The Marvelous Mind

In preparation for my next adventure, work toward a degree in speech-language pathology, I've taken a couple of prerequisite courses in neuroanatomy and neuroscience. It's been fascinating. I've also been reading lots of books and articles about the brain. My husband teases that neurology is king, changing everything. It is an area of understanding that makes psychology and religion seem outdated and naive. Isn't science wonderful?

I just finished An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman. Beautifully written with abundant metaphors that don't mess with the facts, it satisfies the writer and art historian and realist and budding SLP in me. Here's a passage just for fun:

"The brain's dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is like looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears . . .  I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don't attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know."

And another:

"Neurons grow like quaking aspens in the forests of the mind . . . they have two kinds of limbs, dendrites and axons; the former to listen, the latter to speak . . . dendrites hear what neighboring neurons signal through their axons. Like elegant ladies air-kissing so as not to muss their makeup, dendrites and axons don't quite touch . . . At land's end there's a terminal, where a neuron talks to its neighbor by releasing special molecules, more than a hundred different neurotransmitters, that can drift across the tiny gap and bind to receptors on the other side . . . Neurons speak an elite pidgin neither chemical not electrical but a lively buzz that blends the two, an electrochemical lingo all their own. To speak, a neuron wends an electrical shudder down the length of its axon in a wave created from the ebb and flow of alternating sodium and potassium ions . . . When the door opens, potassium ions rush out and sodium ions rush in, again creating an electrical charge . . . until the message zooms among whole environs of neurons. This one process (synaptic transmission) underlies everything the brain does, all of our knowledge, motives, whims, and desires . . . 'Ultimately all that we are -- all our memories, hopes, and feelings -- can be boiled down to the banal transfer of a few ions across the membrane wall of brain cells.'"