Carter’s blog: Svenska dagen 2011-03-11

Blog 14

Hello again dear reader, I am under strict orders not to talk about the Swedish weather this Blog so I will refrain. I promised to deliver my Blog about cognitive neuroscience last time but will actually only give you a teaser. I started writing the Blog and got a bad case of scribal diarrhoea and couldn’t stop. As the thoughts and concepts flowed through my mind and fingers I struggled to write in a coherent cogent fashion. While trying to discuss lots of connected ideas I was simultaneously struggling to knit them all together in one bite-sized Blog. So in the true spirit of erudition I stopped writing and sat back and ruminated for a while. Anyway after several days of contemplation (cf. procrastination) I came to a decision.

It’s at this point I’ll stop talking bollocks and tell you what my decision was. I decided to split my Blog into a series of smaller snippets. Hopefully these will be short enough to stimulate your mind but not too long to bore you into submission. I am fairly confident that if you are of a cerebral persuasion you will enjoy reading these Blogs. What’s more is that if you are one step beyond cerebral and you like thinking about thinking you should really enjoy them.

So why don’t you just give us the first one now I hear you yelp? Well they’re not finished yet for a start and in explaining what I’m going to do I have managed to almost fill one blog already; clever aren’t I? There is another reason too which is that yesterday (10th March 2011) marked my first full year in Sweden. To celebrate this anniversary I am going to dedicate my next two Blogs to a review of my time in Stockholm so far. Each separate blog will cover some central themes; such as Swedish people, the place and my experience interacting with both etc. The neuroscience Blogs will then follow my one year review.

To whet your appetite for the future I will continue my Blog statistic and web-link feature which are cognitive neuroscience related. In the meantime I would like to ask you to think about ‘you’; really deeply think about the concept of ‘you’ as thinking about ‘you’ will be a theme that runs through the neuroscience Blogs.

Statistic: Your brain is made up of 86-100x10⁹(billion) neurons which is about the same as the number of stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. However there are even more synaptic connections between these neurons in the order of 1x10¹⁵ (quadrillion). It is these connections that essentially make your brain work and allow concious and sub-concious thought to take place.

Web-link: This Blog's link is to a website (brainline.org) that has got a nice and glossy interactive image of the brain. It tells you the major sub-division's of the brain; what each sub-division's typical function is and what problems can occur when they get damaged or injured.

In between now and the next Blog I have a trip back home to old Blighty. In the intervening time I’ll try to tone down my pomposity and surgically extract my head from my own arse, wish me luck on that task dear reader. If the procedure is successful you'll be reading all about my time in Sweden so far in Blog 15. Until then I bid ‘you’ a good day/night/morning (delete as appropriate).