Page 142 - Spirit and Mind. Vol 1

Nicolai Levashov. Spirit and mind. Vol.1

our victories and defeats? What makes us resonate with the beauty of a flower,
touched with morning dew, its petals shimmering like jewels in the rays of the rising
sun; or the gusting of the wind, the singing of birds, the whisper of leaves, the
buzzing of bees hastening nectar-laden to their hive? All of these and much more —
everything we see, hear and feel, every day, every hour, every moment of our lives, is

recorded in our book of life by that tireless chronicler — the brain.
But where and how is it all being recorded? Where is all that information being
stored, and by what inexplicable manner does it emerge from the depths of our
memory in all its vividness and vibrancy of color — virtually materializing in
primordial form — those things we thought were long gone and forgotten? By way of

clarification, let us start by seeing what kind of information enters our brain.
All humans possess sense organs such as eyes, ears, taste buds, etc., as well as
various types of receptors over the entire body surface, i.e., nerve endings responding
to various external stimuli such as heat, cold, electromagnetic waves, as well as
mechanical and chemical effects. Let us examine the kinds of alterations these signals

undergo before reaching the brain cells.
Let us take, for example, eyesight. Sunlight reflected from an ambient object
falls upon our light-sensitive retina. The image of the object reflected by the light
then enters the retina through a crystalline lens, which, in turn, focuses it on the

retina. The latter possesses specialized photoreceptor cells, called rods and cones.
Rods respond to low -level illumination, enabling one to see in the dark, and also
provide a black and white image of the object. By contrast, cones respond to an
optical spectrum of brightly illuminated objects. That is, the cones absorb photons,
each of which has a characteristic color — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or
violet. Further, each of these specialized cells "receives" its own fragment of the
object's image. Actually, the full image is broken up into millions of fragments, with
each specialized cell picking up one piece of the whole picture (see Fig. 70).

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