© Krishna MB, 2005.
THE CONTENT OF THE TALK GIVEN TO THE BIOLOGY STUDENTS OF M.E.S. COLLEGE, BANGALORE, FOR THE INAGURATION OF THE BOTANICAL ASSOCIATION, BY KRISHNA MB, SEPTEMBER 2005.
In a world where everybody has an eye on the clock, it is free time which becomes a casualty. Often it is work, personal and family needs that we think of all the time. With the result, we hardly make time for any other activity.
Free time is important: it encourages us to relax and lets us do our things at our own pace. It is a great stress reliever. And it favours hobbies. Hobbies are activities we all need to have. They encourage creativity, stimulate thinking, and help us learn to do things without supervision. Most importantly, it helps us to learn, to break free beyond the formalised learning that always happens in our educational career.
Hobbies are a great way to re-learn the subjects that we have studied. They give a new perspective where we would have just relied on the textbook knowledge that we have picked up. They help us to apply what we have learned.
If we were able to bring in new perspectives, we would learn to look at things in a different way. It is this freedom to look at alternative learning paths that hobbies can give. We just cannot afford to ignore hobbies.
Take for example, the botany, zoology or biology that we study in our formal education; and the computers that we all are surrounded with. Consider for a moment what we were taught about our nervous system. In all probability we would have been infused with a thought that the forebrain (cerebrum) is the most evolved part and the others (cerebellum backwards) are more "primitive".
For a moment, let us go to an alternate subject, computer science. We could think of our electronic wrist watch as a computer, but of a kind which does only one job, repetitively over and over again without tiring out. We could say that it too requires software to compute, only that the software is hard-wired, i.e. It is neither recordable nor erasable.
Think of a mobile phone. It has a SIM-card to store the details of the calls that you get and store your phone numbers. It has a tiny amount of free space to store all this information. The rest of the "software", the instructions required for its working, is embedded: pre-recorded so that it cannot be erased or altered.
Compare this to an ant (or a bee) for example. It comes with the preloaded un-erasable software called instinct. And it has a small space to store all the details of where it found food, where its nest is, and all the details required to navigate to and from the nest. All this is packaged into a tiny little brain. Something like the tiny little computer your mobile comes with. This is the kind of software that cannot be tampered accidentally, and its fail safe reliable nature allows it to be used in "mission-critical" applications like those instruments which are used in life-and-death kind of situations.
Compare this to a human brain for example. It is huge, stores a lot of information and is comparable to the personal computer that you use at office or home everyday. It can do great jobs, do a lot of analysis, picturise, and handle a lot of data and information. It has the storage area, the computing components and load-able data and software (and erasable too!).
Look at the PC carefully. It has the main chip to do the computing, a pre- recorded un-tamperable set of essential instructions which enables further instructions to be loaded. It is called the BIOS (the basic input-output system). This interfaces with the loaded software called the Operating system, which recognises the various parts and interfaces with them. Then you have a command processor, which translates what instructions you give and loads further software to do specific jobs. Along with this you have a designer GUI (the graphical user interface) which makes doing jobs and visualization easier. In essence the bios, the core of the operating system called the kernel, the part of the operating system which accepts your instructions and translates it for the machine to understand called the command processor, and the GUI which interfaces with it can be visualised to be in layers. The most repetitive and crucial jobs being almost hard-wired then a series of layers of software doing more complex jobs but more error prone distanced from the processor by a series of "intermediaries". The lower the layer, the faster it responds and acts.
Now come back to your zoology. We have the Spinal Chord and the Medulla oblongata doing the critical jobs and handling all the reflexes and involuntary actions. It is software which is hardwired, works repetitively, faultlessly and fast. Think of the cerebellum. It is close to the medulla oblongata, handles complex muscular controls (like the flight in birds) and works fast. It is like the command processor, accepting instructions and responding fast, relatively faultlessly. Then you have the huge cerebrum: Full of data, full of loaded software (the learnt things) and error prone. It cannot even retrieve data faultlessly and fast, all the time. We forget. Just like the personal computer which refused to work now and then.
In science, as elsewhere, we use simple analogies to help us understand ideas and concepts better. They are like simplified or poor replicas. They are called models and the process is called modelling.
Now where does this take us? Think of computer science and our understanding of the working of a personal computer as a model. The reality in nature which we are trying to model is the nervous system. Just imagine where we would all have been if we were taught zoology through our computers, but not just using computers. We would never have perhaps so strictly divided learning into rigid compartmentalised boxes called subjects.
In conclusion it can be said that an interest in any subject through a hobby involvement allows us to take non-traditional paths and get different views of many concepts.
E&OE, KRISHNA MB
making time free is culture!
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