My Scientific Journey
I have been interested in science for about as long as I can remember. My parents were not scientists, and they did not know enough science to teach me very much about physics, biology, or the great technical ideas or abstruse theories that would later fascinate me. But they did teach me the knowledge they had, and more importantly, they taught me to respect knowledge itself.
During the first ten years of my life, my mother seemed to feel that it was her responsibility to teach me everything she knew. She helped me develop an adult understanding of life, of people, and of certain areas of the humanities. She talked to me seriously, explained things carefully, and treated my mind as something worth developing. Even around seven, I could tell that my Mom was making a huge effort, that normal parents don't, to try and explain as much as she possibly could to me. She would ask, "Can you say..." getting me to pronounce new words constantly. It was a tireless effort that went on for years and I am so thankful for it. Even though it wasn't particularly scientific, it was helping to build my world model from a very young age.
My father made multiple attempts to try to get me excited about science. I remember him once teaching me the acronym for DNA (dioxyribonucleic acid) and explaining that it was a molecule inside of each of my body's cells. He made it sound mysterious and helped me understand its potential. He did not explain it like a specialist, but he explained it with reverence. That reverence is what mattered. It made me feel that science was one of the highest human pursuits. But more importantly, it made me love science just for science's sake. The molecule itself was something to be fascinated by.
Even though my parents did not know much about the science of Einstein and Newton, they made me feel that the great scientists were among the most important and respected people on the planet. That feeling stayed with me. It made me think that the ultimate ambition was to become a great scientist.
Much of my dedication to science came from a form of self delusion. From a very young age, maybe six or seven, I wanted to write the greatest book of all time. I wanted to write a book that would be more respected than the Bible and that would have better content. As I got older, I had a few experiences where adult strangers told me that I would grow up to be someone very special. I knew they did not have a crystal ball, but those predictions stuck with me. They made me feel that I might be capable of making a contribution, and I wanted that contribution to be scientific. By the age of ten, I had developed a fairly unshakable confidence that I could “invent new science” if I tried hard enough and long enough. I believe that this delusional thinking and "magical thinking" was actually working for me because if I hadn't believed in myself I wouldn't have committed so much time and effort to science. I wouldn't have put off having fun, prioritized learning, and risked wasting so much of my life on a failed endeavor.
At different points in my early childhood, I took matters into my own hands and began reading. I would try to memorize facts and figures so that I could explain them to other people. My mother helped me realize that knowledge begets knowledge. Once I saw that happening in my own life, I came to understand that if I forced myself to learn things, those things would eventually help me learn other things later, even if I could not yet see the connection. This would become a driving belief and motivator for the rest of my life.
One of my parents bought the audiobook of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. We listened to it and talked about it together when I was around six or seven, but we never finished it. A couple of years later, I finished it on my own and took notes on it. It made me decide that I wanted to contribute to a Grand Unified Field Theory of physics. My dad saw my interest and started buying me related books including Michio Kaku's books (including Hyperspace). The books helped shape the way I thought about learning. I came to see difficult ideas as things I could return to, persist with, and slowly come to comprehend.
I remember being in Houston, under six years old, watching Star Wars with my parents while they introduced me to the idea of artificial intelligence. They explained that someone had created R2-D2 and C-3PO and built the instrument through which those droids thought and communicated. My partents took the time to define artificial intelligence for me. They made sure I understood that these were human-made robots and that their mental faculties were engineered. They intentionally made it clear to me that artificial intelligence was an open problem, and that it was something a person like me could work on.
For a long time, I had a wish to create a time machine. In Houston, in 1986 when I was four, the other kids had all seen Back to the Future. I hadn't seen the movie but I wanted to make a time machine so badly. I thought I just might be able to do it if I could build a vehicle and place and place the kitchen clock inside of it while manipulating its internal components in all the right ways. My folks actually helped me with this and it included an old tire, some two by fours, and a broken clock timer.
In second grade I wanted to have encyclopedic knowledge, like the fictional storybook detective Encyclopedia Brown. In third grade, when I looked at the graph of attributes on the back of Marvel Comics trading cards, I wanted my intelligence to be at the level of "Galactus," the highest rated level: omniscience. I was always interested in superintelligent comic book characters like the Leader, MODOK, Ultron, and Brainiac. I was drawn to fictional minds that seemed to exceed ordinary human limits. Looking back, I think those characters helped shape my fascination with intelligence, knowledge, and the possibility of engineered minds.
