What I learned from "Terror in Resonance"

Terror in Resonance. Zankyou no Terror. This is basically an anime about two beings who technically should not exist threatening to blow up places around Tokyo to get their voices heard. It has a beautiful story.

Poster for Terror in Resonance.

These two boys were part of the three who made it alive from the failed experimentation on children under the age of five using an accidentally developed pharmaceutical drug that is thought to cause superintelligence in the subjects of the experiment. This experiment is called "Project Athena" and as of the end of the anime, all 26 children who were part of the experiment died. The motive for the experiment was to create superhuman intelligence (inspired by people with Savant Syndrome) - the ultimate weapon - that would help Japan to be independent from its misery and humiliation ever since the end of World War II. The desire for a few politicians created such a horrific experiment, as well as the theft of a new atomic bomb prototype created by the US, and resulted in a crisis when Nine (one of the two boys) released the atomic bomb to the stratosphere and its explosion will release powerful electromagnetic waves that destroy all electrical appliances.

What got me interested and started researching was savant syndrome. It is a real condition in which the mentally disabled are able to demonstrate qualities that far surpass others in aspects like memorisation, language learning, creating art, crunching large numbers...

After more researching online, I was amazed by Daniel Tammet's story. Not only he had savant syndrome but also synesthesia, which allowed him to perceive numbers with other senses, enabling to give each number a unique shape, texture, colour and feel. I really think there is a high probability of this person inspiring the anime. Synesthesia was mentioned in the anime too, as Twelve (the other boy) was able to see colour in sounds, and told Lisa that her voice was a rare pale yellow. Incidentally, Tammet was able to learn Icelandic, which apparently is a difficult language, in 7 days and made it in time for an interview. In the anime, there were many references to Iceland, especially in the music Nine liked to listen to, and the Icelandic word von which means "hope".

Although having such awesome mental capabilities might not be possible for most of us, I believe there is something that can be learnt from such mental conditions. They provide insights in how learning occurs, and how we can optimise our learning process to increase the effectiveness of the learning.

I understood some concepts from a video summary of Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn book. It takes a considerable effort for our brain to form neural connections that play a crucial world in our learning process. These connections need to be consistently maintained not by repeating the learning of the content but by actively trying to retrieve the memory. Otherwise, such connections would weaken and eventually break off over time as the brain does its own "pruning" to forget things that are not important for us to know.

Back to savant syndrome and synesthesia, I believe that when we add more flavour to what we learn and incorporate more of our senses, what we are trying to learn can be more deeply etched in our brain. In addition, these mental conditions allowed me to gain a new understanding of how intelligence works - a large number of connections that function to help the brain make sense of the world and survive in it. It seems like this is similar to how machines work - the more the number of connections, the higher the amount of operations they are able to perform, and the higher their efficiency and "intelligence" will be. Each data point represent a new set of connections, thereby causing these machines to increase in complexity and in turn, their abilities. Likewise, if we are able to connect something new to what we already know, to make it more colourful and tangible, our brain will be able to digest this more easily. This could be similar to Tammet's thought processes when doing Math, the numbers change in their shape and form while he processes complex calculations, and memorising more than 22,000 digits of Pi to him was describing what he saw in a film (that conjured out of all these numbers).

However, before we are too quick to accept that this theory of how the brain works is true, my beliefs on these were mostly dispelled by an article on Aeon. It wrote that thinking the brain as a complex machine might not be the most accurate. Our brains do not actually make any signatures of what we learn. That means that all our perceptions and knowledge are not stored physically, and we can only guess as to what the brain is thinking through its electrical activity, which has no obvious pattern that tells us what is going on in the brain.

All these sound so magical. The brain is the most complex object in the universe, and there is so much we do not understand about it. The Aeon article fascinated me so much that I began to wonder whether our brains are even more powerful than quantum computers, which make use of quantum properties like superposition and entanglement to greatly boost the computing power we already have on this planet. It would be a wonder if technology can catch up and even surpass this organ and it is closer to reaching than we think - look at artificial intelligence, and we already have a robot citizen, Sophia.

Tammet is such an interesting person. I cannot wait to view his TED talk once I am finished with this blog post.

References:
https://www.aruma.com.au/about-us/blog/5-amazing-people-with-savant-syndrome-the-truth-behind-rain-man/
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2005/04/man-who-memorized-pi
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/learn/what-is-quantum-computing/
https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_tammet_different_ways_of_knowing/transcript