There is a lot of enthusiasm over the recent findings of neuroscience and its specialty known as social neuroscience which focuses on trying to understand social reactions through the neuroscience methodology. The idea is that everything you experience arises out of an identifiable process of the brain.

Now the formation and behavior of the human nervous system is not in fact uniform so different regions of the brain will have differing degrees of development, and more than that, due to disease or injury some functions will relocate to other regions of the brain. This has all been established by neuroscience itself, more or less. The presence and levels of various neurotransmitters and the effect they are known to have on brain health and function is both genetically and environmentally governed.

The whole model that used to be held as true no longer endures quite as well as it used to – the concept of dominant and recessive genes. Which trait manifests now seems to have little to do with the specific code itself but from the parent you inherited it from. They used to think that traits like blue eyes were recessive, now not so much. My father’s eyes are blue, my elder brother’s eyes are blue, my mother’s eyes are polychromatic, my young brothers are hazel and mine are brown.

You’re more or less likely to get a trait depending on which parent has it? Yes. My mother bore mutant traits regarding eye color, and perhaps that lead to my wild card trait emerging, but what that means to today’s topic is that a huge part of your “connectome” is chemical rather than structural.

So there is a chemical make-up of some kind in the parent that makes their genes more or less likely to catch? Yes, and habits of both the mother and father can influence heredity.

So yes, to the point, the functional elements of your hormones and general neural metabolism have a great deal to do with your behavior, but they are not the only things. A great portion of your body is made up of and colonized by bacteria that are not genetically you, and what occurs to these organisms will affect both your endocrine system as well as other functions.

So, things get a little fuzzy if you are trying to define where the chemical elements of thought are coming from, no? Shall we get stranger still?

Cells can migrate from your body into someone else’s, and from their body into yours, and survive for quite some time potentially. So you also have donated cells that bear the genetic and thus chemical traits of people you aren’t even genetically related to. Mothers often have cells that migrated from their fetus living on in their brain as well as from their partner. You can look up this information. It might be an interesting read.

So whose brain is it anyway?

It’s a hacked system? It’s not and never has been a closed system. Environmental stress can have an impact on genetics so profound as to last for generations. Starvation in utero leads to lower birth weight, and regardless of proper nutrition afterward, that persons offspring will show an even lower birth weight. We are considerably more mutable than people ever imagined before.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~