This post is not about bio science although you might have
such a feeling and that's a disclaimer.
The brain which is the command center for our nervous system
is the most complex object in the universe and the good news is that we all possess
one inside our skulls. 100 billion neurons link to one another in a complex but
a unique pattern within the lump of fats and proteins. The scientists and
neurologists are still at the beginning of unraveling the incredible power of
the human brain.
The brain has the power to learn new languages, perceive
beauty and remember tens of thousands of individual bits of information. Human
brains can also achieve amazing results by easily joining the dots even if
there are some dots missing. Our brains can make out the objects, a person’s
face or a sentence in a language of our average proficiency.
Let’s take the sentence above as an example. How many of us
would not be able to decipher it meaningfully! But this is just a simple one
sentence, whereas you have come across entire paragraph in the past with
misspelled words and still managed to read it on the fly...without pausing for
a moment.
This is because we have given total autonomy to the brain
and it determines the entire sentence based on the limited information based on
past experience. Habituation is what brain does when it sees the same old thing
day after day. In such situation the brain economizes on the attention and this
is the strength of humankind.
But the challenge is to make proper use of the power of the
brain as uncontrolled use could also turn out to be its greatest weakness.
We are usually prejudiced based on a few visible traits or characteristics.
He looks like this therefore he will behave like that or she is dressed that
way hence she is of that particular type. We ourselves have experienced similar situations in
the past or often heard our friends and colleagues making such comments.
This is where we need to be rational with our thoughts. Life
is full of wonders and wonderful things will happen whenever we keep our mind
open and pay attention to what happens around us. We will have
better understanding of our world, make new friends and probably develop new
lasting relationships.
We have to remember that there is nothing in a caterpillar
that tells us that it will become a butterfly. The sentence on the top could well be this without our prejudice.
