THE QUANTUM MECHANICAL BRAIN & CREATIVITY

MECHANICS OF NEURONAL FIRING
When a perception of any kind takes place, an electrical impulse is sent from the senses to appropriate neurons in the brain. This impulse is carried along the axon out to the dendrites. Between each of the billions of dendrite connections within our brains there are little gaps. These gaps, called synapses, are microscopic in size. Communication takes place between these synapses through the use of neurotransmitters.

Psychologist William Greenough conducted studies on rats in isolation as well as in stimulating environments. Upon examining their brains he discovered that the rats in the stimulated environment revealed, "that neurons grew larger dendrites with more synapses in response to complex experience." It could be concluded, therefore, that a stimulated brain is able to process more information because it is richer in synaptic connectivity.

WE CANNOT PERCEIVE WHAT WE CANNOT CONCEIVE
We can only perceive, or literally see, what we can conceive of. We must have neuronal firing in our brains, whether it be in the imaginable state or actual perceptual state, for us to register an object as a reality.

Joseph Chilton Pearce's book "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg" purports and shows many examples that we can only perceive what we can conceive of. When Magellan's fleet sailed around the tip of South America he stopped at a placed called Tierra del Fuego. Coming ashore he met some local natives who had come out to see the strange visitors. The ship's historian documented that when Magellan came ashore the natives asked him how he had arrived. Magellan pointed out to his fully rigged sailing ships at anchor off the coast. None of the natives could see the ships. Because they had never seen ships before they had no reference point for them in their brains, and could literally not see them with their eyes. Therefore, it is to our advantage to expose our brains to varied stimulus so that the proper neuronal connections are forged. In this way we expand and enrich our ability to experience more of our environment in a meaningful way.

CODED WAVE INFORMATION
The brain translates consciousness, as coded wave patterns, into the coherent state we call mind. How does the brain form reality from these wave/particles, or interference pattern codes? Deepak Chopra in "Quantum Healing" gives us an example of the difference between interference patterns and a cohesive image. He says, "A good image for this would be a pianist playing a Chopin etude. Where is the music? You can find it at many levels - in the vibrating strings, the trip of the hammers, the fingers striking the keys, the black marks on the paper, or the nerve impulses produced in the player's brain. But all of these are just codes; the reality of music is the shimmering, beautiful, invisible form that haunts our memories without ever being present in the physical world."

This is similar to a computer that translates electric impulses of on and off signals. These impulses are translated into bits, the bits into bytes and the bytes into the patterns of language that produce a program. A stimulated brain is richer in synaptic potential, thus able to process more code. It is more like having a 32 bit Pentium as opposed to an 8 bit 286. Not only is the quantity of information processing greater, but with the capability of more sophisticated programming, or wave form transformation, the quality is also greater.

HOLOGRAPHIC MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Neurophysiologist, Karl Pribram has done extensive work to prove that the brain acts holographically to produce our experience of reality. Again, the brain is a transducer of interference wave patterns. It turns these wave frequencies into electrical and chemical patterns. A hologram is produced when a laser beam is split, bounced off of an object, and then reflected from a mirror onto a photographic plate. Another laser beam directed at the holographic plate produces a three dimensional hologram.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SUPERCONDUCTOR
A superconductor acts as a totally coherent medium which offers no resistance to whatever passes through it. A correlation between this super conductive state and consciousness itself is in "The Philosopher's Stone, Chaos, Synchronicity and the Hidden Order of the World" by F. David Peat. He explains, "One of the pioneering ideas about the brain is that it is a coherent quantum system, an idea that goes straight back to Herbert Froehlich. Consciousness, they argue, is all one piece; it is coherent and cannot be reduced to any classical mechanistic model. Just as the electrons in a superconductor engage in a global dance in which each individual movement is guided by the whole, so, too, individual activities of nerve cells may be coordinated into a much wider dance of thought."

CONCLUSION
The brain transforms the quantum wave patterns of consciousness into electrochemical neurotransmitters. This information is further translated in different parts of the brain holographically into what we call reality. The more you challenge your brain, the more connections you are going to form in the sea of neurons, axons and dendrites that translate waves of thought into a meaningful understanding of our world. Neurologists call this "use dependent plasticity." If you haven't forged a neural pathway that allows for a solution to an apparently impossible problem, you can't intuit or recognize the answer, even when consciousness inspires you to see it. You can only see what you have allowed yourself to experience.

Use your brain, both sides of it. Map and mine those unexplored areas. Stretch it beyond it's familiar limits. Doing the daily puzzles presented here will challenge your notions of rational and non-rational thought. In attempting to solve the puzzles you are forging new neural pathways and enriching the number of synaptic clefts. You are overlaying habitual thinking processes with new potentials. You also entrain the brain as you search for solutions to certain kinds of lateral and analogical puzzles.

This is the stuff that genius is made of. Creative genius has an open mind and has pondered what other people don't dare to think about. In this way they are utilizing that 90% of the brain that science tells us now lies dormant. Ask yourself questions that don't have obvious answers. Allow yourself to contemplate those puzzling situations you would otherwise ignore. Everyone has creative potential as yet unrealized. Discover yours and be richer for it.