Most of everything in our universe is energy. Fortunately, a small amount of matter survived fourteen billion years ago, during the “Big Bang”, when the hot, dense speck that was our universe quickly expanded. Instead of life as we know it being annihilated, leaving us with nothing but energy, we ended up with a world filled with particles, including the particles that allow for human life.
AT FIRST THERE WAS NOTHING
& THEN IT BLEW UP
Approximately 99 percent of our bodies are made up of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. While our cells may regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up our body have existed for millions of millennia. Consider the hydrogen atoms in our body, they were produced during the big bang. The carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms were made by burning stars, and the heavy elements were made when stars exploded. It’s a wonder Hallmark doesn’t make birthday cards for 14 billion-year-olds.
Cosmic rays and high-energy radiation from outer space, constantly pass through our body. These cosmic particles can disrupt our genetics, causing subtle mutations, and may even be a major contributing factor in evolution. Other cosmic visitors such as the neutrinos that the sun releases, constantly zip through our body at a rate of nearly 100 trillion every second. Many of these neutrinos have been around since the first few seconds of the early universe.
Working from the theory that our body is a fourteen billion-year old small-scale mine of radioactive particles, it makes sense to classify our bioenergetic system, including our emotions, in terms of particle physics. Take for example the sensation of feeling creative. Creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas, in the production of an artefact or experience. Imagination is a cognitive process in mental functioning that involves thinking about possibilities and weighing them against alternatives. Imagining uses up our energy reserves. If you’ve ever spent much time creating art or music, or coming up with new ideas for a thesis, you know first-hand how exhausting it can feel to exercise your brain. By the end of it, you’re probably pretty wiped out. Not only do you need a snack to replenish your energy, but most like you just want to relax and recharge.
If you look to the physiology that is our brain (100 billion neurons, forming 100 trillion neural connections – more connections than stars in our galaxy – igniting as you read this sentence), despite only accounting for 2% of the body’s weight, our brains use a whopping 20% of our body’s energy (infants use 44% to process a thought). In other words, a healthy adult brain uses 2-3 times more energy than the heart uses. If the body’s basal metabolic rate is 1500 kcal/day, our brain is using around 300 kcal/day, or 0.0035 kcal/second.
Let’s say it took around 5 seconds to read and think about that last sentence. At 0.0035 kcal/second, it took about 0.02 kcal to process that thought. If you are a person who dreams of someday harnessing your brain’s power to do other things, like cook ramen noodles, let us consider that there is 400 kcal per block, and 150 noodles per block, giving us 2.67 kcal per noodle. Assuming the average noodle is 33cm long, there are 0.08 kcal/cm of noodle. Thus, every thought burns about 0.25 cm of ramen noodle. The future of cooking might lie in unleashing our brain’s energy.
Whether we live to see the day when we can cook our ramen soup just by thinking it so, we probably agree that it takes a good deal of energy to move from one thought to the next – even if all thoughts are created equally.
