WHAT IS MY LIFE

jtotheizzoe:

neurosciencestuff:

No road, no trail can penetrate this forest. The long and delicate branches of its trees lie everywhere, choking space with their exuberant growth. No sunbeam can fly a path tortuous enough to navigate the narrow spaces between these entangled branches. All the trees of this dark forest grew from 100 billion seeds planted together. And, all in one day, every tree is destined to die.

This forest is majestic, but also comic and even tragic. It is all of these things. Indeed, sometimes I think it is everything. Every novel and every symphony, every cruel murder and every act of mercy, every love affair and every quarrel, every joke and every sorrow — all these things come from the forest.

How mapping neurons could reveal how experiences affect mental wiring by Sebastian Seung

The connectome, that ill-understood map of the brain’s interlocking fingers of communication … it has its critics. Millions of neurons, each linked to countless more, and such an incomplete understanding of that web’s significance or function.

But this passage … this is the stuff of true human poetry, this is the honest tinkering of our physical mind. These are questions that we strive to answer, equipped to do so only with the very mass of neurons that we seek to describe. And there, perhaps, at that boundary, we may remain for some time to come.