upset. Can become so upset that they fall into a deep depression and, even worse, bring themselves to the point of wanting or trying to take their own life.
Thanks to imagination, a person can experience emotions and thoughts not only from events that have already happened to them but also from those that have not yet occurred.
A person can feel guilty both for the past and for the future. Guilty of anything, and that makes his condition unbearable. Experience something that does not exist or has not happened, and feel guilty about something that has not happened yet. This ability of consciousness comes bundled with imagination and the ability to visualise.
Nature is not at all interested in the question of who is to blame. Nature does not have the concepts of 'guilt’, 'judgement’, 'moral responsibility’ and similar terms invented by people. Nature has one purpose and meaning, which it puts into the appearance of any living thing on the planet. This is the continuation of life. Suicidal behaviour and depression of a person, according to nature, do not contribute in any way to their reproduction and the fulfilment of this single and most important goal.
Hence, another important function of consciousness is the ability to find excuses and explanations for yourself in any situation. Even after confessing to the most serious crime, a person always finds indirect culprits for his or her terrible action. It can be a dysfunctional family, bad company, government policies, weather, circumstances, and so on and so forth. The unique ability to explain and justify oneself surpasses all other human abilities. A person does not even notice how this happens because it works as perfectly and reliably as it does independently.
A simple question: 'Will you help a stranger who has felt ill in the street?' will be answered in the affirmative by the overwhelming majority of people. But if the respondents are walking down a street and see a passer-by who has become ill, then before realising the necessity to help, they will ask themselves a lot of different questions. All of them will be about one thing: how to find excuses for why this time they are not going to help.
For example, they may assume that this person is a tramp or a drug addict. This will immediately reduce the degree of their responsibility for the fate of the sufferer. Or they will start looking around and, seeing other eyewitnesses, will say to themselves that surely someone has already called the ambulance. And even if they are doctors themselves, they will think about criminal liability for malpractice. And only after all this, the sufferer has a chance to get help.
Despite the fact that a lot of things happen quickly and imperceptibly in us, it is directly dependent on the questions that we ask ourselves at these moments.
For example, very often motivational messages and publications use the expression 'If not you, then who?' But in the human brain, this question, based on the specifics of its work, actually sounds very different: 'If not me, then who?' That is, we need to find that someone else.
People try to explain everything to themselves. Explanations are a certain component of the system of the world around them. This sense of consistency gives them a greater sense of certainty about the present and future. This gives people confidence and, consequently, they are less stressed and less prone to depression. Surveys have shown that during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was uncertainty that most people were concerned about.
To sum up, the cerebral cortex, where our consciousness is for all practical purposes located, has many abilities and two main functions – to purposefully adapt to changes in the environment and justify the decisions and actions chosen for this adaptation.
Energy Strategies of the Brain
'Economic or economical?' – a question that has never lost its relevance.
What really matters is what happens in us, not with us.
An average person’s primitive reaction – the time it takes from seeing the light in front of their eyes to pressing a button in response – is 250 milliseconds. An average computer responds 750,000,000 times faster. But this indicator does not mean anything if you think about the overall capabilities of our brain and what a talented economist and an unsurpassed designer nature is.
Imagine a piece of thin fabric 2—3 millimetres thick with sides slightly longer than 40 cm. And in this piece of conditional matter, there are about 18 billion nerve cells. This is the cerebral cortex. Is it too many or too few? For comparison, the brain itself contains about 90 billion cells. At first glance, the figure of 18 billion looks solid. But if we take into account that there are almost 4 times more cells in the cerebellum, we can conclude that it is more important for a person to walk smoothly and not to fall than to write poems or compose formulas.
But not everything is perfect in the work of these 18 billion cells. Mental activity, too, has certain limitations – a person can simultaneously focus on only one problem and operate with three aspects of this problem. But this is not the most important thing. What matters, as always, is the energy involved. In the living world, to solve the problem of energy replenishment, its own 'food chains’ are built. People have optimised this process and began to literally grow energy in the fields and breed it on farms.
To meet their other 'requirements’ and 'concepts’, people needed different forms of energy, which they began to extract from the bowels of the Earth, generate at power stations, using the force of moving water or split atoms, and build new 'food chains’ now at the level of interests of entire states and consortia.
The average brain weight is about 2 per cent of the body weight, while it consumes a disproportionate amount of energy – 20 per cent and more. If we present the data in a more familiar absolute form, then the power consumption of our brain processor is slightly more than 12 watts. It is difficult to imagine how much power a computer would need if it had the same functionality as our brain.
The brain never rests, even when a person is asleep. It takes about 350—400 calories a day to maintain brain function, mostly in the form of glucose. The peak of energy consumption by the brain occurs at the age of 5—6 years, when the brain is able to utilise up to 60 per cent of all the energy received by the body.
In the evening, energy consumption is significantly higher than in the morning. This is because as the day’s experiences accumulate, cells and especially intercellular junctions have to expend more energy and conduct signals more actively. Impressions are stored, categorised, catalogued, and transformed into a person’s experience. Ultimately, all this changes the architecture of connections between nerve cells.
During its work, the brain is able to redirect blood to its certain areas, and spikes in energy consumption occur in these areas. This happens when the areas are involved in solving complex cognitive tasks – tasks for which there are no previously learned patterns in the memory, for example, learning a new skill, playing an instrument, or learning a language of a completely different language group. Such spikes can also occur when conditions are constantly changing, for example, in planning a strategy in a game of chess.
With the mastery of the skill and the accumulated experience of its application, a person no longer needs a high level of diligence and concentration. And, consequently, much less energy is consumed. How significant are these seemingly minor spikes in consumption for the brain? And, most importantly, why is the body willing to pay such a high price for brain function – such a substantial amount of energy?
It all started a long time ago. It is at present that people, with certain reservations, have practically solved the problem of hunger.
