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As I was sitting in class on Thursday, I heard something that confused me. Prof. Grobstein said, the brain is smarter than the eye and that is why we can see in 3 dimension when we only have one eye open. What puzzled me at first was his phrase. At first I thought. How can the eye be smart? It has no mind. How can we use that term when referring to the eye, but then as I really started thinking about it I could only question, what is “smart”? Is it the repetition of reading textbooks and regurgitating what we read on an exam? Is it free thinking? Is it the ability of the brain to control its action potentials? Is it as simple as being able to multi task or knowing several languages? What is “smartness”?

As I kept thinking about the question, I came upon more questions. I starting rethinking what I have been questioning all semester, What is thought? What do we do when we are thinking? What is going on inside when we cram for exams? Or pull all-nighters to get that one paper in on time? What is going through our brain? Not just thinking about action potentials but the differences between them? How do we interpret these movements? We obviously don’t feel the action potentials that generate our every movement? I don’t feel the action potentials in my fingers while I write this posting? So how do I know they exist? Is it like believing in G-d and having faith that it exists without actually delving into the hard core research?

  These questions rotate throughout my mind and continue to pile up? I think of the question posed last week, What is reality? How can we relate reality, smartness, thinking, and action potentials? There is a link, even if the link is that I’ve been thinking about these concepts throughout the semester. If being wrong is right in this class, then how do we define smartness? Is it a measure of how wrong you are? Is it a measure of how right you are? Can one measure whether something is wrong or right? How is there no answer to any of these questions. There are more questions? How is the brain smarter than the eye if we think of smartness as the thought processes of the brain? If the eye has no brain of it’s own, then what is the reality of smart? And oppositely, what is the reality of being dumb?  

What is the link between reality, smartness, action potentials and thinking? Is there a link or do we just imagine one? If we are talking about reality, shouldn't we mention imagination