Zane's Brain

This is what we are up against. Massive synaptic connections powering a parallel processing baby brain. At night you can warm your hands from cast off heat ¹ radiated as glia and neurons process the previous days data and plot the coming day’s events.

Or maybe it’s already up to computing the next twenty four days?

Whatever the case, we are doomed. Each day our grey matter recedes along with our hairline. We try to remember something, like “how much milk did I JUST put in this bottle?” and only get back the mental equivalent of return to sender, address unknown.

With each day you can sense that Zane is getting smarter, more aware. He may not know the days of the week yet, but he’s working on their trajectory.

A few folks mentioned that they couldn’t get enough of their new baby: cuddling it all of the time. Baby love. That may be, but I think it can also be attributed to mental regression. After bouts of feeding, changing, and fussing the inner reptilian portion of the brain signals, “hey, peace and quiet! let’s just sit here and bask in warm baby for a while.” So you sit there clinging to baby, watching mindless dreck, a small satisfied smile and vacant eyes shining nuclear blue in the TV’s glow.

He sure is cuddly.

1. The neurons of the brain require a lot of energy. 75% of the blood sugar created by the liver is consumed by the brain. The brain also consumes 20% of the oxygen a human breathes. The energy consumption for the brain to simply survive is 0.1 calories per minute, while this value can be as high as 1.5 calories per minute during crossword puzzle-solving. brain