Why do I love Neuroscience?

You might have heard that when falling in love for the first time, the brain lights up like a 1000 watt bulb. Sure, it does have some electrical tendencies but your 3 kilos of fat and water are much more than a simpleton light bulb. If your body were a firework, it would represent the dribble to the top, and the brain would be the explosion. If you were a town of royal subjects, your brain is the Queen. From a body of water, your brain is the flow.

You get the idea right? Dr Michio Kaku said it best – “The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” What makes it more so complicated, is the reality that we haven’t quite understood it yet. With so much still to learn, it’s one of the biggest growth areas for medical research and the tireless efforts of researchers around the world is just now starting to put a dent in our understanding.

Why does it matter so much? Well, seeing as the world revolves around human behaviours and decisions, we have an opportunity to understand why we make those small (or big) choices everyday and how we can go about changing the way we think if we wanted to. There are also reported increases of depression, suicide in younger people, Alzheimers in older people, and these issues impact not just the ones suffering but the friends and families of them too. I set out to learn more about why this is happening and what we can do about it, only to find that there are some well-established theories about the brain that would be able to answer these questions. With a bit of digging about, and a few fun facts in between, I’d like to present those tried and tested theories and help you also understand how your own operating system works.

In the future, I’d love to do my own research, and pop my name on a major research piece that changes my little corner of the Neuroscience world – but until then, I’m just fulfilling my other dream; sharing knowledge and trying to help others.