Kicking things off with a very human question…
Have you ever wondered what life as a sea sponge is like?
But before battling instinctual anthropomorphist tendencies as we seek to bask in the completely unrelatable void-loofah experience, let’s quickly review the foundation of our human experience as it starts in the brain.
Neuron to Neuron
The human brain… the command center of our existence. If you care to, you could spend your natural life exploring the full scope of some 86 billion neurons[1] intercommunicating across hundreds of trillions of synapses. The complexity of this electrochemical game of telephone underlies our entire conscious experience.
When we start removing parts of this system, strange things can happen…
Take Henry Gustav Molaison, H.M., for instance. In 1953, surgeons removed various parts of his brain in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. Though it was a partial success and he lived until the age of 82, there was an unfortunate side effect. H.M. lost the ability to form new long-term memories[2]. Much of his pre-surgery memory, along with about 30 seconds of short-term working memory, were ‘intact’, which allowed him to function well enough on the day-to-day… so it is not quite as if he had become a sponge.
How to BE the Sponge
Strip away your nerve cells, the sponge doesn’t have them. In fact, it is one of only two animals that lacks them. While you are at it, realize you are now bereft of any complex respiratory, digestive, and circulatory systems[3]. How is this going for you? It’s okay, just breathe… oh wait.
Aside from all the cricket chirps, what is left?
Is there anything at all? Is there cognition without nerve cells? Intelligence?
As it happens, it appears so.
You, the sponge, are anchored to the sea floor, and you are moving. But in order to move, you sacrifice pieces of your body where you contact the surface. You are not moving with current, nor gravity[4]. Further, as you are casually creeping along, you even SNEEZE a few times…
Explain yourself, oh creature without a nervous system!
You clearly show signs of responding and even adapting to your environment. Your movement, perhaps an effort to seek out a more secure microsurface footing, or possibly a search for food, appears adaptive[4]. The sneeze, triggered by mechanical stimuli to your cilia (little hairlike structures lining your osculum💩💦) shows a wave of cellular communication throughout your form[5].
Where are you heading? Do you remember where you were? Do you experience some version of discomfort associated with your sneeze? Or are these purely driven by the most basic of sensory causes and effects?
Mayhaps you are able to glean additional details of life as a sponge, but on your own time.
Return from your spongy form!
Welcome Back Human
Revel in the lightning storm of activity rippling through your brain. Sense the world around you, but now perceive your place in all of it. What are you to do with all of this magical presence?
Honestly, the most challenging task in writing this post is deciding what to even include, the direction to take, the point to establish.
And with a little flicker of neurological electricity, it comes to me.
Within my brain is an experience-driven interconnected evolution of neuron-to-neuron activity generating my emotions, memories, and ultimately my human thoughts. In exploring this sense of self, what is more appropriate a point to make for the first post of this blog than to highlight the significance of its very name.
As neurons are the building blocks of our consciousness, none of this exists without them. No invigorating pursuit of understanding or enlightenment… No exploration in the name of curiosity… No finding beauty in science… Just the push and pull of currents and the periodic collision of particles.
Thus, from neuron to neuron, we arrive at the point of all this, exploring what we are with what we have.
be curious. explore.
❤️LoLo
P.S. I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this post in the comments! =)
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