THE BRAIN

The Most Mysterious Part of the Human Body

By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC

In honor of stroke awareness month, The ACADEMi of Life presents an Evening in Conversation with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor a Harvard trained brain scientist who studied her own stroke as it happened and lived to tell this astonishing story. Details of the event on 5/11/11 in NYC at http://bit.ly/dF3CoQ

Take a look at this amazing musical video: An ODE to the BRAIN featuring Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor by The Symphony of Science, which is a musical project designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form http://bit.ly/euurgM. The words to the song in the video are below.

It's amazing to consider that I'm holding in my hands
The place where someone once felt, thought, and loved
For centuries, scientists have been battling to understand
What this unappealing object is all about

Here is this mass of jelly
You can hold in the palm of your hands
And it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space

The brain has evolved from the inside out
It's structure reflects all the stages through which it has passed

Information in the form of energy
Streams in simultaneously
Through all of our sensory systems

And then it explodes into this enormous collage
Of what this present moment looks like
What it feels like
And what it sounds like

And then it explodes into this enormous collage
And in this moment we are perfect
We are whole and we are beautiful

It appears rather gruesome
Wrinkled like a walnut, and with the consistency of mushroom
What we know is encoded in cells called neurons
And there are something like a hundred trillion neural connections
This intricate and marvelous network of neurons has been called
An enchanted loom

The neurons store sounds too, and snatches of music
Whole orchestras play inside our heads

20 million volumes worth of information
Is inside the heads of every one of us
The brain is a very big place
In a very small space

No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain
We can change ourselves
Think of the possibilities

Think of your brain as a newspaper
Think of all the information it can store
But it doesn't take up too much room
Because it's folded

We see with the eyes
But we see with the brain as well
And seeing with the brain
Is often called imagination

It is the most mysterious part of the human body
And yet it dominates the way we live our adult lives
It is the brain!