At one point before junior high, I believed I had come up with an idea that might make a time machine possible. The idea took advantage of the fact that the gravitational attraction between two bodies increases greatly as their distance decreases. I imagined a vehicle that would generate a steady stream of low-mass particles and have them approach its center of mass. These particles would gently pull the vehicle forward. Once they reached the center of mass, they would be projected outward at right angles so they would not pull the vehicle backward. I began to believe in my heart that something like this might be able to reach light speed effectively slowing down time relative to slower objects, and that belief gave me confidence. It made me want to keep learning about science so I could keep generating ideas.
Off and on throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school, I would read about science for long stretches. At a certain point, I wanted to be like Bill Nye the Science Guy and be able to answer anyone’s questions about science. There were times when I would explain concepts in theoretical physics to my parents and their friends. There were times when I forced myself to stay inside during recess so I could try to commit scientific facts to memory. Theoretical physics was my favorite subject, and I would tell people I wanted to become a theoretical physicist or a nuclear physicist. I was never great at math, but sometimes I liked it, and I always respected it.
At the same time, I had clear learning difficulties. I would zone out a lot in class, and it was nearly impossible for me to pay attention to the teacher’s voice for more than a few minutes at a time. My grades tended to be slightly above average in elementary school and well below average in junior high and high school. In eighth grade, I almost failed biology. Looking at cells under microscopes should have been fascinating to me, but somehow I was not interested because all the other kids were doing it too.
The pattern repeated itself. I got an A in ninth-grade physics, but I almost failed tenth-grade chemistry, even though there were a few days when I had all the answers during class discussions because of my prior reading. In eighth grade, my junior high, Harvard Westlake, wanted to kick me out for having low grades. My mother took me to a professional, who diagnosed me with a significant auditory processing deficit.
At the time, that diagnosis was hard for me to fully understand. But the same basic problem continued throughout my schooling, even through graduate school. I could not pay attention to the teacher while they were talking in front of the class. I basically learned only at home, when I did the readings. But trying to read the textbook without the scaffolding from the lecture made things very difficult.
By the time I reached graduate school, the auditory processing deficit was very apparent to me. My auditory system, or perhaps my attentional system, would constantly tune out the professor’s lecture unless I concentrated very hard. Today, we could probably vibe code an app that creates subtitles for a lecture. Something like that would have helped me significantly and might help children who have the same kind of difficulty I had.
Even though I had only a B average in high school, my SAT score of 1460 helped me get into USC. People kept telling me that I could not do science because my math grades were low and because I had not taken advanced mathematics courses. So I decided to go into the USC Marshall School of Business. I wanted to have a wife and a family someday, and I knew I would have to support them. Business seemed practical.
But I struggled through the business courses. I tried to enjoy calculus, but finance was especially difficult, and I almost failed it despite spending many hours studying. Throughout undergrad, I did not go to parties, and I did not do any drugs or drink at all. Still, after several business courses, I had a 2.9 grade point average. Because it was not a 3.0, I was kicked out of the business school.
That was sad and humbling. The academic counselor had a few recommendations, one of which was psychology, because it did not require much math aside from statistics. Psychology was very different from the sciences I had been interested in before. But I knew that in some ways it was continuous with physics. Physics studied matter, energy, space, and time. Psychology and neuroscience studied the mind that experiences matter, energy, space, and time. I knew that the mystery of consciousness was one of the most important mysteries in all of science. So I decided to major in psychology and devote the rest of my life to figuring out the mystery of consciousness.
To save money, I went to summer school at Pierce Community College. I took Psychology 101 and Abnormal Behavior. That summer, I began to understand that there were individual units, neurons, inside the brain, and that these neurons somehow interacted to produce the mind. I had a cartoon picture in my head of a skull filled with discrete spheres, all wired together. The concept of a neural network started to take form inside my own neural network. I wanted to understand how all these interacting spheres, these brain cells in our head, could create subjective experience.
I started turning back toward science with new seriousness. I began picking up scientific magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American and reading them closely. I found myself writing pages and pages of hypothetical ideas. Over and over I found that ideas I had developed on my own, or pet theories I had written out, were actually serious ideas in mainstream science. For example, I had formulated a theory about the likely existence of multiple parallel universes, and then I discovered that closely related ideas already existed in the literature. Experiences like that gave me more confidence to continue. They made me feel that even when my ideas were naive or incomplete, my intuitions sometimes pointed toward real scientific questions.
