I am a battery

I am, quite literally, a battery; you are a battery too, and so is every other living thing on the face of this earth. We all, without exception, function by sending minute spurts of electricity along the nerve connections between our brains and every cell of our bodies, little jolts that tell muscles when to pull, eyes to see, mouths to taste, hearts to beat and glands to make the various chemical traces we require to function properly, and that is just the tip of the iceberg!

Our brains are truly wonderful things, they are exceedingly powerful computers, in fact some experts say that the brain of one average person is more powerful than all the electronic computers of the world, put together, though I do find that hard to believe. Think though about what the human brain can do, and there’s a first use straight away – the powers of thought, reasoning and creativity. Our brains are capable of considering a situation, arriving at an answer to the problem and instigating the necessary action required to solve it. Electronic computers can seem to do most of that too, but don’t forget, there is nothing as stupid as a computer, until a human is around to feed it with the necessary information. Once it has that it can solve any problem at almost literally the speed of light, but it can’t do the creative bit, all by itself because it lacks the power of reasoning!

Think too about the many things that our brains do all at the same time, most of them without conscious thought on our part at all. It regulates our temperature and creates cooling agents, (sweat), if we become over-heated; it controls the beating of our hearts and the accompanying throbs of the arteries, which carry blood throughout our bodies; it makes the smallest and the biggest muscles inside us do exactly what is necessary to either write a letter in neat handwriting or give us the power to run flat out to avoid a ‘situation’, and it interprets and acts upon, the signals coming into it from our external senses, (the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and the myriad of touch sensitive nerves that we have everywhere). While it is doing all that, it is also digesting our last meal and sending the resulting chemicals to the points where they are needed to build new tissue, worn out with wear, to create our internal heat and to satisfy our most powerful addiction, the desire for food, just for the pleasure of it. It is also, as I said above making all sorts of new chemicals in our many glands, each one with the purpose of maintaining some vital part of our anatomy. While it’s doing all this, it’s also removing dead, used up cells from all over us and replacing them with new ones, (hence the story that we are a completely new person every eight years!).

And the brain does all this by sending those minute spurts of electricity to where they’re wanted or needed, millions of bits of information or instructions every second, rushing about all over the place, just so that we can live comfortable, safe and easy lives.

This, I believe is what life is all about for all living things, including vegetation, which operate and take form through the wonder of DNA, the basic requirement for the living battery; the factory that builds us to a set design created by chance, millions of years ago and which changes slightly with each descending generation, the system we call evolution, all battery powered!

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