What are the effects of mathematics on the brain?

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Does anyone have free literature sources?

Mathematics is sexy to women.

1.) you find an interesting question, and try your hand at it.
2.) 3 hours and 20 sheets of scrap paper later, you still haven't solved it. Your head starts to hurt, and hand aches a little from all that frenetic writing.
3.) Another 3 hours on Matlab yield nothing. Headache worsens, compounded by the fact that you've forgotten to eat.
4.) You start to doubt the question: maybe it was wrongly phrased.
5.) You start to doubt your intelligence.
6.) You start to doubt your sanity.
7.) You start to doubt your worth as a human being. Your headache has invited about 3 other headaches to join the party.
8.) You contemplate Seppukku,.
9.) It's about a week later, and you've solved the question.
10.) you find an interesting question, and try your hand at it.

If you're like my Dad you become strangely hooked on Sudoku.

I was thinking more neurobiologically , but good posts!

Mathematics is a substance that affects the brain chemistry of the user, causing euphoria, supreme confidence, loss of appetite, insomnia, alertness, increased energy, a craving for more math, and potential paranoia (ending after use). Its initial effect is to release a large amount of dopamine, a brain chemical inducing feelings of euphoria. The high usually lasts from 5–10 minutes, after which time dopamine levels in the brain plummet, leaving the user feeling depressed and low. A typical response among users is to have another hit of derivations.

Math is everything, everywhere. Its hard to explain, without math that is. I've even modeled the mind with math. Anybody wanna check it out?

I tried to post a link but the site denied me. So I'll just include the introduction. Can you guys visualize the math?

How do children learn?

Most of them learn randomly. First a child experiences a situation: I touched the stove, and I got hurt. Very soon she learns a rule to prevent such situations: Don’t touch stoves. Then she experiences similar situations and begins to improve her rule: Don’t touch things that make fire or turn red. This new rule works for more than just situations involving stoves. It helps her in dealing with far more situations than her first rule did. So with rules, situations are easier to understand which means that with rules, situations are more easily controlled, even if one has never experienced a specific situation before.

Then she learns a logic: Beware of electric and gas lines and machines because our flesh is conductive and not flame-retardant. Notice that a logic works for more than one rule; some logics apply to only a few rules while others apply to billions or more. So with logic, rules are easier to understand which means that situations are even more controllable, rules are more easily understood, the task of determining which rules to apply in certain situations is made much simpler, and finally rules are more effortlessly applied in those situations.

But this process of learning is far too chaotic. There is far too much entropy, i.e. the amount of chaos, in this method of learning. More chaos means more possibilities. Consider language. The more possibilities that a statement could be interpreted to, the more ambiguous that statement is. More ambiguity equates to more error in understanding, which slows the learning process. So how do we make this less random? How do we reduce the entropy of the educative process?

I've been having thoughstorms. 5 hour long ones. And yes absolute euphoria. And I've been trying to chase that high since then. Its not so easy to replicate. I'd like to show you what I mean. I've included a portion of my journal:

--07/20/2011---I wrote this to my Professor and great friend Dr K. I bit of background. I’ve been reading a lot about education and other things since Dec-2010:

Hi K****,

I've quit reading. I know you told me not to but I couldn't help it. I'm now barely able to keep my attention on anything besides what is in my head. While I am doing perfectly well at all things at work and home, I am now worse than ever when it comes to keeping attention on something, besides my own thoughts that is. I can't read. I can't watch my tv shows. I can barely pay attention to other people when they speak to me. I have stopped reading because I am now just thinking. While it probably happened beforehand, I noticed it the night after we had that lunch in Morton. After the lunch, I was deep in thought whenever I was not interrupted long enough to hold a train of thought. That night I couldn't sleep until 3 am even though I was exhausted from thinking. I tried to sleep but I couldn't because I couldn't turn off my thoughts.

I had recently learned The Socratic Method by reading a little bit about it on wikipedia. I immediately noticed my ability to reason increased. Which lead to my increased ability to form logical sentences. This has lead me to hypothesize that human intelligence in a mind can be modeled as the highest order effects of a collection of logical concepts learned by that mind. Could this mean that if enough logic was learned, that a critical mass could be reached? I only ask this because this is what seems to have happened to me.