After my parents divorced, my mother asked me to move back home so I could help her raise my brother. To save money, I started taking the bus to school. That gave me two to three hours every day to read. I did not have to drive myself, I did not have to spend money on gas or car maintenance, and best of all, I could read anything I wanted for hours. I started reading primers in different scientific disciplines and marking them up with pencils. The underlining and writing in the margins was an important part of being able to keep track of my ideas. Eventually, reading textbooks, primers, and science pop books allowed me to begin reading real peer-reviewed scientific journal articles.
At first, those articles were difficult to understand. But within a year, I was reading journal articles in many various scientific disciplines. Since childhood, my strongest subject on standardized tests had been reading comprehension, and now I was putting that ability to use. I spent the next couple of years trying to learn everything I could about psychology and biology. I learned many facts, and those facts improved my mental models. But nothing I read gave me a real understanding of where consciousness might come from.
My biggest insight during my undergrad period was the realization that one particular neurological phenomenon had to be important: sustained firing. I was on the bus around 2007, on my way home, reading a scientific review article about sustained firing in cells within the prefrontal cortex. I was reading about how sustained firing can carry a meaningful informational signal capable of influencing an animal’s behavior. At the intersection of Temple and Broadway, I realized that thousands of neurons in a state of sustained firing must act as a bridge through time for consciousness.
That thought felt important immediately. I realized that sustained firing could be the phenomenon that makes the act of thinking possible. A set of neurons currently in sustained firing could preserve information long enough for it to influence the next moment of thought. That set would not remain fixed. It would be constantly updated. I realized that as the set of neurons in sustained firing changed incrementally, the content of thought and consciousness must also change incrementally in lock step,
I saw it as a stream or river. There was continuity, but also movement. Some elements (representations and concepts) persisted while others dropped out and new ones entered. I knew that this phenomenon was what I had been looking for: a mechanistic explanation, or at least a conceptual substrate, for the mystery of consciousness. After reading about sustained firing, I knew that this transient state of temporary excitability was the tool I had been searching for. I did not expect the answer to take the form of sustained firing. I do not know what I expected. But when I encountered it, I recognized it immediately. I have since expanded this into a full model of consciousness and a corresponding cognitive architecture that you can read at aithought.com
Later, I had another experience in a lecture hall that felt like the next step in modeling the brain. I had the strong feeling that it must be important to understand, scientifically, how the mind’s next association is determined. I wanted to know mechanistically how associative memory works in the brain. Given a current mental state, how is the next state selected? I was beginning to frame the problem of consciousness in terms of brain-state transitions. My eventual answer to this became "multiassociative search," where all of the items in working memory coactivate and spread activation energy around the brain, converging on a new, related concept, the iterative update.
There was another time, in a different lecture room, when I was trying to understand how the hippocampus might work. I did not yet know about the models of pattern completion that existed at the time. I imagined that the hippocampus went through a linear or serial process of looking for episodic similarities. I imagined that when the hippocampus checked its memory, it had to go through every memory it held, one after another in a straight line, trying to find the relevant association. Of course, this was before I understood convergence, divergence, and pattern completion. But that naive model later created an illustrative contrast once I understood those more advanced principles.
I remember waiting for the bus, staring down at the concrete, and trying to will myself into understanding the nature of consciousness. I would pose the same questions to myself over and over again, hoping I could come up with some kind of lead. “Jared, what is consciousness?” Other times I would stare down at the concrete in a kind of meditative trance, trying to analyze the experience itself. I would watch my thoughts make the patterns in the concrete move, trying to gauge different aspects of my subjective state. I was trying to catch a glimpse of anything that could better describe my conscious state.
I took psychology and brain science very seriously, and I read everything I could. I started with all the major textbooks and moved toward peer reviewed academic review articles. I also found myself generating many evolutionary theories about why things evolved, why certain human traits came to be, and how adaptive functions might shape cognition and behavior. Some of these subjects became complex very quickly, but I loved how new knowledge would relate to something else I had learned recently or something I had known since childhood. My mom's pivotal insight was coming true.
I had read a lot of comic books and newspaper funnies as a child, and I think this helped my reading comprehension. Being fascinated by characters’ superpowers also probably influenced my interest in how evolved traits could be adaptive. Superpowers were exaggerated abilities, but they made me think about capacities, functions, limits, and advantages. In a very indirect way, they may have prepared me to think about traits as solutions to problems. Reading about a character's abilities and the drawbacks set the stage for thinking about evolutionary medicine and the costs and benefits of different physiological adaptations.
