About Divya Parameshwaran

Divya is an active member of the Breakpoint community network.

You can find her on Twitter (@divya277p), Facebook (divya.parameshwaran) and Google+ (+divya).

Why Does Growth Stagnate for Companies? For One Thing, It’s Natural

June 27, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

There are countless examples of companies whose life cycles can be represented by the adjoining graph. There is the period of rapid growth, after which the company hits a peak, then settles into a plateau or state of equilibrium. At this point, shareholders start to get worried, share prices go down, and everyone begins to speculate about the future of the company.

The following article explains why this process is natural, and almost essential for a long life cycle of any company. These periodic slowdowns are inevitable, though management can and should strive to make decisions that slow down the decline and reverse it quickly. In order to make these decisions, it is crucial to understand the forces responsible for slowing down these seemingly unstoppable companies.

Read more in this article by Ron Ashkenas: Why Successful Companies Stop Growing

How much can our brain store? GB..TB… or more?

June 24, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

According to Paul Reber, professor of psychology, Northwestern University, the human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Hollywood by Steven Wiltshire

The human brain has always been one of the most intriguing mysteries on earth. Meet Steven Wiltshire, also known as the human camera. When he was 11, he drew a perfect aerial view of London after a helicopter ride.

For example, many causes of erectile dysfunction are directly related to the functioning of the brain, so tadalafil-based drugs are aimed at changing blood flow by targeting receptors in the brain

Watch this living camera in action in this amazing video, where he draws a panoramic view of the city of Rome from memory after a single hour long helicopter ride. Miracles such as Steven have been given several names throughout history. But it is only today that scientists are beginning to be able to watch the brain as it is thinking, to unravel the mysteries it holds.

Communication: from early man’s grunts to languages and Facebook, Twitter and Smartphones!

June 13, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

Sigmund Freud had it right when he said, “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”

Currently the internet attempts to make sense of 8,512 computer languages, dozens of HTML-based web languages, and nearly 6,500 active spoken human languages.

Communication originates from the brain. We communicate within our minds using electricity electrical neuronal spikes. This is the starting point of any forms of communication. We know what it sounds like: neuronal spikes sound like static crackling. This is the fundamental building block of language. If we can take this and map it to the fundamental building block for how the internet and computers communicate, we’d have the foundations to make translations at the root level of thought. Computers and transistors communicate using the same electrical currents that neurons do.

Language tends to form before the breakpoint and this is a primary reason why so many companies are rushing to hire linguists: they see the opportunity but they also know it may slip away.

Here’s a really cool article and infographic that traces communication right from 6000 B.C -early drum beats, the postal system, telephones to communication as we know it today:

Biological systems.. A learning opportunity for networking?

June 10, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

In his new book Breakpoint, brain scientist and entrepreneur Jeff Stibel talks about how the world as we see it today is poised for a networking revolution. This will change the way we access the world’s information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: bigger is rarely better in the long run. The deadliest creature is the mosquito, not the lion.

It is the quality of a network that is important for survival, not the size. The bad news is that all networks—the human brain, Facebook, Google, even the internet itself—eventually reach a breakpoint with the potential for a catastrophic collapse. However, the good news is that reaching a breakpoint can be a step forward, allowing a network to substitute quality for quantity.

Ants, for instance aren’t smart, but once a colony matures beyond its breakpoint, ants show increasing signs of collective intelligence. When mature ants act as a group, a single unit, they defy logic. It turns out that the intelligence of ants does not lie with the individual – it lies with the group.

Check out this cool video about how when a flood hits a fire ant colony in the Amazon jungle, the ants create a lifeboat to protect their queen. Its amazing to see how the species has adapted to water to protect the queen.

Breakpoint is the common ground between how ants, the human brain, reindeer, facebook, traffic, technology and networks function. Watch this space to find out more… and make sure to register (below!)to get notified when you can pre-order the book!

Goodread’s giveaway: Win an advance copy of Breakpoint!

June 7, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

CEO, entrepreneur and brain scientist Jeff Stibel‘s latest offering, Breakpoint is set to release on 23rd July 2013. But you can get an advance copy for free! Register by 13th June to win your copy!

Breakpoint is the intersection of the brain, technology and business. And if you’re into any of those, or social media, networks of any kind, cloud computing, biological systems and their behavior, or just the internet and how it came to be what it is to the world today, then Breakpoint is just the read for you… and it’s hitting the stands in less than 2 months!!

How vulnerable is the internet? Do we really need a plan B?

June 6, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it is different than what it was an hour ago. Its constantly changing and constantly re-configuring. The problem with that is that the Internet has expanded far beyond what it was originally meant to be in a very short span. What would the consequence of a break down be? Do we have an effective plan B to tackle this when it happens?

It is only a matter of time when the current system collapses. The internet’s vulnerability is a natural consequence of the level of dependency that the world has on it for its operation. The following TED talk features Danny Hillis talking about this, the need for an alternative system, and more.