A case study of one brain...
Mine!
Brains are very odd organs, in my humble opinion. They are tasked with receiving a ton of information from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and I don't even know how many different nerve cells from our fingertips to our toes to all those places inside us like our stomachs and lungs and hearts and kidneys and... After they receive all that information, they are required to prioritize that information and then make decisions about what to do with that information, and then control the immensely complex beings that we are.
Take for example, a brain faced with this information: your bladder is informing your brain that it's about 90% full, your eyes are informing it that there's a large rock on the trail that you need to navigate over effectively, a friend is requiring you to carry on a conversation about her troubles with her boy-almost-friend, your stomach is reminding your brain that it hasn't been filled with anything more than a banana in an hour and a half, your left big toe is informing it that it is developing quite a large blister now, thank you very much, your skin is reminding it of the benefits of sunscreen, your legs are reminding your brain (and your lungs) that this would be a lot easier if you could get off the couch for a longer sprint than to the refrigerator during a commercial break more often, and your ears tell it that something rustled in the brush off to the left, maybe 3 feet ahead of where you are now.
SOMEHOW, your brain ignores all the other information for a couple of milliseconds and focuses on the rustling, just to make sure that the thing that rustled was something small and potentially edible and not something small and venomous or something large with quite large teeth, but SOMEHOW it still picks up enough of the other information to keep you from falling over the rock, emptying your bladder, or even missing a beat of your oblivious friend's boy-almost-friend's issues.
During this incident, you were probably also parallel processing what's for dinner tonight and that you should brine that chicken when you get home so it builds some flavor and doesn't completely dry out in the oven, probably at your mouth's and stomach's suggestions.
Brains are weird, man.
Brains are SO GOOD at not only processing information as it comes in real time, but at the same time storing, recalling, and processing information that came in earlier. It's hard to believe that we humans have such a complex information processing, storage, and control organ that we could ever get bored. I mean, seriously. You're doing some mundane task like dishes by hand. All the real-time information hitting your senses and leaving your brain as controls just to carry out that simplistic task would overrun the processing power of a really good computer. Throw in Taylor Swift's latest album blasting on an iPad nearby, recalling the to-do-list for tomorrow, carrying on a conversation with a significant other doing dishes with you, and you'd easily over-run the processing power of many of the best super-computers.
Brains are really weird, man.
And yet, quite often, we still perceive our miraculous organic super computing brains as being somehow deficient. I started off this post intending to tell you all about how my brain has failed me over the years, and somehow wound up marveling at all the ways it hasn't failed me. That's a brain for you. You can't always tell where it's going to take you....
But seriously. I once lost my keys in the fridge, because I had hooked them onto my finger while carrying groceries and when I dropped the bags of refrigerated goods in the fridge, the keys came off with them, to be forgotten until they were next needed. It took forever to find the car keys, and now my darling husband always asks me if I've checked the fridge anytime I lose anything.
I learned right from left really early on. My mother tells me that I had it down by the time I was two years old. At some later point, however, I either got it wrong or someone gave me false information, so I got confused, and I've second and third and fourth guessed right and left directions ever since. It's one of those things where I know I got it wrong once, so I have to double and triple and quadruple check every time I try to orient things as right or left. That act of multiple checks and second-guessing means I actually get it wrong about 30% of the time, and only get it right with only a few second's notice maybe 10% of the time. I learned R and S stereochemistry notation for complex organic molecules much later in life, and I've never had an experience of being wrong with that notation, so my darling husband, who makes fun of me for losing things like keys in the fridge, now gives me driving directions in R and S language rather and right and left.
Another thing my brain does poorly is tell time on an analog clock without the numbers. I can never remember which way is clockwise unless the numbers are there. I have trouble telling time on an analog clock even when the numbers are there, in the sense that it takes me a good 5-10 seconds of true attention time to figure it out. I attribute this to a "goofy" wristwatch I wore for many years early on that ran backwards. I learned to tell time from an analog device that runs opposite to convention, and now when I look at a "normal" timepiece, I psych myself out as to whether I'm reading it correctly or in reverse, and I cannot for the life of me figure out which direction is correct without the numbers there to help me along. We have a large clock in the living room that has Roman numerals at the 3, 6, 9, and 12 positions. This is the worst clock ever for me, because it combines my second-guessing at which direction the clock is supposed to run with my second-guessing at my ability to interpret Roman numerals correctly. Honestly, I'd do better if it were inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs. That clock is pure decoration, in my opinion, and I tell time from the digital cable box display.
You know when you're learning vectors and you must use the right hand rule? It turns out that using the wrong hand and not being able to easily tell clockwise from counterclockwise is not a good thing.
However, my brain is weird in other completely useless ways. I can remember a phone number I had when I was 6 years old, but I can't remember correctly what I did the night before my flight home for Thanksgiving in 2000. The flight left at 6AM, so I would need to be up and ready to leave the dorm at 3AM, which means in undergrad time that you just stay up all night. I have detailed and vivid memories of watching Trainspotting (a horrible, graphic, and quite memorable film, mind you) with my roommate Heather. We ate Ben and Jerry's ice cream that we got from the student center just before they closed at midnight, then at around 1AM went up a floor to steal Jimmie's guitar and hide it in Heather's bed.
The only problem with that memory is that it is wrong on all counts. The flight home details were correct, but I watched "10 Things I Hate About You" with a guy who was not my roommate, Ben and Jerry were not involved, and Jimmie's guitar was safe that night. I have this information corroborated by Heather, the guy, and Jimmie. Ben and Jerry were not harmed in the making of this incident.
Why on Earth would my brain fabricate a completely fictional account of an innocuous evening, complete with vivid memories of ice cream and a disturbing movie? This isn't something I remembered decades later, either, I was informed of the falsification of my memory of this event within a year.
I've also had encounters recently with really well-trained chemists (like CalTech PhD scientists) where they've forgotten not only basic chemistry but really basic chemical principles that should've been learned in high school. I have it on record that these people have never made less than a B in a course. How does this happen? Why do brains fail us? But even more relevant, "Why do brains succeed so well for us?"
Brains are really weird, man.
Really, that's all I can say. My brain does so much for me, stores so much information, and controls my extremities so well that I can actually type this faster than I could speak it. I challenge you to spend 10 minutes to really think about how your brain works today. I further challenge you to post what you find as a comment. After all the really embarrassing things I've posted about my own brain, there's absolutely no reason to feel any shame about yours.
Stay hungry, my friends!
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