The human brain is marveled as something unparalleled in its construction, as having greater speed and capacity than any computer out there, and indeed any computer that will be built in the foreseeable future. It is this pinnacle of perfection in design that allows us to write our essays, remember definitions, differentiate equations, and even decide whether we will regret eating so much butter chicken rice with egg. In slightly over a week’s time, this is what we will be relying on to achieve glory, fame, and other perks of being selected to study at an overseas university.

The brain’s immense storage capacity is what allows humans to form and retain their memories, almost indefinitely. And so with the blessing of being able to remember all the facts we have learnt comes the curse of remembering other things, things that we’ve wanted to forget, or think we’ve forgotten, and one innocuous event can drag them up from the depths of memory. Truly it’s a double-edged sword, and this is where the technology metaphor ends, for there is no delete button for us to forget at will, no defrag to sort it out, no consistent index or folder system to arrange everything nicely. And thus they lay hidden in dark recesses until by chance they are called again, and when this happens there is no escape.

It’s really amazing how anything gets done when such an object controls our life.

Enthalpy of formation is the energy change associated with the formation of 1 mol of a compound from its elements at standard state under standard conditions of 298k and 1atm. Go brain.

~ by Amamiya Yuuko on October 25, 2009.