My SOP for IIT Gandhinagar

Buddha said that “Our life is the creation of our mind.”

Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside your skull. - David McRaney.

These statements summarise our entire life and how it happens. When you learn yoga, you are invariably introduced to the mind, its intricacies and its innate strength. You may even get bewildered by its supernaturalistic power. Yoga says that the mind is past impressions. If you live out of your mind, it will replay the same installed programs and your future will look like your past. So, it was through my experience with yoga over the last 3 years that I became extremely interested in the human mind and its workings. That was the time when I was searching for my passion and wanted to devote myself to the study of things that I was passionate about.

The practise of mindfulness or awareness led me to the inner corridors of the mysteries of the human mind. The more I worked with computers, the more I fell in love with humans. Human beings are infinitely more interesting than computers and I became a social observer. The biggest and probably the only tool that we all have, in order to explore the world was ourselves - our minds - the experiences it created, the beliefs, thoughts, emotions and desires. I started observing myself and people around me and I was fascinated by our behaviour. Many a times we acted like pre-programmed machines. It was so difficult to change one’s patterns. We made irrational mistakes. We jumped to wrong conclusions. We worked in auto pilot. We had a set of cultural prejudices and biases. We created personalities and our actions reinforced our personality. We liked to be slotted and labelled and identified. We chased success and happiness without sometimes fully understanding what we mean by these terms. So human life looked like a well intended but badly mixed cocktail with the mind playing conman and deluding us.

For all the advances in technology it appeared to me that the human mind carried certain hard wired evolutionary baggages that were no longer valid in today’s modern world. I read about cognitive biases and the range of positive illusions created by the mind for the purpose of motivation, survival and emotional stability. These cognitive biases explained why some people were optimistic and more likely to succeed and how others were setting up for failure. I read about the stories that we constructed without evidence and how we based our beliefs on such poorly constructed narratives. I was interested in the works of Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, Mc Combs professor Raj Raghunathan, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, positive psychology father Martin Seligman, psychotherapist Ernest Rossi and journalist psychologist David Mc Raney. I read a little about the subconcious mind and how we do so many actions unconsciously. That brought up questions like - how is the subconcious programmed in the first place. Once a wrong program is inserted, it would result in wrong actions, wouldn’t it? I became interested to know more about Freud’s studies on the subconcious mind as this programming seemed to be at the heart of many of our issues.

The most fascinating aspect of all was, how do we bring about change? The ability to change your mind, is the key to happiness. How then, do we debug the mind? Using the same mind, right? A tool debugging and auto correcting itself - is amazing. In our projects we have done live updates, where we load a new version of software while another is running and switch to it. It’s a very complex process even for a piece of software. In that sense I wondered how the contents of the mind were changed while the mind was in action. How do parts of it get reprogrammed? How is memory stored? How do we translate our memory into stories? The entire science of it - psychologically and neurobiologically was fascinating. As someone who has undergone the complex process of in-vitro-fertilization I know how impossible it is to replicate all the chemical signalling happening inside the human body for any single function. So, I am fully aware that today, it would be impossible to recreate the human mind. It may take us forever to discover the human mind - its organization, processes, biology and evolution in entirety and no single stream - philosophy or psychology or neuroscience can completely answer the puzzles of the mind. Even a combined approach such as cognitive science can only “hope” to answer and construct a better picture of the mind - its representational structures and computational algorithms and state machines.

So, over the last few years I have occupied myself with TED talks, open courseware from leading international colleges, book reviews and articles about psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. I maintain a blog where I collect articles related to these domains and create my own articles for my friends and family regarding interesting topics like happiness, our behavioural patterns and flaws, success, human values and art. I have a basic understanding of these domains and I hope to understand them systematically through a rigorous and well designed academic program. I aim to understand scientifically the functioning of the human mind and the causes of our behaviour, personality and biases. I hope to understand in depth about how we get programmed by nature and nurture, how to improve our pursuit happiness with higher degree of success and how we can aim to attain professor Mihaly’s states of “flow” for a more fulfulling life. These are the three core areas that I am most interested to pursue for research.

I also aim to understand how each of us represent the world, inside our heads. How do we perceive the world and what forms the reality for each of us? What is the underlying mechanism for human thoughts? How do we gain language expertise and problem solving skills? How do the maps in our heads look like? How can learning a complex language like Chinese increase one’s intelligence? Is there one universal reality? Can we scientifically answer concepts of karma or maya using science? Can we explore the intersection of ancient meditation techniques and modern neuroscience? If there has been found a correlation between transcendental mental states and gamma waves, can that we explored further? Can psychological phenomena be explained via neuroscience experiments? Can we reverse engineer the mind using cognitive science and bring about changes in the society and education system to improve human well being?

My undergraduate degree in Computer Science and my 11 years of work experience in leading technology firms, more specifically, my work in data structures, algorithms, switching and routing protocols and state machines would enable me to easily follow some of the computation related courses. My passion for knowledge acquisition and commitment should help me transcend any shortcomings and lack of exposure to certain topics.

My aim in applying to this course is to gain a breadth of knowledge in my areas of interest from the best faculty in the country. I hope to gather a set of skills which can aid me for a deeper understanding of some areas. I understand that the breadth has to be supported by depth in the three specific areas I hope to do research in, and I hope that my professors at IIT Gandhinagar can guide me towards more focussed programs on completion of the degree - so that I can finally pursue research in one of these areas. I hope to finally pursue a doctoral programme which will enable me to become a teacher and an author. I hope to gain sufficient breadth and depth of knowledge in the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience which will enable me to write articles and books that can bring about small changes in our culture and education system because, despite so much advancements in all fields, most humans are unhappy. I strongly feel that the increasing emphasis on technological pursuits without enabling a human being with sufficient happiness, self introspection, sufficiency and sustenance tools will lead to increasing cases of mental disorders. Having lived in the US, I know firsthand how common mental disorders are and technology is not the answer to it and probably even worsens it. The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life’ - says professor Martin Seligman. So scientists and researchers have to address how to behold a positive, optimisitic and healthy mind. The result of our research should form the core of school curriculum and organizational policies. Even laymen should have access to tools for better mental health and mental life and this should be as widespread as mobile phones in India. Early in one’s life, one should be exposed to a sufficient set of tools and knowledge for better well being and success and happiness. The bigger scheme behind my pursuit of the degree is these somewhat unrealistic but yet possible to realize goals. The pursuit of better mental lives should become as common as the pursuit of health and wealth.