Dr. Aslinger emailed yesterday, telling me of a grad student he is mentoring he would like me to meet. I suggested the same Starbucks as a suitable location, and with a brief description of the woman, I sat down to await her arrival. While she is willing to share the nature of her studies and what avenues of interest she is exploring, she was apprehensive of having her name shared on my website so as to maintain her privacy and not divulge to the world at large just who it is raising some of the questions she is exploring I will simply refer to her as RTR for the rest of my blog posting.

RTR set the stage by first telling me about her studies in order to establish a background for how she plans to attack her theories. Now nearing thirty years old, RTR received her Bachelor’s in Filmmaking from USC, then worked for a short time in Germany in the advertising industry. It was during this time that she became aware of the Max Planck Institute. Through conversations with students from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, she started exploring how the brain processes language and affects cognitive behavior in regards to how this could be incorporated into her filmmaking. Back in Germany, talking with yet another student, RTR learned of an undergrad project at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden where students looking at how cells form tissues were contemplating if pigments could be programmed with genetic information in order to have them self-assemble art.

RTR’s original interest in film began with the observation that there were a handful of movies being made that contained a kind of psychedelic spirituality, such as Dune, Contact, AI, Altered States, and 2001 – A Space Odyssey. While Dune, with its reference to spice, piqued her interest, it was the time dilation scene with Jodie Foster in Contact that struck a chord. RTR felt that this particular scene exemplified a move from suggestive psychedelic spiritual hints to overt references to a particular entheogen. This interest was to lie dormant during the intervening years of working to make a living, but that was about to change.

Germany was leaving its mark and effecting great change in RTR’s life and outlook upon the arts and reality, but it was time to return to America. Trading the camera for a new bookbag, RTR returned to her studies and finished her Masters in Computer Sciences for Biomedical Informatics to lay a foundation for a better understanding of genomics and computational biology. As a grad student still unsatisfied with the limits of her knowledge, she has since embarked on a lengthy education process, currently working for a Professional Science Master in Nanoscience and her Ph.D. in Molecular / Cellular Biology.

The aim of this multidisciplinary trajectory is to find answers or, at a minimum, to create a better allusion to an artistic model for film or video, allowing us a glimpse into her view of the human relationship to the universe. The crux of her quest is to gain an understanding of the complexity of the mind and its capacity to be fed by an enormity of information and influences contrasting with our place in a slow-moving world where mountains don’t move; forests stand witness for decades if not centuries and clouds drift by – why should your minds have such innate ability for an environment that seems to plod along? RTR believes there is more to things than what meets the eye, ear, nose, sense of touch, and thoughts we appear to crawl through. She would like to find the key to the existence of a more primitive or intuitive language she suspects we may yet carry embedded in our instinctual knowledge, a language that exceeds the limits of our current understanding and lays bare the maze of survival information and ability to dream to our conscious mind.

At the core of her thesis is that our DNA is not as simple as it appears. Not that it is overly simple with what we already know regarding the four building blocks that make up DNA (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine – ACGT), but she thinks it is far more complex than we have yet considered. Specifically, she believes that encoded in our chromosomes amongst the 3 billion base pairs that define our genome is more information that we are yet to discover. This is where Dr. Aslinger’s work comes into the equation as with his theory of a particle of time tinier than any theorized particles to date and his ideas regarding fractal energy, RTR has begun exploring a hypothesis that our 3 billion base pairs of DNA contain a fractally encoded data state holding the collective survival information that proved efficient to any and all species since life appeared on earth billions of years ago.

She is curious if this embedded information acts as our compass for the evolution of humanity on levels that are subconscious to us but are at work in order to propel our species forward and hopefully not make the mistakes of earlier life forms that weren’t well adapted to survive. Specifically, she has looked at the human mind with its capacity to perform at between 10 trillion and 20 quadrillion calculations per second (this is open to interpretation with no definitive answer to precisely how fast the mind operates) and that we have storage capacity in the neighborhood of 100 terabytes. Consider that 20 million books in the Library of Congress would represent approximately 20 terabytes of data, that 144,000 songs encoded in the mp3 format would require one terabyte of storage, and that 10 million photos would require approximately 20 terabytes of data storage, and you see that considering we may be able to read three to five hundred books over a twenty-year period and that the average person might listen to and remember two to five-thousand songs, there is an incredible amount of storage capacity in our mind that we are not able to withdraw and playback with the precision of a computer but for some reason, we have this capacity and maybe it is being used for something.

Then there is the question of the speed of calculations that the mind is capable of while our senses and thoughts seem to go about at a rather tepid clip. Why have this processing power but not have the ability to render our memories in the waking clarity of our visual perception when a piece of silicon called a graphics chip running at a magnitude slower than our brain has the accuracy to display dynamic data sets of changing imagery combined with sound and action? RTR believes that, in reality, our mind is interpreting a massive data set, filtering life lessons learned over the eons, and that these instincts guide human endeavors to work from past failures to ensure the survival of our species. Somewhere in our evolution, information was being fed piecemeal to our slower senses that are limited by gravity, the need for food, sleep, and a short life span to act in a way that would sustain an ever-expanding population. Earlier species may have destroyed their environment by eating more than the biota could supply, and so the lesson learned and subsequently encoded into our DNA is that for our species to survive while our population is skyrocketing to the tune of billions, we would need to develop systems of food production able to sustain such a mass without requiring each individual to participate in growing their own food. Similarly, a shelter for a fragile species is at a premium when tool-building skills do not exist, so maybe a slow focus was necessary to allow humankind to work out the complexities of how to build ever-expanding demands on a secure shelter to ensure the protection of a species from the natural elements.

RTR went on to explain that over the last thousands of years, our growing knowledge of mastering natural resources and creating new artificial resources has put us on a trajectory to either save this organic creature from destroying its environment and potential or succumb to the apparent destructive forces that at times forces species into extinction. RTR told me how happy she has been to meet Dr. Aslinger because she can see that the approach of 2012 and the possibility of a mass awakening of our awareness to our real potential may be becoming a requirement for our survival as it appears that our conscious mind is overwhelming our subconscious instinctual needs for survival and that we risk failure of yet another life form – ours.

Working within this new framework of hypothesis, RTR would like to share visually through a medium most of us watch, television and film, that we are wasting our potential and risking our survival by not understanding the complexity of what we are trying to accomplish as the breathing, thinking, imaginative creatures we are.

On a final note, RTR is fearful that we may have an inherent propensity towards stupidity and ignorance and that this, too, may be part of the knowledge built into our DNA. Maybe the Egyptians, Mayans, or if they existed, the people of Atlantis, found that their knowledge of the world proved destabilizing to their successful continued existence and that in our current state of awareness, we are but pawns moving sentient life out of the organic form and into an artificial life form not affected by lack of water, food, warmth, and cold. Maybe the highest embodied form of a being with a physical presence will have to be a silicon and electron-based piece of hardware that can be imbued with the qualities of a soul, but that can exist under harsh conditions while still being able to catalog, dream about, and share the immense beauty that can exist on a world that is but a trillionth of the entirety of our universe. Or are we doomed to build the inheritors of our legacy as we extinct ourselves due to our myopic view that centers the individual as a cornerstone in their own mini-universe where we can consume and destroy what suits us? Can we awaken to our shared adventure and work in a coordinated, enlightened, and knowledgeable way that will allow a three billion-year history to succeed in creating a kind of heaven on earth?