"There is no certainty, only opportunity."

The brain is the most important part of the body. According to the brain.

Neurophysiology is a rather fascinating science. Difficult to research as most methods by necessity are invasive and possibly harmful. Yet infinitely complex in its nature. Just think of the myriad of emotions you are able to experience, think of the information you are able to analyze and store, think of all the creative ideas any person can come up with. And then think about 9% of all Europeans (according to research) have suffered or are suffering from more serious mental problems, most of it being depression. 20% of American homeless people suffer from skizophrenia. How to differentiate brilliance from madness of a molecular or neural scale? How do you know whether a person is depressed, not just feeling a little under the weather?

It is difficult to tell these states apart by looking at the symptoms, it is more difficult to find the causes. In a way, the causes of mental illnesses use security through obscurity. With all of these different brain functions manifesting at all kinds of different times, how do you tell which specific reaction (or lack thereof!) is causing a specific pathology? Without years, or even decades of thorough research, you just don't. You take a stab in the dark and hope you can solve it in time.

When speaking of electrical signals, you can think of a brain as a glob of Jello. In fact, the comparison is frighteningly apt. If you were to add electrodes to both (a brain and a glob of actual Jello), you can get brainwaves from both (if the Jello wobbles, which if you have any sense of fun, it will). But as Jello is not really a brain as a whole, sometimes neither is the brain. Alien hands might not be very common, but they do occur. For those that don't know, alien hand occurs when there is a communication problem between the right and the left hemisphere. Just imagine a married couple refusing to talk to each other after a fight. The problem with no communication is that one side does not know or understand what mischiefs the other side is up to, and can panic. Especially if at least one side is irrational. That can lead to one side of the body attempting to harm the other side, inevitably hurting itself in the process.

So that's all the brain is. A ball of fun directing our every move, regardless of whether it understands why or how. A mix of wires so complex that 'thought' and 'emotion' are possible. Most actual effective neurons are concentrated in a rather tiny spot at the back of the head, with a lot of the rest filled with glial cells that work as isolation and support. Put simply, it is a bunch of tangled wires that by some amazing process have combined into a central processing unit with subunits that process different kinds of informational input. We know how neurons work, but we don't know how the system works. We can't even reproduce the existing networks. That's what modern neuroscientists and computer scientists are trying to do - create a simulation of neurons and see if and how they create a brain-like structure. If it works, who knows, maybe the next step is organic computing.

If you know that a healthy brain is infinitely complex, just imagine a brain with a quirk in it. Then you understand why mental illnesses are so darn difficult to define, locate cause of, and remedy. Even thinking about it changes your brain, possibly causing a fault or a kink in it. Now that is scary.