. And no, I didn’t get this from anywhere, this is a sneaker original! Here goes….

Sneaker‘s Top 10 Reasons Why Girls Are Like VCs

      OR

Sneaker‘s Top 10 Reasons Why VCs Are Like Girls

10. There are always more of us and less of them.

09. Before you try approaching one, you must eat your pride and bury your ego six feet under.

08. You must have a reference for a proper introduction, cold-calls generally do not get a good response.

07. They don’t look at you if someone else isn’t already looking at you.

06. They expect you to do all the work while they just sit there and look pretty.

05. Even when you do approach them, they always play hard to get.

04. You buy the drinks.

03. You never get a straight answer, they always string you along, even when they know there is no chance in hell.

02. When one says yes, all of them say yes.

01. Asking a girl out or trying to raising money from a VC both suck.

P.S. If you decide to forward this around, please send this link with it, since I reserve the right to re-prioritize and update this list! 🙂