Personally, I have never seen an actual human brain, only pictures, or drawings. I trust, more or less, what the “experts” have to say — the “brain scientists” — that alliance of many scientific disciplines, such as neurobiology, microbiology, cognitive science, and others. I defer, like many of us, to that grand edifice of scientific knowledge, insofar as their major accomplishments drift into the popular culture, manifesting in forms of “user friendly” new technology, or new medicines, or the almost daily pronouncements of novel “breakthroughs” at the expanding edge of research.
Thus I believe it when an acclaimed scientist, for example, Edward O. Wilson, writes, in “Consilience,” that the human brain is about the size of a grapefruit, weighing, on the average about three pounds. If you glimpse it with the naked eye, you will see a “blob” of gray and white tissue, soft in texture, like custard, “soft enough,” says Wilson, “to be scoped out with a spoon.”
Yet there’s more to that coconut custard than meets the naked eye. With the aid of very complicated instruments, made by the very “blobs” we are investigating, we (that is, the scientists) are able to probe into the micro-levels, even the nano-dimensions of the brain’s structures. There, it is revealed what constitutes the brain: about a hundred billion nerve cells (called “neurons”), each connected to others by thousands of connectors (called, I believe, “dendrites” and “synapse”). So this three pound “blob” is a machine of trillions of parts, all working together, and producing, somehow what we call our subjective experience: consciousness, perception, feeling, emotion, behavior. This infinitesimal part of universe, this “grapefruit,” on one remote, ridiculous planet, is more complex than the universe itself! As Woody Allen once said, “the brain is my second favorite organ.”
Many of us, or, I venture to surmise, most of us, are not specialists in a scientific discipline. This makes it difficult to assimilate the unfolding picture provided by the natural sciences. The time and space framework of this picture approach the infinitely small in one direction (quantum physics) and the infinitely large in another direction (astrophysics), disclosing a reality of fact that is often stranger than any fiction. At the same time, our everyday lives are lived on a human scale. The objects we encounter are macroscopic, medium sized. We may understand time in seconds, minutes, hours, or the span of a human lifetime, but processes that take billions of years or billionths of a second stagger the imagination. We are a practical species; we need not know the intricacies of the brain in order to use our mind, or the details of the visual system in order to see. I want to know if the plane will fly and if it’s safe, not the principles of its design or how it was constructed.
Yet this situation may be problematic, for it separates the reality of what is from the reality we live. This is a problem faced by all scientific cultures and those who live in them. Many take on the challenge, attempting to make the sciences more humane, and the humanities more scientific. But we have a long way to go, for the gap is very wide.
On the other hand, the incoherence of our fragmented belief systems does not seem to bother us. We blithely bounce between the sacred and the secular, between the Middle Ages and the 21st century without a moment’s thought. Contradictions become commonplace, and each day is different than the one before. Our species is programmed to survive and have reproductive success, not to be “logical” or “rational.” Or so it seems.
The hope is that there will come a time when we may bridge the divide between biological and cultural evolution, and so finally, with our amazing brains, create ourselves and survive.
Puzzle
1. There is a circular pond with a water lily growing in the center. The water lily doubles in size every day. If, in 20 days, it covers the entire pond, in how many days will it cover half the pond?
Answer to last week’s puzzle
1. 24 = 6/ (1 – +)
