Category Archives: Philosophy

Abiogenesis, Atheism, Cosmology, Evolutionism, Faith, Intelligent Design, Keeping It Real, King James Bible, Laws of Nature, Liberate your Mind!, Materialism, Miracles, Monism vs Dualism

Of 10 highest IQ’s on earth, at least 8 are Theists, at least 6 are Christians: Examiner.com.

Saturday 12 July 2014 Tim 21 Comments

Andrew Magdy Kamal – apparently the highest IQ ever recorded, at 231.734. This was accomplished last year (2013) just before he turned 17. This includes an adjustment made for his age (which is done routinely for minors), so only time will tell if he maintains his position, but he is listed in Record Holder’s Republic for Highest IQ and Highest IQ average, and it looks pretty good. He is a he is a staunch conservative and a member of the Republican Tea Party. He is also the founder of the Coptic Orthodox Messianicans Group. Andrew Magdy Kamal hopes to use his talents and intelligence to spread the news of Messiah Yeshua (Jesus Christ) his hero, and he lives in Michigan.

Abdessellam Jelloul – apparently the highest IQ ever scored by an adult in the “advanced IQ test” was by Jelloul, who scored an adult IQ of 198. This was in a 2012 test which included 13 dimensions of intelligence (analytical, spatial, logical, memory, musical, linguistic, philosophical, moral, spiritual, interpersonal, intra-personal, bodily and naturalist). Unlike other tests, the advanced IQ test includes more measures that other tests cannot assess. I tweeted Mr. Jelloul a question about his beliefs in September of last year, and he graciously replied to me that he does “believe in God, a Supreme Architect of the universe” (see a screenshot of this tweet in the slideshow).

Christopher Michael Langan – has a verified IQ of at least 195. Langan achieved a perfect score on the SAT, but dropped out of Montana State University after concluding his professors weren’t qualified to teach him anything. ABC’s 20/20 measured his IQ (as an adult) to be between 195 and 210. Langan has indicated in his writings numerous that he believes in God, for example, in William Dembski’s book “Uncommon Dissent”, he wrote: “…since Biblical accounts of the genesis of our world and species are true but metaphorical, our task is to correctly decipher the metaphor in light of scientific evidence also given to us by God”.

Terence Tao – his IQ was estimated to be between 220 and 230 by the Davidson Institute when he was about ten years old. At eight years old, Tao achieved a score of 760 on the pre-1995 SAT, received a Ph.D from Princeton at 20 and at 24 became the youngest ever full professor at UCLA. I couldn’t find anything about Tao’s metaphysical views. He’s obviously a tremendous mathematician, but doesn’t seem to post much outside of mathematics.

Christopher Hirata – has a verified IQ of 225, calculated when he was in his teens. Hirata skipped middle school, and at 16 was working with NASA on a project exploring the possibility of colonizing Mars. The Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s student paper, where Hirata began attending for his PhD in Astrophysics at 18, reported that his IQ is around 225. Hirata posted the following to his Facebook on October 31, 2013: “Today’s experience: saying the Lord’s prayer with a homeless couple on Colorado Boulevard. It may not feed or shelter them, but I hope that it made a difference in their lives.” So he is clearly both a Theist and a Christian.

Evangelos Katsioulis – has apparently scored a 198 as an adult. Katsioulis is a Greek Doctor/Psychiatrist/Philosopher who has publicly referred to his belief in human souls several times. For example, he did a lecture in 2008 called “BODY AND SOUL”, and made clear that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically in it with lines like: “The soul is not the body. It is not the flesh. It is the spirit.” He is apparently a follower of a strand of Christianity influenced by Teilhard de Chardin.

Rick Rosner – has apparently scored a 192 as an adult, after years of honing his IQ test-taking skills. Has been a writer for the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and appeared on “So You Want to be A Millionaire”. Rosner denied that he was an atheist on Twitter, after an inquiry. He also retweeted this Einstein quote: “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically” and in answer to the question “You know there’s a God?” he answered “Maybe. Suspect there’s an infinity of gods”.

Mislav Predavec – has apparently scored a 192 as an adult. [Update – I initially had the wrong quote linked here]. His Christianity can easily be confirmed by a beautiful response he wrote to a friend who had become a Christian in one of the groups he belongs to and which was posted online:

“David, I am so glad hearing good news about your convalescence, and more about your enlightenment, you are aware now that your suffer and pain, your giftedness and sense are a part of plan. Truly, all this can´t exist without being leading it intentionally. Atheistic explanation that everything is accidental progress is full of holes. Stay well my friend.

