I was watching one of my recorded programs last night (I don’t know what the greatest invention in history is, but the DVR has to at least be in the top 5!), and I caught the end of one of the Chuck Lorre programs at the beginning of my recording.  He is the man behind Two and a Half Men (which I never watch), and The Big Bang Theory (which I do).  He always has these “vanity cards” at the end of his shows.  You have to hit the pause button to read them.  They are frequently funny, frequently profane, but sometimes provocative and substantive.  Here’s the one I caught last night.  (They are sometimes censored, but always available in full on line.  I’ve cut it off before the more profane section).

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #406
According to futurist, inventor and all-around incredibly smart guy, Ray Kurzweil, human beings actually reorganize their frontal cortex as they pursue mastery over different skills. For example, a musician redesigns his or her brain by means of constant study, practice and performance. The same thing applies to a mathematician, carpenter and pole dancer. The brain is physically changed over time by activity and learning. This means we have direct influence and control over how our minds operate. This means we actually mold our perception of the world by the way we mold our brains. This means that over the last twenty-five years, I have reshaped my frontal lobe to do one thing, and one thing only — write sitcoms. I can’t tell you what a relief this knowledge is to me. To begin with, it single-handedly explains why I fail so consistently at other activities (golf, common courtesy and marriage come to mind). It also eases my fears about my disintegrating memory. Why would my brain waste precious neurons remembering where I put my glasses (on the top of my head), or the names of the camera crew (I think one guy is named John, or maybe Jamie or Nigel), when it’s working overtime trying to structure a joke…

Now, whatever else Mr. Lorre is, he is a writer who has to reduce his thoughts to quick, sound-bite, simple-to-grasp lines.  And he is very good at it.  So, here he summarizes Ray Kurzweil in just a few sentences.  Look at the key sentences again:

According to futurist, inventor and all-around incredibly smart guy, Ray Kurzweil, human beings actually reorganize their frontal cortex as they pursue mastery over different skills. For example, a musician redesigns his or her brain by means of constant study, practice and performance. The same thing applies to a mathematician, carpenter and pole dancer. The brain is physically changed over time by activity and learning. This means we have direct influence and control over how our minds operate.

Ray Kurzweil is no dummy.  Inventor/futurist, author of The Singularity is Near and many, many other books/essays, he thinks about big issues.  And he is convinced that, regarding what great things technology will bring, “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”  Here’s Wikipedia’s summary of some of his major accomplishments:

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

And here’s an excerpt from a recent article, describing his first two months at Google:

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RAY KURZWEIL DISCUSSES HIS FIRST TWO MONTHS AT GOOGLE
In another exclusive interview with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil provides an update about his first two months as Director of Engineering at Google. During the interview Kurzweil revealed that his team is collaborating with other groups at Google to enable computers to understand and speak language just like humans.  Kurzweil also tells us how Larry Page personally recruited him to join Google to pursue the goal of creating machines that can think and reason like the human brain.
Speaking with Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner, Ray explained that ”My project is to get the Google computers to understand natural language, not just do search and answer questions based on links and words, but actually understand the semantic content. That’s feasible now.” To successfully do this will involve employing technologies that are already at Google like the Knowledge Graph, which has 700 million different concepts and billions of relationships between them. His team will also develop software as part of a system that will be “biological inspired” and can learn in a way analogous to the way the human brain is designed, that is, in a hierarchical structure.

Now, Kurzweil and his capabilities are way beyond me.  But the idea that we can actually change our brains, and that we end up becoming something else, something new, by what we do with our brains…  Well, that sounds like pretty right-on and consistent-with-ancient-wisdom counsel to me.  Years ago I heard this line, attributed to Aristotle:

“We are what we think about all day long.”

What we decide to spend time actually doing with our brains shapes who we become, so that we can be “what we think about all day long.” 

Just a little Brain/Thought food for a holiday weekend…