My adventures of understanding the human brain

This post is inspired by: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-empty-brain

Our human brain is the best reflection of the ourselves. How we see it reflects our attitude towards life.

There was once upon a time when human brains were thought of as machines, where there were cogs running, the machinery humming and even mechanical minions working inside the brain. It has been portrayed as a work of art, an industrial wonder authored by Nature.

If you have seen the movie "Inside Out", you can understand what I feel about how people see the brain, where there are inner voices that can get into conflicts at the worst of times and work together to achieve something inconceivable at the best of times. Otherwise, do not fret, here is a video that illustrates my point here.



Our brains are wondrous wonder. No being really understands how it works. According to the article this post has been inspired from, there are people trying to create SIMULATIONS of an entire human brain (while some people have questioned whether our existence is a simulation). Honestly, I am quite doubtful because we already have problems trying to understand a complex system like weather and climate and have difficulties predicting it accurately. With regards to the human brain, we have a long way to go.

But research in the human brain is no less fascinating. When I was in Secondary School, I once did a project in collaboration with Science Centre Singapore to bring our own content and speak to the public about the wonders of the human brain. How a brain works is really mind-blowing, and whatever we know of it today is the product of many years of tireless research and many eye-opening events leading us to a greater insight into the human brain.

The Aeon article which link I put right at the start got me thinking: what will our understanding of our human brain be like within a decade? Or even a century later, what will we think of it? No doubt, increasingly advanced technology will be able to study it with far greater depth and breath than there ever is today.

I find it interesting that this article proposes that our brain is empty, with no evidence of information getting codified inside. The processes look more abstruse and random than we have ever imagined. Nothing is physically stored, only bound together by ephemeral electrical signals that our brain is wired to produce. These signals are highly flexible and can change quickly. They are not bound by boundaries. Recent findings really challenged all our assumptions we have about the mind. It may even have a universe itself! It's own systems, laws, eccentricities... A mind of its own.

All of these is so mind-bending. The only thing that we all can be sure about the brain? The brain is not a computer.