The power of Neurons and what makes me, ME!

The power of Neurons and what makes me, ME!

Inside of our skull there is a whole world. Interactions so fast moving, we don't even know they have happened before we react. Professor Gerbig once told me that a neuron can fire off 25 times in one second. Yet it does so faster than I can think about what it is doing. In fact as I think what to write my neurons have already fired out commands for my fingers to move and my eyes. The brain is a well organized machine. So mysterious and complex, that studying it often leaves us more perplexed than when we started.

Neurons are a mass of Dendrites, and Axons. They all group together and fire off in the same direction. It is by having these specialized cells we are able to think, and be aware of the world around us. They are hungry and hard working cells. Just a few minutes without air leaves them dying. They are faster than any computer and work from birth to death. In fact scientists are starting to find that when neurons do not fire off right, it does not send the steady signal to your lungs and heart to keep breathing and beating. So since the signal is lost due to errors in aging cells the heart stops beating and does not start again.

During our life time our neurons will do steady work. They will pick up millions of gigabytes of information, and every night while we sleep they will move that information from the front of our brain and the short term memory, to the long term memory. They will sort what is needed to be kept and where that information goes. After all we have pattern seeking minds, so logically we file everything with its pattern.  For everything we learn a little of our white matter turns to grey, and we get a wrinkle on the brain. That is because new information causes a link between neurons. That link is made by dendrites. They are like wiry cables stretching from one neuron to the next, and crossing over. We are in fact hard wired.

So this is what makes us, us. Each new memory is filed, and out of it we get a lesson, or pattern. We learn what feels good and what hurts. We learn how to achieve, and how to avoid. We learn all about our world and as we do, it makes the person that you are a series of patterns flowing from cells that keep track of the you it made. Anyone who has ever suffered amnesia can tell you, they may never be the same person, but then they don't know that. Sometimes a familiar memory will trigger a connection that was created in the past linking their old pattern with the new, but sometimes they are changed forever. Just like people who suffer from Alzheimer's. They often lose who they are. Because when there is damage to the brain tissue and the connections between axons are severed we change. We are not really some sentient being. We are a bundle of cells clustered in a way that makes sense to us. This is why most of the time we don't see eye to eye with each other. No two brains are wired the same, and the closest we can get is twins. Probably because they share so many experiences, or their brains have a cellular plan that makes them structured similar.

But all we know of each other and of our selves comes from the great machine our skull works so hard to protect. What we are now can be changed in a heartbeat. Or with just a bit of brain damage. What makes us us, is the fact of how we are wired and the things we did, and nothing else.