I was raised as a Christian Scientist. I mostly rejected the idea of self-healing by around age eleven, and around that time I was able to convince my parents that the religion in general was unscientific. Still, the self-healing aspects of that upbringing likely influenced my interest in self care (such as my book Program Peace). Even after rejecting the religion’s claims, I think some of its emphasis on self-regulation, the importance of mindset, and the power of positivity remained part of my intellectual background.
I kept coming up with evolutionary theories and started writing them up as articles. By my junior year at USC I had thousands of handwritten notes about scientific insights I had. I would later transcribe these notes and produce hundreds of pages of Word documents. Some were derivative, some were unknowingly unoriginal, by my belief in them may have been the most important thing. After a while I started to know that some of the ideas were veridical. The ideas and insights often sat on top of one another and compounded. The more I revisited my notes, the more I could see the compounding process. One idea would create the context for another idea. One half-formed model would become the scaffold for a more developed model years later.
After taking a class in cognitive science around 2004, I decided that the contents of consciousness were items in working memory. That felt like a major insight, and it pointed the way toward iterative updating. It implied that consciousness might be made up of something like 7 plus or minus 2 psychological items at a time, and that these items somehow filtered in and out of attention. I did not yet have the full model, but I had a direction. Consciousness seemed to involve a limited set of active items, maintained briefly, updated continuously, and linked to the flow of thought.
Later, around 2006, I was on the bus and felt as if I had experienced another tremendous revelation, perhaps the greatest of my life. It was about how the mind worked. But almost immediately, I forgot it. I spent hours trying to remember it, but I could not retrieve it. There seemed to be a bizarre irony in the fact that I could associatively reach and grasp an insight that felt incredibly profound, only for it to become irretrievable a few seconds later. That experience itself became meaningful to me. It was a personal demonstration of the fragility of working memory, retrieval, and conscious access.
A few months later, I had what felt like another tremendous revelation on the bus. But brace yourself, because it sounds pretty stupid. I saw thinking as similar to the way Tarzan swings from vines. Tarzan holds one vine and uses it to swing toward another vine, but for a short period he is holding both vines at the same time. That overlap orients him toward the next vine. I thought of the vines as concepts, and the analogy seemed to organize many of my thoughts about how the mind works. Thought was not just a sequence of disconnected moments. It involved overlap. The current concept helped orient the mind toward the next concept. This started to answer the question of where the next association comes from and pointed toward the idea of multiassociative search.
Perhaps a year later, in 2007, I was in my front yard and realized that the Tarzan analogy could be improved if it used an octopus with eight arms rather than Tarzan with two arms. That was influcnced by George Miller's notion that working memory holds 7 plus or minus two items at a time. Consciousness seemed like an entity capable of grabbing hold of around 8 concepts at a time, then letting go of some and grabbing others as it progressed. Octopuses have 8 arms, so I thought the analogy worked. I knew the caricature sounded funny, but I also felt that it held real truth. For several years afterward, I organized much of my reading and writing around that analogy. I actually snuck pages of writing regarding the subject into my doctoral dissertation (after the the dissertation defense but before my submission to ProQuest). The analogy eventually led to my concept of incremental change (Reser, 2016) and, later, to my concept of iterative updating (Reser, 2022).
During the holidays around 2008, I drove up to see my parents in the Bay Area. During the drive across the Grapevine, I realized that my long-term goal of contributing to a grand unified field theory of physics, might be solvable through artificial intelligence. If I could help create a computer system much smarter than myself, then that system might be able to solve scientific problems far beyond my own ability. I realized that my developing model of working memory and consciousness might help guide the programming of such a system. That thought felt like a tremendous revelation during the drive.
I decided that my new transformative purpose was to create a model of consciousness and then implement it using computer science. Previously, I had felt insecure about my knowledge of computer science. I told myself that this was acceptable because I studied things that were objectively real and that had evolved naturally, while computer science seemed artificial and full of arbitrary human creations. But at that point, I took it upon myself to learn more about computer science. I came to understand that just because a discipline is man-made does not mean it is arbitrary or fundamentally misleading. Computer science had deep principles of its own, and those principles might be essential for understanding intelligence.
