The Brain Challenge

Deepak Chopra has a very interesting post on the Intent blog called “WHO IS USING THE BRAIN”. It’s a very interesting analysis of the fact that human mind can be compared to software and hardware and the analogy between both ends leads to some interesting reading.

Experience changes the brain. The notion that we all share the same hardware is simply inadequate, for one sees extremely altered brain activity after emotional traumas; different activity between criminals and ordinary people; between people who are more emotional than rational and vice versa.

In addition, the billions of dendrites, or nerve branches, connecting each brain cell are totally unique from one person to the next. What makes them take on their unique pattern is experience (and probably genes, also).So we cannot separate a conscious mind from an unconscious brain. And we cannot give primacy to the physical brain over the non-physical mind. Just as the observer and the observed are intimately related in quantum physics, using your brain makes you both its observer and the thing observed, your mind uses the brain to know itself.

A moment of insight, for example, requires the brain to function properly, since insights consist of thoughts, but left to itself, no brain would have any insight--it would just do what it does, and which is electro-chemical processing.

Finally he ends the by saying that “no one is using the brain. The self is interacting with itself, creating experience and then entering into experience to see what it feels like.”

After reading this post it made me wonder how intriguing is the evolution of mankind, on one hand we have made giant strides in all sphere of our lives, be it technology ,medicine, biology but alas we fail to understand our own mind. I guess it amply demonstrate how difficult it is to understand one own’s self and how challenging is the task of managing human mind’s.