one-not-seven

Names and faces Things and places All these events And my moments All my thinking All my inkling All my feelings Are not my things My bodily form My emotional storm I only watch But I don't catch I see  But they are not me I am afar I am ajar I am away And I want a say I am just on the verge But I will not merge I am at the gate But I am separate I don't wish I am a free floating fish I dream neither I am a free falling feather Nor I will Because I am nil I don't intend I am independent  I am not me I am free

  Plastic Brain Cameron Mott used to have seizures, a condition called Rasmussen’s Encephalitis. Suddenly, she would drop to the floor. To be prepared for this uncertain eventuality she had to wear a helmet all the time. And one day she would be paralysed and be dead.  Therefore, she was operated on and one half of her brain was removed. Her post operative brain scan, with a blank hemisphere, looked scary. But she survived. Not only that, she lived normally too. She understood language, did maths, participated in sports and enjoyed music. The remaining half of her brain re-wired to take over the functions of the missing part. Literally, all neural functions had been crammed into one half of her brain. Michael Chorost is a cochlear implant recipient. The implant receives sound waves and converts them into electrical impulses with the help of 16 tiny electrodes, feeding them to undamaged auditory nerves. The latter then transmits the signals to the auditory cortex which decodes ...

  The Idea of Intent In an experiment there was a group of participants and a group of observers. The participants were to harbour harsh emotions but were also to suppress them. That is, they were not to express them via face or body gestures. During this emotional suppression by the participants, physiological parameters of the observers were recorded. Interestingly, the blood pressure of the observers shot up.  This experiment demonstrates that there is no point in camouflaging emotions with socially appropriate decorum. Despite our social appropriateness, body and the brain of the person in sight will receive our negative vibes. Consciously they may not register the transaction but the exchange will happen. Consciously, we can sense 28 types of signals. However there are around 40000 cues that the brain is picking up incessantly, processing them into either ‘reward’ or ‘threat’ states. The brain is such a diligent and detailed signal processing unit! In another experiment, ...

Why are human babies so helpless for so long? Babies of all other animals, birds and insects get on with their lives quite quickly. It will not be an exaggeration to say that dolphins are born to swim, giraffes are born to walk and zebras are born to run. But we take a year to walk, two years to speak and many more years to fend for ourselves.  It is because we have a different biology. That is, we have a ‘ live-wired ’ brain against a ‘hard-wired’ pre-programmed brain of non-humans. According to David Eagleman , author of the fascinating book ‘The Brain’, we are ‘born unfinished’. This is the trade-off between preparedness and flexibility. In a newborn human baby’s brain, neurons are sparse and disparate. After birth, connections, called synapses, are formed between these neurons. At the rate of two million synapses per second, about one hundred trillion synapses are made by the age of two. It will be worthwhile to know here that an adult brain has half as many synapses. So betwee...