Running head: Brains…the structured but unstructured!
The photograph is a simple landscape of a small village in Northern part of Sweden. It was just clicked to capture a beautiful frame, a good moment and to offer a small piece of happiness to myself. Later on, this photo started explaining something different to me. Day by day, that understanding behaved like a guided imagery process. It started telling me what I could think beyond the mere appreciation of pictorial beauty. Slowly, the imagery got a better shape and now, I am going to share that very same with you all…
When we talk about ourselves we talk about our hobbies, disliking, choices. Often we try to characterise ourselves in certain specific constructs. Let’s say I describe myself as an interactive person, I can initiate conversation on my own, I always try to make other people comfortable to talk to me. So, in that way, I can be an extrovert personality with a very simple style of categorization.
Likewise, few people are introvert, few like to think much, few are emotional. Few are too anchored to the reality while others are dreamers. So we have different shades of similar things and the supra or infra normal shades are the ones that are coined as exceptions (illness/discomfort). Behind all kinds ofsuch expressions, there is a complex of synergy and antagonism, a serious biological perspective that is often neglected in general discussion. Behavioural expression is perhaps the most sophisticated interaction between environment and our biological footprint. In one sense, it’s so individualistic, that each person is unique, in the other sense, all individuals follow certain standards or norms. Yet, this uniqueness and the resemblance are so grey that an absolute black or white can hardly be pointed out! This is exactly what I can see through this image, trees are the same but its brunches are of individual identities!
Our behaviour is an outcome of what our brain does consciously and unconsciously. So, within brain, thousands of forward and backward processes are happening every moment. At microscopic level, it’s how the cells are, how they do their functions, if they produce the correct protein from the specific gene, if the protein is maintained at the threshold level, or if the protein is maintained for too long or too short.
These all lead to another set of checkpoints; i.e. if they can make synapse, if they can transmit information, if they can store important codes and very importantly if they can excise off unwanted information. In the next level, we can think brain as a network of different wires together, where recalling one event is related to another similar memory, often linked to certain emotion and also leads to a new memory of the reminiscence in the present context. The relevant networks act together to make this happen every moment. All such networks have nodal points, some of which have strong positive synapses with amplifying effects, some of which have inhibitory collateral effects. So an environmental push to the switch on the circuitry can light up the lamp, but not always in the same intensity for everyone. The profuse resisting network to titrate the final outcome is very individualistic. It is still not completely known what exactly triggers in each level of organisation to make a phenomenon happen. Most importantly, the reaction to environmental cue uses this same internal physiology and so every reaction to environment has a deep rooted biological signature.
Thus the biological footprint of brain is not only a dependent entity on environmental influence, but much elementary to genetic loading, familial trait, congenital complication, developmental perturbation, immunological reactions, stress response etc. All of them build together the mesh of our behavioural system, a signature of our own. Each mesh is different from the other and when they interact in combination, they express the difference even in bigger scales. This is exactly what I seep in through the photograph. The brunches of the trees are superficially similar, yet difference lies there.Each small extension of the brunch is unalike in shape, length and number. It looks different when I look at it, part by part, rather patch by patch. More interestingly, when one brunch from a tree interacts with its neighbouring one, it creates a new phase of spatial orientation which is otherwise missing. It’s all about difference in similar construct, just like our behaviour.Behaviour is thus so complicated and unique by its own!
Appreciate its biology, its originality and most importantly “accept the difference”!
