For the Sake of Your Infinite Abyss

Knitted Brain by Psychiatrist Karen Norberg of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts

When does knowing something with purely emotional conviction transcend the crazy that it is to become sheer brilliance?

When is stealing a brain on a hunch that it'll reveal neurological secrets worth losing your job, your credibility, in the very same field you're stealing it for? I guess that's a question for Thomas Harvey. This rogue pathologist high tailed it out of Princeton with Einstein's brain believing it to tell the fortunes of the brilliantly minded... perhaps he was mad with genius, or perhaps he just got lucky, but his partners in crime eventually found something.

They found something big, that made big waves in the neuroscience community, the very same I've managed to get myself tangled up in, and blissfully so I might add. But it is things like this, big discoveries like this that can happen in a moment's time that... just... change... everything.

In anatomy, the thing we know least about is our brain, our powerhouse, the home of our identity. It makes me wonder, how can we possibly know as much as we do about all the rest when the thing that controls all these other squishy, bloody parts is such a great mystery to us. Our brains are this infinite abyss of secrets and magic right now. There's so much there to learn and explore, leaving so much behind to be redefined, corrected, transformed.

I have this love hate relationship with this science. It's this immensely passionate and rewarding relationship but I can see it completely consuming me. But maybe that's ok. Actually, maybe that's the best part. It feeds my brain, it intrigues my soul, and it gives my life a purpose. It also teases me, it builds me up to break me down again. I trip over my eagerness, I wonder if my love is in vain, if it'll throw me a bone. It owes me nothing. There are plenty of scientists in the sea, but the chance of a breakthrough, of progress, of change, of something so much bigger and better than what it or myself has now keeps me going, keeps me chasing that impossible dream.

For me too, I suppose, some things are worth losing yourself over...