Feeling a bit end-of-winter fuzzy? Awash with Wednesday ennui? Fed up with days filled with frustration, procrastination and possibilities that never quite manifest?<\/p>\n
Then read this.<\/p>\n
Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia\u2014hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. Each cell contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the sum total would be blinding.<\/em><\/p>\n
The cells are connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new kinds of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about 10,000 connections to neighboring neurons, which means that there are more connections in a few cubic centimeters of brain tissue than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.<\/em><\/p>\n
The three pound organ in your skull\u2014with its pink consistency of jello\u2014is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we\u2019ve dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you\u2019re the busiest, brightest thing on the<\/em> planet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now tell me you don\u2019t feel a little more, well, special? It is from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain<\/a>, the new book by neuroscientist David Eagleman<\/a>, who delivered a fantastic lecture at the Southbank Centre this week and who is indisputably the Brian Cox<\/a> of the brain (with added humour and a better haircut). Here he is talking about possibilianism at PopTech last year (possibly).<\/p>\n