MIND MEASUREMENTS  (9/16/76)

Well, I don’t know if this is very profound, let alone accurate.  Maybe we’ll never know.  In any event, let’s keep probing.

If we use the mind and our imagination as the laboratory, just how do we go about it?  Well, I haven’t even thought of what facilities we have in the lab.  I suppose we better define just what equipment we have before we try to set up an experiment.

Okay – what measurements can the mind make in the realm of imagination?  When I think of measurements, I think of weight, time, mass, pressure, temperature, velocity, acceleration, frequency, probability, distance, flow rate, viscosity, etc.  It seems though, that we usually need some implement . . . some physical tool in order to perform a particular quantitative measurement.  On the other hand, the mind is required to attest to the result of the measurement.

But it’s strange that the mind is not usually used as an analytical tool or instrument.  It’s a sorter of logic but not a measurement device.  For example, how does the mind measure a distance or a weight or a time interval?  It can’t!  You simply need a yardstick, a balance and a clock.  With these tools the mind can observe and verify the results of the physical measurement, but through the use of the senses like sight and hearing.  Perhaps this means that measurements made in the physical world require physical analytical instruments.  I wonder if the converse is true . . . .. . that is, variables of the non-physical world require non-physical analytical instruments for their measurement.

There is perhaps one variable in the physical world that I can think of that can be measured by the mind.  That is frequency, or frequency difference.  Well, let’s not get too specific yet.  There will be time for that when we finally get into the laboratory.  We still have a great deal of preliminary work to do.

It’s interesting that in my leading statement of 9/16, I observed that the preceding discussion yielded nothing profound.  This may very well be true, but ironically, the following page contains a concept that indeed, I have never heard of before.  In fact, it deserves more scrutiny.  To boil the concept down . . . . The mind is not capable of quantitative sensual measurement.  This is meant to be generally true.  There may be some exceptions and if there were, it would be most important to understand the nature and even mechanism of this process so we might apply fundamental law, or truth, or more realistically, knowledge, to other observational sectors of the mind.  Certainly, our brain, or mind, can be calibrated to a degree.  I mentioned frequency.  What I meant was sound pitch.  Some people can sing and carry a tune while others couldn’t do it “in a bucket” because of the possession of a “zinc ear”.  It is said some people can sing an “A” right out of the “blue”.  While I’m not totally convinced of this, even if they got close to the 440 cycles/second, it would be encouraging.  Quite a number of people, however, can sing intervals with precise accuracy.  I can “hear” intervals over probably two octaves or perhaps more and this includes any pitch of the 12-tone scale.  I might add that by “hear”, I mean imagine the tones without the aid of any sense organs, of course the ears included.