In Praise of the Human Brain

The human brain is an incredible piece of machinery. Not only does it keep your body functioning, but it provides a pretty credible GPS and it lets you store phone numbers. But even more interesting is its power to make sense of the things we see.

Consider the example of the noble stick figure. Five straight lines arranged at odd angles, with a circle placed near the top. Somehow, our mind is able to take this arrangement and determine that this represents a human being, even though it doesn't look like anyone you know. We can even distinguish its gender with as little as one more line added horizontally, near the bottom, to make a dress, or added vertically to. . . never mind.

We can do the same thing with dots. I can arrange a collection of dots in such a way that you will soon see what I’m making, even though the actual image is nothing more than a series of dots.

This is truly an incredible power if you think about it. Without this ability, we could not communicate by drawing, art would be meaningless, and even television would seem like nonsense to us. Music and speech too are nothing more than a collection of tones and notes, the audio version of our stick figure.

And the power of the brain doesn’t stop there. We have the power to rearrange objects in our minds to make sense of them. Consider for example this sentence: administration the disaster total Obama is. That last sentence would be meaningless if we didn’t have this power, but because your brain is a problem solver, it can reassemble that sentence. The same holds true with chronology. Indeed, it is our ability to reassemble stories that have been mixed around time-wise, that lets us understand so many interesting films and novels.

And here’s an example you probably did not know: a recnet sutdy fnuod taht haumns are able to mkae sesne of wdors so lnog as the fisrt and last leertts of the wrod are in palce. The order of the letters in between is entirely irrelevant to our ability to understand the meanings of the word. Cool huh?

So the next time you understand anything, thank your brain.


(And if you have nothing to thank your brain for, then just use this as an open thread.)