Most humans have brains. Actually, all humans have brains but there are some people I know whose brains are so weak and who annoy me so much that I like to think that they are brainless. There are a few folks, however, whose brains were so enormous that they have gone down in history as somewhat super humans: Albert Einstein, for example, or Sir Isaac Newton, Bach, Shakespeare, Archimedes, Michelangelo, and maybe a few others whose names I either can’t remember or don’t know how to spell. It just shows what any one of us could have become if only we had been born geniuses.

Nature has seen fit to equip its favored species with a rather well developed and serviceable brain. It doesn’t just fill our heads with warm, gooey matter but has some very fine uses. For example, it controls not only our speech and vision but also our hearing, smelling and feeling. Because of our brains we are able to talk, walk, feed ourselves, identify colors although some of us are not able to do this without a little timely help from our wives, argue, play Frisbee and other senseless games, listen to stupid talk radio shows, solve problems, calculate cosines and do many other things that begin with verbs. Because of our brains, we have come up with a number of startling inventions like airplanes, wheels, Twinkies, nuclear weapons, alphabets, sun visors, comic books, toothpicks and razor blades. The list could go on but my fingers are getting tired. There seems to be no limit to the things that the human brains can fashion.

It appears that some very brilliant scientists have determined that the brain consists of as many as one hundred billion thinking cells, called neurons. They do not explain how or why some underworked member of their group had nothing better to do than count to such an outrageous number but I will take their word that it has been done. These cells are not an inactive lot. They are constantly firing electrical charges at one another at the speed of light. When one of these charges hits its angry target the target takes sweet revenge by bearing a thought. What becomes of the thought depends on whose head the charge and target lie in. They could become brilliant words in a brain like Shakespeare’s, or breath-taking notes in Bach’s brain or hideously evil plots in the brain of someone like Caligula. Or maybe they could be nothing but idle moments in some of the rest of us.

Human brains were not always the marvelous powerhouses they are in today’s species members. The earliest human ancestors had rather small, uncertain brains that enabled them to eat, sleep, breathe, reproduce, avoid, for the most part, hungry, sharp-toothed predators with nasty dispositions and a few other things necessary to sustain life. They had to wait for nature’s help in evolving into the fancy creatures that they later became. One of the reasons that our thinking power grew to such an extent is that, forgive my saying so, we humans are so weak compared to other animals. In a one-on-one battle between a man and a wild animal larger than a jackrabbit, the man would almost certainly be the loser. So we could only compete it we fought dirty, a skill at which we excelled. By using weapons, humans became dominant and could begin thinking about becoming civilized. At that time, civilized meant sending their spouses out into the fields to search for food while the men sat around the fire, drank fermented beverages and told dumb jokes and laughed so hard that they peed their loin cloths. In this way their brains developed.

Now nature, which allowed our brains to become formidable thinking organs, has no stomach for perfection. Indeed, the human brain has a distinct propensity for including imperfections. It is our lot as humans to have to live with such imperfections. For example, our brains have become extremely adept at forgetting things. At least my brain has. Sometimes, my wife marvels at my natural ability in practicing this skill. She is not similarly highly developed and, in fact, forgets nothing, much to my eternal embarrassment. In general my memory is accurate and retentive for a few microseconds, after which all traces of the memory fade forever from my mind until my wife reminds me with an ill-concealed look of mild displeasure. Likewise if I am talking to someone or engaged in any vocal activity, I tend to forget the name of the person to whom I speak, even though I may have known them for decades. The same thing happens with common nouns, even those that I have used with frequency and accuracy all my life. I wonder if other people have the same problem but I always forget to ask. I sometimes think that my brain spends much of its time rehearsing death.

Brains have other imperfections, too. Sometimes they come up with a simple, inane tune, like “Pop Goes the Weasel”, that you never really liked and don’t really want to listen to but will not let you forget it. Not only will it infest your waking hours but will infect your dreams. This is the brain’s idea of entertainment. The brain has a great sense of humor, vastly different from that of the creature that it inhabits. Who knows, maybe this is nature reminding us who is really the boss.