the only thing the human brain can't understand:

Obviously itself. We know so much about the physiology of every other organ in our body. We know so much about the first three minutes of the universe when everything was radiation dominated and atoms couldn't form. We know more about the nature of spacetime and cosmology in general than we know about our own minds (brains?).

On a good day, that's exciting to me. There's so much left undiscovered in the field of neuroscience, and that unappreciative gap between cognitive science and neuroscience. On a bad day (like today), that just seems overwhelming. I feel like we'll never understand all of these mechanisms in our brains. It's not like something in physics that takes a sudden insight to all fall into place. Everything's complicated in neuroscience. So many things are impossible to understand, and so many aspects are impossible to model experimentally due to the complexity of everyday life. It's crazy.

An example of this is the occlusion of learning by previous learning. I pick this example because I feel like it has happened to me, although I am assured by my neuroscience professor that such a thing is impossible (it would require the saturation of every synapse in my hippocampi). However, I feel like every synapse in my hippcampi has reached its excitatory maximum, its information threshold. In such a case, further learning is occluded. Why? We don't really know. One way to occlude learning is previous maximum phosphorylation in the postsynaptic spine (since phosphorylation drives so many processes involved in potentiation, saturating the phosphorylation by inhibited phosphotases for instance yields a maxed out post synaptic density). But that's only one way. We have no idea what other mechanisms may be involved, or what role such saturation has to play in normal behavior (although I am convinced it is the reason I can stuff no more information into my brain before my test tomorrow and my test Wednesday). And there's no promising way to experimentally figure that out in the near future.

That's just one mechanism of a million in the study of long-term potentiation, and long-term potentiation is just one effect of millions in the study of the brain. Hopeless.

On a side note, the tree outside my window has turned a beautiful rustic red (if I remember correctly this is because the chlorophyll that reflects light of the green wavelength dies out in the fall, leaving other photopigments to control the coloration of the leaf as it slowly dies and falls to earth). The tree next to it is still largely a hearty green, but the very peripheral edges next to the red tree are also turning red. It looks as if the red tree has a communicable disease that is slowly spreading to the surrounding foliage.

How interesting, to think of beauty as a communicable disease. Or is it death, primarily?