Three Thousand Years

By Aobh Quinn

It would take approximately three thousand years to count the number of neurons and nerve cells in the human brain. That’s one hundred generations of people required to count just one hub of thought. How many years would it take then to decipher the rest? Add in all the emotions and ideas and I imagine it could take thousands more.  

It’s a tricky thing, trying to understand the complexities behind the decisions of others. Often, we take the stance that we ourselves would never make certain choices, that our brain would know without doubt what to do if we were placed in such situations. But how can we ever be certain of this? How can we ever be sure that we know someone, that we know our own brain if we can’t be given three thousand years to figure it out? 

For some people decision making comes easily, the thirty-five thousand choices we make every day are considered fleetingly by them. For others, even the thought of picking between two breakfast foods can be stifling. The act of making more permanent decisions can then become a tangled web of mistrust of one's own brain. How can you make up your mind if you can't commit to one of two simple options? How can you make a decision if you can't trust your own intuition? 

The idea of having a quiet mind is often a desirable one; peace can be hard to come by if the perpetrator of noise and chaos lives inside your own head. The scourge on my mind is often hindsight and its ability to wheedle its way into every aspect of life. “I should have said this”, “should have done that” and so on. Which neuron I wonder is responsible for those reoccurring thoughts? How many years of the count would it take to get to that one?  

The human brain is about two percent of our body weight. And yet the concept of a heavy mind is a common one. How did the synapses and hippocampus manage to become leaden? Memory is one thing that is assured in its weight and importance. It’s carried by everyone, regardless of our awareness of it or not. Sometimes the lack of memory can be more hefty than the presence of it. A forgotten piece of information that was once important to you or someone you loved can leave craters of mammoth sizes if dropped.  

Memories, like the tangle of neurons and nerve cells, can be maze-like in their ability to tie themselves into knots. It is just as easy to lose oneself in a memory as it is to mistakenly reach a dead-end in a maze. Without signs or maps however, this escape is a more difficult one to come across.  

Continuous contentment in one's mind is a privilege afforded to very few of our contemporaries. For some, the chemicals required for certain emotions get mixed up. Too much of one thing and not enough of another change the trajectory of a person's life; leaving them to the mercy of their mind.   

The billions upon billions of cells required to make up one brain may only be made from tissue but the mind has to be made from more. Three thousand years seems a miniscule amount of time when faced with the idea of deciphering the rest.