Dipoles, Neurons, and Us

Neurons - Your brain isn't made up of individual
thoughts but rather a web of connections.

What is a magnetic field? Truth is, you can’t make a magnetic field with just one object. You need at least two (a dipole), and the interaction between them can cause a magnetic field.

Think about neurons and thoughts for a moment. A thought isn’t an individual neuron firing; rather, a thought happens when two neurons connect. In fact, the strongest neurons aren’t the ones that are the biggest; rather, it’s the ones with the most connections. Just like magnets, it’s not the individual that really matters but the connections they make.

I think the most important things in life are like that. For instance, love. It, by definition, can’t live alone or just in one person. It must be shared to really be love. It lives in the connection between people more than the individual people.

We are also like that. When we think about who we are, we think on an individual level. However, maybe we should think of ourselves more in terms of our relationships and the influence we are on others. After all, isn’t that how wiser people define themselves? It seems like the course of human thinking (at least in America) is to define yourself by what you do when you’re young, what you’ve done when you’re older, and by your friends and family when you’re old. Also, when you think of the impact you have, it’s almost universally defined as relationships instead of individual actions or accomplishments.

So what about you? If the connections you made and the impact you had in others was more important than what you did, would you behave any differently?