Mislav”

Gary Kasparov – is alleged to have an IQ of 190. He was perhaps the most universally attested-to as a top-shelf intellect, so it was unthinkable to leave him off of this list. In 2003 Kasparov played to a draw against a chess computer that could calculate three million positions per second. He is considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time. Kasparov has described himself as a “self-appointed Christian”

Kenneth Ferrell – has apparently scored a 190 as an adult. If I have located the right Kenneth Ferrell online, it’s abundantly clear from his own words that he’s a Christian. Since I’m not sure, I didn’t include him in my count of believers.

So you can see that the brightest of the bright have not foreclosed on the possibility of the existence of an Intelligent Designer. Juxtaposed with the fact that most Scientists are not atheists, I’d say that the Appeal to Authority on which atheist debators have long relied has dissolved.

Steve J. Williams is the author of What Your Atheist Professor Doesn’t Know (But Should)

Read full article >>>Here<<< Read more.... Atheism. The Philosophy of Small Minds.

Pasteur’s Law, Creation Science vs Nose Bone Atheism.

Faith, Science, and Reason. The Pomposity of Atheism.

David Berlinski—Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

The Walls are closing in on Atheism… not Theism.

Rapturous Amazement! The Advance of Science Converts The High Priest of Atheism to Deism. A Flew.

Abortion, Electric Wizard, Green Party, Semantics, State Rape

Legalise Drugs and Murder

Tuesday 10 June 2014 Richard 5 Comments

Green Party to decriminalise abortion

The Green Party will decriminalise abortion and assert the right of women to make decisions regarding their own health and the wellbeing of their family or whanau.

But will the Green Party assert the right of unborn women to make decisions regarding their own health? Check your born privilege!

Abortion is currently a crime under the Crimes Act. It is only legal if two consultants agree that the pregnancy would seriously harm the woman’s mental or physical health or that the fetus would have a serious disability.

So let’s get this straight. Abortion is already legal if “the fetus would have a serious disability.” That’s disability based discrimination, isn’t it?

“The Green Party trusts women to make decisions that are best for them and their whānau/family,” Green Party women’s spokesperson Jan Logie said.

“The Green Party believes the time has come for New Zealand to take an honest approach to abortion, to treat it as the health issue it is, and remove it from the crime statutes.

I think the time has come for the Green Party to take an honest approach to abortion, and acknowledge that abortion is killing an unborn child. Abortion is a form of infanticide.

“The fact that 99 percent of abortions are approved on ‘mental health’ grounds and that rape is not grounds for an abortion reveals the dishonesty of the current legal situation.

“By keeping abortion a crime, New Zealand has created an unnecessary stigma around abortion that has led to delays, erratic access to terminations depending on where you are in the country, and unnecessarily late terminations.

Perhaps there should be a stigma around killing babies. Nice to have?

“Decriminalisation will reduce the stigma and judgement that surrounds abortion, and enable abortions to be performed earlier in pregnancy, which is safer for women.

“The Green Party’s policy would allow terminations after 20 weeks gestation only when the woman would otherwise face serious permanent injury to her health or in the case of severe fetal abnormalities

“Our policy will ensure that women have access to neutral counselling, if they want it, and that women who choose to continue with their pregnancy are given more support and are not financially penalised for doing so.

“We would also ensure parents are fully informed about the support available for families and people living with disabilities and address discrimination against disabled people that exists in the current laws around abortion,” Ms Logie said.

I don’t see how the Green Party can “address discrimination against disabled people that exists in the current laws around abortion” by amending the abortion laws to make it legal to kill disabled people in the womb. But maybe my head’s just too muddled by smoking too much of the other thing the Greens want to decriminalise?

When is a disability not a disability? When it’s a severe fetal abnormality.

Green Party women’s spokesperson Jan Logie also posted this clarification on Facebook.

Some people have raised concerns that our policy might allow abortions post 20 weeks based on disability. This is not the intent of the policy. The Greens have a commitment to human rights and the acknowledgement of international obligations runs under all of our policies. The UN Committee with responsibility for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has already ruled that any distinction in abortion law on the grounds of fetal abnormality breaches the CRPD so our policy will not do that. The intent is to re to allow abortion after 20 weeks for a baby who has conditions so severe that they are extremely unlikely to survive post birth.

