Personal Development
Do you have a brain?
Abandoned, abused, desperately poor, a single mother and at times almost completely overwhelmed, she nevertheless held onto her dream of a good education for her two sons.
Ben recalls; “Whenever my brother Curtis or I offered Mother an excuse for failing to accomplish something or complained about some obstacle in the road of life, she always offered the same response. She would get a puzzled look on her face and ask, ‘Do you have a brain?’”
I seem to remember my own mum asking a similar question. And of course what they were saying was crystal clear: ‘You have a brain. Use it! It’s all you need to overcome any problem right now and any time in your life.’
The Ben I mentioned spent his childhood as an at-risk black child on the streets of Detroit. He had a fiery temper and the day he almost killed a friend with an angry knife lunge marked a turn around in his life. The only reason his knife didn’t plunge into his mates gut was that it rebounded off his belt buckle.
Determining to conquer his anger and use his brain took him on the road to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated neurosurgeons. He’s also a professor of plastic surgery, oncology and paediatrics.
I read in his book, ‘Take the Risk’ that no computer network on earth can come close to the capacity of the average human brain. Speaking to thousands at a time he often tells them what could happen if he brought one person on stage and had her look at the crowd for one second before leading her away.
“Fifty years later I could perform an operation, take off her cranial bone, put in some depth electrodes, and stimulate the appropriate area of her brain, and she could remember not only where everyone was sitting, but what they were wearing.”
He says our brain is the most complex organ system in the universe and can take in two million bits of information per second.
“Inside each human brain are billions and billions of complex interconnections, neurons and synapses, which science has only barely begun to understand,” he adds.
Ben always tells people their brain is a tremendous gift from God and using it is the prescription for life, love and success in a dangerous world.
Tags: Persistence, Capacity, Brain, Success.
