There's a thought experiment that tries to explain how uniquely important the brain is. You put a brain in a jar, hook up various sensors to it, and it would be able to reason and think just as effectively as if it were back in its own body. Some people are so taken with this idea that they come to despise their bodies as so much superfluous and vestigial junk and wish they could just put their brains in jars already and not have to worry about their usual sacks of meat weighing down their pure intellect ever again. But that's not actually how the brain works. The brain is not some cold and distant puppet master that demands the body to do its bidding or else. The brain is in constant collaboration with the rest of the body. The brain has about 86 billion neurons but there are hundreds of millions of neurons distributed throughout the spine and various ganglia in the body. The gut alone has almost half a billion neurons and is sometimes called the second brain. The point is that the brain is an important piece of how we process information and make decisions, but it doesn't do so alone. How often do we make stupid decisions when we are hungry or angry that we would never make in calmer moments? That's because the brain is getting a lot of feedback from the body and suddenly certain options seem much more compelling than they would if we didn't have so much cortisol firing up all of the nerves in our arms and legs so that it's all we can do not to hit someone or start running. I bring all of this up because just like we sometimes think that our brains don't need the rest of the body, we often think that we, as individuals, don't need other people. We feel sometimes if we could only be completely by ourselves and not have any of the dead weight of society dragging us down, then we could finally be all that we were meant to be. But just as the brain is on constant feedback loops with other parts of the body, we need other people to truly understand ourselves and become who we were meant to be. Being completely alone means we are only a tiny fraction of our real and full self. When we choose to be selfish, we become self-ish - a small, distorted shadow of who we really are. The brain is part of a larger nervous system, perhaps the biggest and densest and most important part, but a part nonetheless. Likewise, we as individuals are a part of a larger system. Inside of our own body is the most important and biggest and densest source of our sense of self and personhood, but this is only a part of the picture. As we open ourselves up to other people by loving and serving them, we begin to exist in their hearts and minds, just as they begin to exist in ours. The more we affect the lives of other people, the more we distribute our sense of self beyond our own bodies. We will see ourselves better as bits of ourselves are reflected back to us through the grateful words of those we have helped. I hope that we all have greater ambitions than being a sad and lonely brain in a jar on an island all to ourselves. I hope we aspire to be more than self-ish. I know that the more we waste and wear ourselves out and lose ourselves in the process of being a light and a joy and a source of strength to others, the more of ourselves we will find as we distribute pieces of ourselves throughout a whole system of loving and grateful people.
