Outside Context

You are in pos­ses­sion of the one of the universe’s most mys­ter­i­ous objects. Your per­sonal copy of this object dif­fers in func­tion only slightly from all the other sim­ilar objects in our solar sys­tem. It is the part of you that feels pleas­ure and yet it is also the part of you that knows pain. It is a part of your body that you can­not see, but it is also that which you rely on to make sense of what you observe. It is built of more than 33 bil­lion neur­ons, linked in a mesh up to 10 thou­sand times each, mak­ing a total num­ber of con­nec­tions greater than the observ­able stars in the sky. It is the true won­der of planet Earth; for it grew here in the same way apples grow on trees.

It is your brain.

And while we can explore the fur­thest reaches of light-enabled space, we can­not claim to have begun under­stand­ing this small lump of tis­sue we each pos­sess. Our sci­ences regard­ing it are crude at best and mostly reply­ing on mere obser­va­tion. That sum of know­ledge even­tu­ally comes down to this: which bits you should not poke. On the other hand, our men­tal sci­ence experts, doctors and sci­ent­ists try to reduce the func­tions of the brain down to an increas­ingly mor­bid col­lec­tion of fac­ulties about which they then bicker and argue about endlessly.

And every single one of them has missed the point… Read More