Where the magic happens
I once read an article on perception. How the brain perceives, the speed at which the information gets to it and when we are actually conscient of it, and I found out that there was a gap between the two: conscience and action. The action happens before the conscient process starts. The brain has already started to do its job, but we’re conscious of it after it did. We’re talking about milliseconds here, but still….that blew my mind.
And this is how it started. This and depression.
I realized that we live in a world that our brain creates, what we see, how we see it, how we integrated it, how we interact with it all…it all depends on it, on the brain, on how it works.
So I’m thinking: I need to know how the thing that makes me see the world the way I see it, works. I need to understand, and this need got bigger and bigger as I understood how extremely complex is the job of the brain…because of course, we know that all motor and vegetative functions are orchestrated by the brain, but what about the inner world, the thoughts that arise and have no connection to an actual action, just thoughts, perspectives, ideas….everything that happens at the “rooftop” of the head: the cortex…
The brain is the most important part of the body and yet mental health is the less taken care of. It took me five years of struggling with myself and the system, during and after a depression that I still carry on. And all this time I realized that no one is actually even close to ready to helping someone with depression, and that in spite of all the “you are not alone” slogans. Don’t commit suicide, live. why? Because you have to. Why? No one knows, but killing yourself is not really recommended.
I gave up on external help, it all lies within me, I know what triggers me, what shuts me down, what makes me sad, angry etc. I know me and I know what part of the brain contributes to what happens to me. It didn’t bring relief, far from that, it brought even more sadness in a way, because the more you know, the less you manage to integrate into a society who’s only purpose is to make you forget who you are.
But I’m not going to deviate from the subject which is: what is going on UP THERE?
And as I like to start from scratch, and understand the basics, I started by wondering: what is a neuron? That didn’t help much because I have a hectic way of thinking so I was all over the place, each information made me curious about another aspect and once I found out about that one, I had to understand all the links with other different aspects and so on and on.
This is me telling myself: you’ve gone a long way.
A neuron is a cell that….communicates. Its specialty is communicating information.
That in itself is amazing and when you add the fact that each neuron can be interconnected to other cells from the same family, neurons, through 7000 “antennas” (dendrites), that becomes huge.
It all comes to: we have, at least before “descendent path” when the neurons begin do die, 100 billion neurons and they all have at least 10k connections between them. It seems, after a mathematical calculus, that we’d have 4 billiards neuron connections in the brain. Approximately. And it also seems that there would be about 4 billiards stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Coincidence? I have no idea, but the thought of it makes me smile:)