Sunday 11 September 2016

Human brain

This thing keeps me intrigued. Like really.

I come from a time when even owning a computer at home was termed a luxury. And soon after a considerable folk started to, the middle aged men who would meet up at social gatherings would keep repeating (like most always do) about their brain being a hard disk that stores a lot of information and it never gets erased. It was some reference that the person who made the joke would laugh louder than the ones who heard it.

Well, humans. We all age, we all wear out, we all rot. If that joke didn't catch up on people, it was probably because of this.

But technically, I sometimes feel if its a hard drive or a RAM. I honestly am in no capacity to discuss in these technical terms, so I'll get rid of the jargon before I say something stupid.

The point I'm trying to make is, we all absorb a lot of information. Some extremely essential, some luxurious and mostly unwanted - the stuff we could do without. And then, who keeps recalling this information time and again thereby making the present situation a pain to live in? The brain. Some information that would have been essential at a point of time would somehow wear out in importance. 13 years down the line, when such an incident is called upon, the brain pulls out the information in exactly the way that it requires. A sad thing, it never happens for most of us when we write exams of any kind, at any level of maturity. I know the technical stuff - things that we want to remember, things that are dear to us, we make sure we remember that. Does that mean you erase off the rest? You don't! At that point, that information is probably useless and its stored in some deep storage. When the situation comes back, if at all it does, the brain pulls it out and presents it to you. How many times would each of us have experienced this! Just imagine, information of this degree, of this size - even if its stored in a computer, we would lose track of what to pull out when and from where. Despite its size, the brain simply sits and works, organising stuff in the head and neatly stacking them up. To a degree where I wonder if we control the brain or the brain controls us.

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