John Clayton
With the coming of computers, we have seen an explosion of knowledge
about the brain and how it does all of the things it does. The
greater emphasis has been on how our senses of sight, smell, hearing,
taste, and feeling are handled by the brain. May Pines has said
it best:
We can recognize a friend instantly-full face, in profile, or
even by the back of his head. We can distinguish hundreds of
colors and possibly as many as 10,000 smells. We can feel a feather
as it brushes our skin, hear the faint rustle of a leaf It all
seems so effortless: we open our eyes or ears and let the world
stream in. Yet anything we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste requires
billions of nerve cells to flash urgent messages along linked
pathways and feedback loops in our brains, performing intricate
calculations that scientists have only begun to decipher.1
What we are finding as we start to decipher the brain is that
there are incredible differences between various sections of the
brain and some incredibly designed sections that fit our life
styles. Even the differences tell us a great deal about the designed
features of the brain. When you watch a movie at the theater,
for example, there are 24 separate pictures being put onto the
screen every second. If the subject on the film is moving, your
brain interprets the object as a moving object. If the object
is sitting still, you still see it. It does not have to be moving
for you to be able to see it and identify it.
A frog, on the other hand, cannot see an object unless it is moving.
Place a fly that is immobile in front of a starving frog and
it will ignore it. Unless the fly is moving, the frog cannot tell
that it is there. If the fly starts to move, then the frog will
eat it. Basically, the retina of the frog detects movement while
our retina does not--we use our brain to detect motion. Dennis
Baylor, of Stanford Medical School, has said it best: "The
dumber the animal, the smarter its retina."2 The intricate
design features used to allow all living things to survive are
still being studied. Our ears can hear and distinguish some 20,000±
different frequencies. Comparing the 24 images per second of
the eye with the 20,000 of the ear tells us a great deal about
how these sections work, but speak even more eloquently about
their design. How limited would be our world of sound if only
24 sounds a second could be processed and understood.
"I am fearfully and wonderfully made," the psalmist
said (Psalm 139:14) and the brain is one of the great demonstrations
of that statement.
1Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling the World, 1995, Howard
Hughes
Medical Institute, page 5.
20p. cit., page 24.
This article taken from: Does God Exist?, Nov/Dec 1996
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