Continuing my discussion about being a human-spirit being, I’ve come to the part that was instrumental in my transformation and in my work with others. The turning point for me was seeing how I (and all of us) operate like a computer. Though I’ve worked with computers since I was in the 5th grade, it wasn’t until I was in graduate school (some 15 years later) before I could see this analogy.

The Human Computer

This short video and talk take the core self (discussed in Being a Human-Spirit Being: Part 5 - The Core Self) one step further. They show my view on how we operate as a computer.

In essence, we develop patterns of thinking, being, feeling, and doing that affect us at every level of our being. In a personal computer, these patterns would be considered the software. In a PC, unless someone updates or reprograms the software, the computer will run the same patterns (instructions) over and over again, even if they are buggy, broken, or detrimental.

We tend to do the same thing. Unlike PCs, though, we can reprogram ourselves. The problem is that we get stuck running programs, and we don’t realize it, don’t know how to change them, or don’t have the will or discipline to take action to change them. It is this experience and understanding that is at the core of how I help people to transform themselves from the core outward.

Origin of the Human Computer View

Back in 1997, I was a computer science graduate student at UC Berkeley. At the time, I was studying high-performance computers. That work resulted in my spending hours upon hours each day in a freezing cold, dim computer lab with computers (hundreds of them).They were all around me in racks and arranged into rows. I would load my software onto them, take measurements, and move to the next machine or task. This work went on for months.

One day, I looked around and felt awfully strange being in the midst of computers all day everyday. There was no one around but me. I didn’t talk to anyone. It was just me and those damn machines.

As I wondered what I was doing, I felt as if I had become a machine—a computer that robotically does the same thing over and over again. In that moment, I knew I needed to make a change. I needed to be more in touch with people. I needed to get away from those machines. So, I started looking at other research areas and moved to human-computer interaction, where I could interact with people and do work that I felt could improve the quality of people’s lives.

My Core Software

Although I felt like a computer during those earlier research days, it was another six years or so before I could fully see and understand the inner workings of the human computer, in particular the human software. For instance, the software pattern that I ran for most of my life was one of low self-worth. No matter what I did, I didn’t feel good about myself, so I worked harder and harder to prove myself until my near-death experience with meningitis began a several-year process to turn things around.

When I could see how this pattern affected EVERYTHING that happened in my life, I understood that the key to my transformation (and others) is to reprogram one’s self. In the computer world, one would figure out where things are broken (diagnosis), fix the problem (debugging), and  verify that the problem is fixed (testing). Depending on the problem, it can be a very complex and time-intensive process to fix a broken computer program. The same can be said for fixing broken human software.

Rather than go into more detail in this post, I will be posting articles to provide more information about how we can go about reprogramming our human software. The point I want to make here is that not understanding how to do so is what keeps us trapped, holds us back, and interferes with our ability to live up to our potential and experience complete success. That’s why I’m committed to bringing this human computer analogy to the forefront in an actionable way.