SYSTEMS DO NOT have to be complicated or unintelligible, or even dressed in jargon. A system is just an arrangement of circumstances that makes things happen in a certain way. The circumstances may be metal grids, electronic components, warm bodies, rules and regulations, or anything else. In each case what actually happens is determined by the nature of the system. One can take the function of the system for granted and become interested in how it is carried out.

If young children are asked to invent a potato-peeling machine they draw a winding tube through which a string of potatoes is seen travelling towards a simple box with the explanatory note, ‘In here the potatoes are peeled’. Another tube carries the peeled potatoes away. There is nothing mysterious about the box, it just performs the potato-peeling function. One takes it for granted that that is the function of the box and that somehow the function gets carried out. In some of the inventions the potatoes are then carried to a metal grid through which they are forced in order to make chips. The making of the chips is not taken for granted but explained, because it is explicable.

If you put water instead of oil into a frying pan you would not expect to be able to fry chips. If you were to use fat or oil you would get some ordinary chips. If you add a little water to the oil before you put the pan on the fire, then the temperature of the oil will rise more slowly and the chips will be soft on the inside and crisp on the outside – much more so than if only the oil had been used. The nature of the system determines what happens.

The brain is a system in which things happen according to the nature of the system. What happens in the brain is information. And the way it happens is thinking.

Since thinking in this broad sense determines what people do on any level from the most personal to the most international, it could be worth looking at some aspects of the brain system. If one were to discover all there was to know about the brain system, of what practical use would this be?

If you want to get your shoes cleaned in an English hotel you simply leave them overnight in the corridor outside your room. Many an unhappy Englishman has learned that in America shoes treated in this way disappear never to be seen again. Left outside the door, the shoes are regarded as a rather eccentric form of tipping or garbage disposal. The first useful thing that can come out of knowledge of a system is the avoiding of those errors that arise through thinking the system to be something that it is not.

The second useful thing is awareness of the limitations of the system. No matter how good they may be at performing their best functions, most systems are rather poor when it comes to performing the opposite functions. One would no more go racing in a shopping car than shopping in a racing car. Where one can, one chooses the system to fit the purpose. More often there is no choice, and this means that a single system will perform certain functions well but others not so well. For instance the brain system is well suited to developing ideas but not so good at generating them. Knowing about the limitations of a system does not by itself alter them. But by being aware of the nature of the system one can make deliberate adjustments.

The first advertisement to proclaim that a certain brand of soap was superior to all others might well have induced people to buy that soap, since they were inclined to believe what they were told. But an increasing awareness of the advertising system would cause people to make adjustments that would lessen the inevitability of the response.

The third way in which one could use knowledge of a system would be to make use of the characteristics of the system to improve its performance or to achieve some end.

In the early days of the instant breath-test for drinking drivers, one drunken driver drove his car into a lamp-post and wrecked it. As he sat waiting in the wreckage for the police to come and test and charge him, he remembered the nature of the system. So he pulled out a hip-flask and started to drink some more. When the police came he explained to them that the shock of the accident had caused him to have a drink. Since his car was no longer drivable he knew that he could not be held to have the necessary intent to drive, as required by the system. What his blood alcohol level had been at the time of the accident was, of course, no longer determinable.

Ovulation in the human female can only occur when there is the right amount of certain hormones in the body. Altering the amount of these hormones will prevent ovulation. Thus, by taking advantage of the nature of the system, effective contraception can be achieved with small doses of synthetic hormones taken by mouth in the form of a tiny pill.

In both these examples, knowledge of how a system works enables one to make effective use of it. The practice of medicine is an obvious example of this process. For that matter so is the whole of science, which tries to understand systems in order to make better use of them.

Some understanding of how the brain system handled information could be very useful. It might then be possible to recognize some of the errors and faults inherent in this type of system, to show, for example, that there was a tendency to arbitrary and self-enhancing divisions which were extremely useful in most cases but could also be the source of a lot of trouble. Apart from becoming aware of the errors of the system, it might also be possible to make more effective use of it through understanding its nature in order to make the learning process easier and more economic. It might be possible to do something about communication.

Language, notation and mathematics are useful artificial aids to thinking. There may be other artificial aids which could be invented if one had sufficient understanding of the brain system. With new notation it might prove possible to generate ideas as easily as we now develop them once they have been generated. For instance it might be possible to invent a new word which would be functional in nature like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘but’ or ‘not’. The function of this new word would be to compensate for the inherent limitations of the information-processing system in the brain and open up new ways of talking and thinking. The word would ultimately have to justify its usefulness in practice, but its invention may not have been possible without an understanding of the nature of the system.

Something as definite as a new word would be a very practical outcome of understanding the system. Such an understanding could also have a more general usefulness in showing that there is no inaccessible magic about the system, only an intimidating complexity.