I Am Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

"I am fearfully and wonderfully made"

"I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well"(Psalm 139:14). From what I've been learning about the brain, that is, what we understand and the whole lot that is yet to be understood about its intricate networks, I can marvel along with the psalmist, David. Indeed, we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and our brain is a great testimony of that fact. What would the psalmist have written if he was alive today, to know what we now know and understand? To think of what we've come to understand about ourselves, especially about our brains. How would the psalmist respond?

Well, let's take a look at the brain. From being in class, my awareness about what I'm doing, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, what I'm thinking has come to reflect upon not just what, but how is it all being done by my brain. This morning I woke up, my eyes opened, I looked out my window, I saw the sun rising, it was this beautifully deep yellow/orange color. I thought, "How beautiful" and I smiled with a sense and feeling of wonderment. It could be said that I experienced nothing out of the ordinary this morning. Yet, if I could narrate these few activities in terms of the networking of neurons resulting in my eyes opening, my sight of the sun, my ability to perceive its color, my inner acknowledgment of its beauty and the emotions that sight evoked in me, you would be reading for a very long time and what I did this morning would indeed present itself in quite an extraordinary light. It is in recognition of this, with respect to the brain's aptitudes, that Howard Hughes in his paper, "Seeing, Hearing and Smelling the World" quoted May Pines in expressing, "We can recognize a friend instantly-full face, in profile, or even by the back of his head. We can distinguish hundreds of colors and possibly as many as 10,000 smells. We can feel a feather as it brushes our skin, hear the faint rustle of a leaf. It all seems so effortless: we open our eyes or ears and let the world stream in. Yet anything we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste requires billions of nerve cells to flash urgent messages along linked pathways and feedback loops in our brains, performing intricate calculations that scientists have only begun to decipher"(1).