Brainbow

Hey brainiacs, try sorting this out, let alone creating it. For the uninitiated among you, Brainbow is the process by which individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from neighboring neurons using fluorescent proteins. By randomly expressing different ratios of red, green, and blue derivatives of green fluorescent protein in individual neurons, it is possible to flag each neuron with a distinctive color. This process has been a major contribution to the field of connectomics, or the study of neural connections in the brain.

Right, and if you think I came up with that spiel, your brain is tied in a bow. While trying to imagine the human brain’s staggering complexity is daunting, that apparently random mass of neurons, axons and dendrites is far from infinite. Imagine the feat of engineering required to design such an organic thinking machine, capable of drawing relational data from a lifetime of memories, visual and conceptual, nearly all of which only surfaces when needed for thought.

“But,” as the TV pitchman said, “that’s not all.” That same miraculous, thinking machine balances cognitive conclusions based on new, and remembered, perceptions, with emotional responses linked to said lifetime of memories, then intercepts those past emotional responses and moderates them for application to the new situation, and hopefully, if the brain is functioning as designed, takes all that into consideration and generates a neuromuscular order for arm to bring the finger to the edge of the nose to scratch that bothersome itch.

And the brain that produced that complex task came about through random mutation guided by the Law of the Jungle. Evolution? Yeah, right!