The Nervous System

Since it's really just a series of circuits, the nervous system of the human body has all the complements of its cousin, the silicon circuit board. A large Indian city, as I imagine, a sensory deprivation chamber would do, reveals some of these commonalities. Resisters are used to buffer sensitive pieces of the board, allowing passage to only small drops of the deluge of amperes that comes from the mainline current. Capacitors store up electrical current for sudden bursts of energy, like a camera flash. Doides allow current to flow one way, but not another. The human body and mind has all of these. A city provides endless stimulus, which the brain needs to mitigate in order to make sense of its perceived surroundings. They say that for every million bits of input that the nerves receive, only about 2000 of them ever make it to the conscious mind. That's a hell of a job for the bureaucracy of the mind; constantly filtering out the nonsensical, the harmful, or just the irrelevant. Parts of the mind lay dormant, spurned only by moments of agression and adrenaline, brought on by a dishonest rickshaw driver, or crossing an impossibly busy road. Much of being alone in a place with lots of stimulus means that things can flow in, but there are few outlets to let the information go on back into the ether from whence they came. Resisters, Capacitors and Diodes.

It is tough to be alone for an extended period of time. I used to think I was born to go on deep-space missions, where months would pass silently in empty space with little to do, save for the daily log. There is no way I could hack that. I much prefer the overload of the city to the absolute solitude of black vacuum. But it's hard. I can smell the tang of burning copper filiment. It's time to hit the beach. The city, with its noise, smoke, and poverty is impossible to handle alone forever. At this point I'm looking forward to national parks, shorelines, temples, and cool drinks served in coconuts. But really, I'm looking forward to going home.