A work out for your Brain
Garrett Baldwin
3/25/11
The human mind is almost never used to its full potential. That is no big news. There have been a few people who have been lucky enough to dabble in the shallows of the incomprehensibly vast ocean that is the human mind. This brings up questions like; if the mind is capable of such greatness, why is it so hard to attain, and why can’t we use more of our brains hidden power? In simple terms, the world just isn’t big enough. If 100% of mankind used 100% of their brain power 100% of the time, there would be nothing that couldn’t be achieved, gained or solved. Competition would no longer exist. No more progress would ever be made again. No one would want or need for anything, it would be absolute perfection.
So, what do we do with that? Think back to early man, a Neanderthal with the brain capacity of a mouse and compare him to Albert Einstein, quite a difference. But if you think about the times they lived in, they could’ve been of equal intelligence. See, that Neolithic primate was only concerned with food, sex, clothing and a shelter; old al concentrated his thinking on tremendous math problems and things of that nature. However, they both had to call upon the power of their mind to solve these problems and if you think about it, to that Neanderthal, figuring out how to kill a woolly mammoth to feed himself and his family had to have taken the same amount of thinking and brain power as Albert used to come up with his relativity theory, relatively, pun intended. So the only real difference between the two is the time and evolution. Evolution takes a long time, and as time goes on, humans are introduced to more and more things that need more and more brain power to fully comprehend and be able use to our advantage in everyday life. This process is ongoing, how long did it take humans to invent the car, the light bulb, a toaster oven or a clock that you can carry with you? These simple little things that most people could not live without in today’s world, took decades to develop and perfect.
Which brings me to my next point, if you introduce the brain to something that it isn’t used to and expands its thinking capacity rapidly, it goes into overdrive. You will have so many of the most original, deep, and revolutionary thoughts that you cannot possibly contain them all and they are lost before you can use them and after that stimulus is removed, they are lost completely. Also, if you were trying to explain one of these thoughts to someone who is not in the same state of mind that you are, they will not understand and think you are a crazy person. However, this is where our good friend evolution comes into play. If you repeatedly introduce the brain to this stimulus, it will eventually recognize it and slowly, ever so slowly adapt to this new level of thinking and run at that level all the time.
Ladies and gentlemen, this stimulus I am referring to is marijuana. I know what you have heard about pot; how it makes you stupid and kills you brain cells. The laziness factor also comes into play as well when you think of someone smoking pot. People are going to be lazy no matter what, and the people who have either lost their job or family or anything else of great importance, and tries to blame it on pot, chances are they were probably going to lose those things anyway and they just use weed among other things as a copout for their own faults. However, while you are using marijuana, the areas of the brain that control thought, creativity, time perception and memory are affected. It breaks down walls or, barriers if you will, in your mind allowing you to look far deeper into things and understand concepts that otherwise you would not be able to comprehend. Also, your sense of time is altered, I believe this happens because your brain is running so much faster than it was before that it seems like two hours have passed when it’s only been thirty minutes. Also, the creativity sector is stimulated, allowing artists to paint more abstractly, musicians play more freely and writers to create tomes of poetry and award winning novels. But this new level of thinking is almost impossible to control. I personally tend to ramble on for minuets at a time about things that make no sense to anyone but me and make a complete fool of myself. Hence why people think pot heads are stupid, they say things that to people who don’t have the same understanding that they now do and the person who get to witness the new thought is lost and immediately writes it off as nonsense and thinks that the person telling this outlandish story is insane and should seek professional help.
All this extra activity in your brain is bound have some ramifications. Have you ever heard of how exercising works? When you lift weights or run or stretch, your muscles are damaged slightly and when they heal they are larger, stronger and in better shape. I believe that the brain works the same way. When you learn something new, your brain dedicates a group of cells to that process or function. Just like your muscles are being broken down and rebuilt, your brain conditions itself to a new action. Then you ask what about those people that have used cannabis so much that they have literally smoked themselves stupid. Have you ever seen a body builder? They can barely move because their muscles are so massive that it constricts their movement. They may look impressive I will grant them that, but I guarantee that they would lose a fight against a light weight college wrestler. The wrestler is so much faster and actually stronger than the body builder the wrestler would tear him apart. The same thing applies to the brain and cannabis. Abuse of any substance is not a good thing, especially marijuana. If you work your brain too much too often, you will fry it, just like the body builder.
Civilizations have been using cannabis since early Mesopotamia and up until recent history, it has not been outlawed. Know I now that we have had some big leaps in technology and science and such things in the last century, but imagine if cannabis was legal and widely used. Would those advances have been discovered a long time ago and where would we be today? Could the prohibition of marijuana be delaying the progress of the human race?
I believe that God put marijuana on this planet so that one day, he could take a well deserved break and he wouldn’t have to hold the hypothetical hands of mankind as we make every day decisions. So, one day in the distant future, assuming humans don’t completely pollute the earth and kill all life on this planet, my hope is that by then, people will have put there misplaced prejudices aside, accept marijuana and are able to harness its full potential and live in a better world with longer life spans. Because by that time humans will have been using marijuana long enough that their brains will have adapted to its power and use it towards making life better worldwide.
