I woke up this morning with a huge crick in my neck after I accidentally slept on the floor. Anyway, what started off as a comment on [link] ended up (as usual) becoming a huge digression..


It is almost common knowledge that the human brain is made up of around one hundred billion neurones (the cells that through a spark of electricity transfer information), and each neurone has between 1000 and 10,000 points of contact with other neurones. It follows that there are more permutations of brain state than there are elementary particles in the known universe. To quote the worlds leading neurologist V.S. Ramachandram; “ it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life- all our feelings our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions our love lives, our religious sentiments, is simply the activity of little specks of jelly in our heads”.

Knowing that what I am typing now, the thoughts behind it originating from the frontal lobe stimulating the motor cortex in the cerebellum that instigates the movement of my fingers and visual feedback of what’s on the screen registering in over 30 different parts of the brain with unique bits of information and finishing at the amygdala which attaches emotional relevance to it all before starting all over again (without factoring hundreds of things that can and do go wrong along the way), is no less amazing than not knowing. And it in no way detracts from the mystery or the majesty of life as a continuous chemical reaction.

Of course there are emotions, just because they aren’t tangible or you know they are really quarks dressed up doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Sometimes things are just more than the sum of their parts. You see it’s a false dichotomy, that you are either a materialist believing in the objective states of the world or an idealist believing that it is only true in our conscious mind, however, what if both were true? Surely all we have are subjective perceptions of a material life, others and our own, when importance and relevance are the same thing. But I'm definately not a philosopher.

Or a scientist for that matter!