Brain chatter

What an impressive study that gives me hope that one day I'll know what my brain is talking about.

Neural networking: some kind of brain chatter? A form of neuronal socialising?

Ever had those repetitive thoughts that you can't get out of your mind?

'Oh why did I say that?!' 'Actually, what did I say?' 'Why did that person say that to me..?' etc etc and so on and so forth.

You'd know it if you had! Everyone else, well, lucky you.

Whenever this happens to me, I can't help but imagine neuronal connections forming, as the path to neurotic town is paved and reinforced. With concrete. That I can't unearth. Like a bad party that you can't escape from because you're the designated driver.

Or when you're thinking about something completely ordinary and boring, such as boiling a kettle of water, and you suddenly get a flashback from when you were 5 and a seagull swooped down and stole your icecream. (Oh, how the cold burn of disappointment still lingers in my mind.)

Surely this means that there's a connection between the sound of the boiling water and the seagull/icecream scenario somewhere in there. Unbeknownst to you, as you stand freezing cold in your kitchen waiting to fill your hot water bottle, deep inside your mind action potentials are zipping along the neuronal information superhighway from water to steam to cold lino floor under your feet to the sound of water, sea, cold, icecream, seagull... And before you know it, you were wishing you were a child at the seaside, icecream or no icecream, it's warmer there. Seems obvious now, huh?

Well, I doubt it's that simple, and the 'neural network' is more like a 'neural maze' filled with thousands and millions of connections. You know that scene in 'Entrapment' where Catherine Zeta Jones has to clamber through a maze of lasers that will blow her to smithereens if she doesn't get herself into provocative positions? If that was a neural network, there'd be no way she'd make it.

Maybe one day we'll decipher the 'brain chatter' and discover how our neurons socialise with each other.

I wish I could decipher what my neurons are talking about...