The biggest junkyard - human brain

The structure and working of the human brain is obviously fascinating, but getting lost in reading the brain anatomy book by John Nolte on a lazy Sunday without a background in medical lingo gets the mind thinking in the ways, interesting though, other than the intended.

The brain is very very structured. Thank God! Control of all fundamental mechanisms, sensory data processing, motor controls, personality/behavioural traits, language and cognitive skills are all managed at specific locations. Evolution is the statistical re-shuffling of the gene-pool in the combining DNAs over an insanely long period of time.. I feel, understanding evolution is the learning of refinement in the controller mechanisms of life forms, core of which is the brain.

A neuron is like a tiny piece of semiconductor (or actually the other way round :P) ready to quickly transmit some kind of messages through ionization. The human brain has neurons of the order of fcuking 100 billion!! This factory requires approx 25% of total oxygen supply in the body. This bunch of neurons is very carefully floating in some cerebro-spinal fluid, all of which is enclosed in a hard helmet of the skull.

Now at the psychological level and yet to understand this as a machine, all worldly and unworldly patterns of sight, touch, thoughts, feelings, encoded DNA formats for internal processes, blah blah blah are simply stored in and processed with interconnections of these 100 billion neurons. Yes! the whole stuff about life and this world and beyond of which we think or imagine are just patterns in this gray thingi. A deeper understanding might get depressing, but I seriously can never believe the sci-fi stud thinkers of all times who can imagine complete brain control by electronically barging in the brain circuitry. It will be something freaky.. out of wits. On the other hand, some ancient wise people have experienced and explained the brain and everything of us to have some higher connections which transcend the worldly thinking (and so can't be rationalized in existing science). However, lets take this interesting thing - so many chemicals just fool around with the normal functioning of the brain! Fundamentally, the 'highs' and 'kicks' are just some equivalent changes in thoughts which chemicals induce. So, its all in our t h o u g h t s!! One thought can even spike the blood supply to the brain or alter the functioning of a portion of the brain.

Defining mind is very difficult in the tangible space but the safest assumption is that its as real as the outside world. Thoughts evolve with every single step in the evolution along with the refinement of the DNA (which is just a chemical composition or a mathematical encoding of some structure). The linkage between these two worlds, the kick-ass mix of chemistry/biology with psychology/spirtuality, happens at the understanding of the brain from different sides!