Shortly after that lunch in Morton, I had many epiphanies all within minutes. I had many overwhelming emotions as a result. First I was very angry, which only lasted a couple of seconds (my conscious was able to override my unconscious). Then I cried after remembering what I had recently realized which was that I had lost 20 years of my life without this capacity to reason. A couple seconds later I inevitably thought of Lulu (as I always do when I think about my intelligence), who has been exhibiting the same symptoms of giftedness that I did when I was her age of 3 years old. Then I was nauseous. This was only days ago now. I realized that the nausea was due to the fact that all my thoughts were racing through my head and I wasn’t able to turn them off. The only fix was to write them down, which would serve to help me not think about it anymore (a technique I learned a long time ago). As I started writing down short notes, I noticed that not much had changed.

I had been explaining many of my experiences to my 10 year younger brother Suhail (I’m 33). During these talks, he asked me 'How did Isaac Newton do it?' referring to discovering so much knowledge. I contemplated on that a little and I was remembering my conversation with you about Karl Marx. I had told you that Mark saw the future and I was very wide-eyed about it. I realized that the reason I fell in love with his work was that it was a very simple mathematical model that explained socio-economics. And of course Isaac Newton did the same when he explained his physical environment with mathematical models. This made me realize that mathematical logic is extremely important but I did not know how important until the next day.

Yesterday I was explaining the theory that Emotions cause Behaviors and Behaviors cause Emotions. It is the unconscious that does this. I had just had an epiphany about this and realized that this can cause a cyclical effect because EmotionA can trigger BehaviourA and that same BehaviourA can cause EmotionA and it continues in an infinite loop until the mind can not take anymore. I have been able to explain this and how the conscious can suppress these triggers. I saw a flowchart emerge in my head. I put it on paper (see below). Later that night I explained it again to my brother Suhail. This time I went deeper. I think I've come up with the simplest mathematical model for emotions.

Human Emotion
Human emotions are at least partly affected by the unconscious, which reacts to information it receives that originates from the five senses. The conscious has the power to suppress the behaviors that the unconscious triggers, so long as the conscious has learned the intricacies of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious and how that affects emotions and behaviors. A new-born must cry when she is hungry. If she doesn’t, then she dies. Evolution produced a mind that consistently produces a behavior when it senses a problem. Animals share this with us. It is the unconscious part of our minds that produces this forward- and reverse-causal relationship between emotion and behavior. This begs the question: If an emotion can cause a behavior, and then that same behavior can cause an emotion, or even the same emotion, then what would happen if it spiraled out of control? This seems to be what is happening when the mind cannot bear anymore and it experiences an uncontrollable spiral effect. Anger leads to temper tantrums, sadness leads to crying, worry leads to anxiety attacks, and fondness for other humans leads to love. I hypothesize that this might be able to be explained in mathematics, and if so, then possibly in computer science, and if so, then it may be possible that AI could have emotions; not to suggest that this necessary dictates that those emotions would be sufficiently similar to ours so as to blur the line between human and computer. I hypothesize that the differences between the higher order effects of neurons, or rather the 'action potential', and that of transistors would prevent any such blur. (---11/13/2011 I’m less sure about this now. Needs more reflection…) What else would serve to help us understand the difference between humans and computers. What do humans have that computers currently do not?

----11/5/2011---- I was rereading this and realized that there is a logical concept that I must write down here. I got this from my Physics class Electricity and Magnetism. The logical concept is this: “Different micro effects resulting in the same macro effects.” The micro effects are the behaviors of neurons and transistors. The macro effects are the higher order effects that we call intelligence. My Theory of Knowledge dictates that any logical concept could be valid in any other field. Maybe this logical concept is valid here. If so, then AI can be as intelligent as human intelligence. Or could it be more intelligent? The answer is yes because a computer brain can be expanded upon while the human brain cannot be expanded (unless we’re talking about merging biology and computer hardware).--------------

Human Creativity
I am inclined to believe that the unconscious is the part of the mind that is responsible for human creativity. The unconscious proposes an idea. The conscious is there to check that idea against its complete set of knowledge and logic. Then the conscious either decides to trash the idea or deem it rational. What is very astonishing is that this is The Socratic Method. I believe that The Socratic Method is the natural way that the human mind works, which partly explains why I have been able to do what I've done and why I wasn't able to before.

By the way, I feel much better now. I'm no longer as excited as before and I think it’s mostly because I've put my ideas into mathematical form.

Rami