With the smell of rubbing alcohol in my left nostril and lab rat piss in my right, I sat in a windowless lab room staring down at a diagram of a neuron in awe.
The design responsible for everything — the feeling of a cheap keyboard under my fingers, the incessant buzzing of fluorescent lights in the room, and the lab coat sitting heavily over my body.
I’ll spare my 3(-ish) readers the poetic bullshit.
Neurons are fascinating.
As far as I know they are all that that we are/will ever be:
How does a collection of stupid looking hairy noodle thing make us experience everything?
Electricity and chemistry,
That long tube labeled “Axon” connecting the 2 parts of the neuron, is where electricity is created, bringing life to our neurons. This is what happens inside it:
This works the similar to the way that batteries do:
Ions “want” to move from high concentration to low concentration. If those ions are charged and they cross a membrane, that movement doesn’t just spread them out, it also separates positive and negative charge on either side of the membrane.
That charge separation is a voltage. And that voltage is the electrical signal neurons use to fire.
This is what our lived experience is made of, our brain is made of many of these electrical cells firing and releasing different chemicals/neurotransmitters causing the rest of our body and brain to react in different ways.
However, when these are arranged in a complex way, are necessary for us to experience literally everything.
And that’s pretty crazy.
