My Brain on my Mind / E

When you remember your grandfather's face, what are your neurons doing?

Priscilla Long, The American Scholar

What are your neurons doing? Other than making a million connections, sending signals along axons, shooting extraordinary starbursts? When I remember my grandfather's face I see inside my head his dented lines on his forehead, his dark skin, his still black hair. Does he have dimples? I cannot recall. And perhaps this is when my neurons are failing to make the marvelous zaps and fireworks. 

Dreaming

Can the blind still dream? I would like to know. For it must be the brain that dreams, not the eyes. And if the blind can dream, then perhaps it is less unfair. For seers may have insomnia or rarely dream. 

William Carlos Williams

"[Williams] was willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one,... learning from the first and then understanding through the second." 

Linda Wagner, Poetry Foundation

The doctor who wrote his poems on prescription blanks, who still found the time to write between patient visits. I want to be like him. I would like to become him. 

My Brain on My Mind / B

The Brain, wrote Emily Dickinson, is wider than the Sky, since it contains both Sky and You. ...

The geography of the brain ought to be taught in school, like the countries of the world. The deeply folded cortex forms the outer layer. There are the twin hemispheres, right brain and left brain. (We may be of two minds.) There are the four lobes: frontal in front, occipital (visual cortex) in back, parietal (motor cortex) on top, and temporal behind the ears. There's the limbic system (seat of emotion and memory) at the center. There's the brain stem, whose structures keep us awake (required for consciousness) or put us to sleep (required for regeneration of neurotransmitters.)

The brain also has glial cells, white matter. Glial cells surround and support neurons, carry nutrients to neurons, and eat dead neurons. Some glial cells regulate transmission and pulverize post-transmission neurotransmitters. Others produce myelin, which surrounds and protects axons. Glial cells are no longer thought to be mere glue. When stimulated , they make, not electricity as neurons do, but waves of calcium atoms. They also produce neurotransmitters--glutamate (excitatory) and adenosine (inhibitory).

So there you have the brain: a three-pound bagful of neurons, electrical pulses, chemical messengers, glial cells. There, too, you have the biological basis of the mind. "Anything can happen," says the poet C. D. Wright, "in the strange cities of the mind." And whatever does happen--any thought, mood, song, perception, delusion--is provided to us by this throbbing sack of cells and cerebral substances.

Priscilla Long, "My Brain on My Mind," The American Scholar

An abecedarium dedicated in memory of Long's grandfather. 

Last Saturday morning, I woke up and began reading this. I could not get out of bed until I finished the last alphabet of the abecedarium. This was just what I was looking for. A scholarly, artistic, literary, scientific piece of writing for someone like me, who has been searching for that middle ground, that intersection, that convergence.

"Medicine is an art." I believe some ancient Greek philosopher said this, and I very much agree. But it is literature that encompasses both medicine and its own art. I would like to write that. 

I would like to write from the beginning.