This is Your Brain on Faith

Most of you know Torrin pretty well by now. If you don’t know him personally, certainly you know his reputation. Torrin is rambunctious, stubborn, very hard to communicate with, he runs around at a dizzying pace, he sleeps poorly, is a terribly picky eater, he’s messy, he doesn’t listen well, and he tends to push all of my buttons at once. Do you remember the old saying, boys are made of “snakes, snails, and puppy dog tails?”

That said, he’s mine. And while he is very much all of those things that I’ve mentioned before, he’s also very sweet, very kind, very caring. He likes to give very tight hugs, he’ll get his arms around your neck and he’ll squeeze you for all you’re worth, to the point where you wonder if you’re going to be able to breath if doesn’t let go, but that’s his way of showing how important you are to him.

Torrin loves letters. The way your child might love Batman, or Barbie, my son loves the ABC’s. And shapes, he’s a sucker for shapes. He likes to draw these little characters, they’re basically shapes with arms and legs and simply names them “Square,” “Circle,” “Triangle,” so on so forth.

Now, most 6-year-old kids are rambunctious, and can be hard to pin down. They’re willful, stubborn, and not very easy to communicate with. But Torrin takes that to a whole different level.

When Torrin was a baby, we kept waiting for him to manifest traits that normal babies would exhibit. When he didn’t, and when as he grew older, he still didn’t, we decided it best that we start considering consulting with some folks who could tell us more about his development.

To make a long, very complicated story short, we ended up recently taking Torrin to a place in Indianapolis called Brain Balance, a pseudo-educational facility where Torrin’s behavior and learning patterns were analyzed. In speaking with the consultant, she informed us with quite a few things about how the brain works.

The Left side of your brain controls things like, logic, practicality, it’s your organizational side, your verbal side, it’s how you live and function in society. The Right side of your brain, meanwhile, that’s the more expressive side of your brain. That’s color, and taste, and art, and music and, for lack of a better way of putting it, it’s enjoyment and expression of life. 

What the folks at Brain Balance discovered was that Torrin has a hyper developed “right brain” and an under developed “left brain.” Now, some of you might be thinking that that sounds like non-sense, but trust me, as his father, listening to them in that consultation, it was like, someone was putting words to the things that I had been feeling about Torrin’s personality and behavior.

Because of these findings, I’ve been researching the human brain, and I’ve come to discover some very interesting things about both my son’s brain, as well as my own brain. 

Here are some things I’ve learned about the human brain, since beginning this research. Your brain is about the size of a head of cauliflower. It looks and feels like a three-and-a-half-pound lump of firm tofu. It comprises about two percent of your body's mass, but it uses twenty-five per percent of the body's energy. Scientists estimate that the brain receives 100 million bits of information per second and contains 100 billion cells, many of which are neurons.

These cells are shaped like tree branches. They vary in length from a millimeter all the way to a meter long. At one end of the cell exists the axon and the other end houses dendrites; think of them as twigs on the branch. Neurons communicate with each other by sending both chemical as well as electrical signals racing down said branch at speeds of around 200 MPH.

When the charge reaches the end of the cell, it leaps the synapse, kind of like Evel Knievel, jumping the space between the dendrite and the next twiggy branch. Each cell is surrounded by anywhere between ten to 100,000 dendrites creating the possibility of one million billion synaptic connections – that’s a 10 followed by a million zeros!

All of that, all housed, right up in here. That told me something very important about my son, and really about all of us. Simply put friends, as Psalm 139 says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. 

Come here more this Sunday, November 20th at Plum Creek Christian Church.