Around 2010, I read about the concept of psychological co-activation and how concepts co-activating can help pick the next association. These jived with my ideas. I first read about this in a psychological sense, but I wanted to make it neurological. Eventually, I started thinking of co-activation as a form of search. The current contents of mind could activate a field of possible next associations, and the next thought might be selected from that field through some combination of activation strength, relevance, memory, perception, and goal-directed control.
Later, I was reading about visual cortex and started seeing it as something like a television inside the mind. I imagined that the focus of attention could interact with this internal television. One day in the garage around 2010, I started doodling and showed how the static image on this television could be updated by the iterative updating of items in working memory. This gave me another way to think about consciousness: not just as verbal thought, but as an evolving internal scene, shaped by perception, imagery, memory, and attentional selection.
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, I believed that a software program would have to mimic the brain in order to be intelligent. I thought that it was necessary to simulate a conscious and brain-like system in order to realize intelligence. It never occurred to me that simply modeling language could produce something that looked like general intelligence. When I first read the outputs of GPT-2 (2019), I was surprised and amazed, but I still did not think that language modeling would scale toward AGI. In that sense, I sometimes feel left out and left behind. But I also think it is possible that self-improving artificial intelligence (if not humans) may still gain meaning, and perhaps architectural direction, from my writings.
Looking back, my scientific journey has not been a straight path. I began with physics, time machines, and dreams of encyclopedic knowledge. I struggled in school, failed to fit the standard classroom model, and was redirected into psychology almost by accident. But that detour led me to the problem that has organized my life: how consciousness emerges from neural activity, how working memory holds the contents of mind, and how one thought becomes the next.
The question that kept returning was not only “What is consciousness?” It was also, “How does the present state of the mind become the next state of the mind?” Sustained firing gave me a possible bridge through time. Working memory gave me a structure for the active contents of consciousness. Association, co-activation, and pattern completion gave me ways to think about transition and selection. The Tarzan and octopus analogies gave me intuitive pictures of overlap, limited capacity, and incremental change. Eventually, these ideas grew into a model of consciousness as iterative updating (aithought.com).
My life has been shaped by the feeling that knowledge compounds, that ideas can accumulate across years, and that even difficult or imperfect early intuitions can become useful if they are revisited, revised, and connected to better evidence. I have spent much of my life trying to understand the mind by observing my own mind, reading science, writing notes, generating models, and returning again and again to the same central mystery. The hope that began in childhood has changed form many times, but it has not disappeared. Is that a good thing though?
So, how did my risky wager turn out? Given what I have produced (written and published) was it worth it spending all this time devoting myself to science and education? Did my learnings interact synergistically, did my insights compound? Have I made any contribution at all? Fascinatingly (to me), its too early to tell. Nothing that I have done has entered mainstream science. I have only around 300 citations in the literature and many of those could be unrelated to my actual ideas. Theoretical work doesn't pay off in the short term. It can take decades or even centuries to validate. I have made absolutely no money off the majority of my thoughts, ideas, and writings. I have worked myself so hard, performing research all day, right up until bedtime, that I have headaches, tinnitus, neck and back pain, long covid, and various other issues. I have a knot to the side of my neck vertebrae the size of my thumb from working the mouse and keyboard. I am entirely unestablished professionally and academically. I have zero friends in science or research. I don't go to conferences. I don't have anyone that I correspond with about my ideas (except for AI). I live in an insular world where I write multiple essays every week about hypothetical concepts that could be totally and wrong and will probably be completely ignored even if right. I'm 44 now with no children, never married with no partner. I have virtually no plan or ambitions aside from continuing to write. And I don't know if I will ever be recognized in any way for my work. ...either in my lifetime or after my passing. But you know what? I wouldn't go back and change anything. I am happy with my choices. I always knew I was taking a risk. And I have learned to be content in the journey, not the outcome. I hope that AI will vindicate some of my theories but I am not counting on it. And in the meantime, I am just going to continue to read, and write, and think as much as I can.
And beneath all of that, beneath the ambition, the uncertainty, the frustration, and the hope for recognition, there is something simpler and more durable: I love science. I love the ideas. I love the mystery. I love the way one fact connects to another, how a concept from physics can illuminate a question in neuroscience, how a principle from biology can reshape the way I think about intelligence. I love the attempt to model the universe, even when the model is incomplete, and even when I am incomplete. I love the grandeur of it, the feeling that the mind can reach outward toward reality and slowly, imperfectly, begin to understand. That love is what started this journey, and it is still what keeps me going.
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