Tales from a Bruised Mind

This is my actual brain. How colourful!

How do I have these images, and why is it important?

Well, flashback to 2019, I was selected to be part of a study for those who had experienced an episode of early psychosis. From my understanding, a group of doctors wanted to find out whether an episode could affect cognitive abilities for these people.

I was super excited but nervous to be part of such a study. I remember that it took all day, and included a 90 minute MRI scan where I had to do some simple tests and challenges. It felt a lot like Total Recall to be honest!

By the end of the day, I was understandably very mentally exhausted. I went straight home and passed out. It was a huge day for my brain.

So what do all the colours mean?

Almost two years later, I got in contact with the lovely doctors again. I hadn’t heard anything about the research.

He sent me a kind message, explaining to me more about the colourful brain image from above:

“The colours indicate direction of the neuronal connection.  Red is horizontal axis, blue is vertical axis and green is an oblique axis. There’s 1 million fibres in there (downsampled – from the hundreds of millions that we actually render in the image)”.

Wow.

I was blown away just by the sheer complexities of our brain. There really is so much going on in there. And boy, do I know it!

But then I went and found out some other crazy brain facts:

• your brain is 60 percent fat
• the storage capacity of your brain (or as I like to call the HDD in lame computer speak) is apparently unlimited
• information in the brain can travel at speeds up to 430 km/h
• Your brain is always active
• The human brain can generate up to 23 watts of power, or enough to power a lightbulb

Those facts just blow me away.

There is so much to the brain, and we as humans are still working out how it all works.

The fact that human beings have been around for roughly 2.8 million years and yet are still working on it, also blows my mind. Literally speaking.

Love,

Zak