So the intent is to allow abortion after 20 weeks for a baby who has conditions so severe that they are extremely unlikely to survive post birth. But not if those severe conditions are fetal abnormalities. What other severe conditions are such that a baby is unlikely to survive post birth? Being sucked out of the womb with a vacuum cleaner?

Provisions later in the policy make it clear that we wish to extend protections against disability based discrimination.

We just read (above) that abortion is already legal if “the fetus would have a serious disability.” Is this the disability based discrimination the Greens want to protect against?

Also, if a baby has “conditions so severe that they are extremely unlikely to survive post birth,” why not just let nature take its course? That would be the Green thing to do, after all.

I’m not sure what disgusts me the most. Killing babies in the womb or the Green Party’s blatant contradictions, Orwellian newspeak and senseless rape of the English language.

Consciousness, Heroism

RIP Alexander Shulgin

Tuesday 3 June 2014 Richard 2 Comments

Psychonaut Alexander Shulgin has died.

Kua hinga te tōtara o te wao nui o Tāne

Thank you and God bless you, Sasha.

Bogus Science, Cosmology, Evolutionism, Keeping It Real, Liberate your Mind!, Materialism, Miracles, Monism vs Dualism, Science, Zombies

Christians cant have tattoos!??? The history of militant atheists suppression of science for the sake of maintaining the Materialist world-view.

Sunday 1 June 2014 Tim Leave a comment

b87cb_62fd9_christian-tattoo-designs

Genesis, Justice, S.O.D., Semantics

Harm minimisation vs. harm elimination

Thursday 29 May 2014 Richard 3 Comments

It’s important to say what you mean and mean what you say.

If you don’t say what you mean and mean what you say, you will likely be misunderstood.

The trouble is, even if you do say what you mean and mean what you say, you will still likely be misunderstood!

Sad but true.

It all goes back to the Babel incident recorded in the Book of Genesis.

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (NIV)

Later, much later … we have modern telecommunications technology. We have the Internet and language translators such as the Babelfish). Microsoft readies real-time language translator for Skype. Is anything we plan now possible for us?

No, it’s not. Our language is still confused! People can’t seem to speak clearly. Ambiguity is ubiquitous. Even if we do say what we mean and mean what we say … it takes two to tango. Communication is as much the listener’s responsibility as the speaker’s. People can’t seem to speak clearly, and they can’t seem to listen clearly either. They’ll hear you say what they thought you meant. Even before you said it.

Even if what you meant is what you said and what you said is what you meant, you will still likely be misunderstood!

Here’s a recent case study. It’s an edited snippet of a conversation I had on Facebook with a libertarian friend. (No prizes for guessing whom!)

Do you agree that a government should minimise the unjust harm the government actively inflicts on its own citizens? Yes or No?

No it must be absolutely eliminated…and it is *we the people* who do this…. not the government itself. *they dont make the rules. We do. They merely enforce the duties we delegate to them…. Government for the People… by the people.
Their Duty is to *uphold our rights*….. whether or not we Harm ourselves to a greater or lesser extent…. via ignorance or choice.
When you say Governments unjust harm should be ‘minimised’ rather than eliminated, you are saying that there is a tolerable level unjust harm that is allowable….

That’s not what I’m saying at all. Or is it?!

verb: minimise
reduce (something, especially something undesirable) to the smallest possible amount or degree.

To minimise harm is to reduce harm to the smallest possible amount or degree.

To eliminate harm is to reduce harm to zero.

To minimise harm or to eliminate harm completely? These come to the exact same thing if it turns out that the smallest possible amount of harm is zero! The question is, consistent with its ongoing role as a properly functioning proper government, what is the smallest possible amount of unjust harm the government can actively inflict on its own citizens? Is it, in fact, zero?

It’s not zero.

What is the proper function of a proper government? My friend says that government’s duty

is to *uphold our rights*

but what the hell does that even mean? Uphold? Wat.

According to my understanding of libertarianism, the government really has only two proper functions, viz., defence of the realm and administration of justice.

For defence of the realm, we have the Ministry of Defence … and (arguably) the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (but not Trade).

For administration of justice, we have the Ministry of Justice … and the subsidiary Ministry of Police and Ministry of Corrections (so-called).

The police are there to apprehend those who infringe our rights. The prison system is there to punish the perpetrators, according to principles of justice. To “uphold” our rights is merely to apprehend those who infringe our rights and bring them to justice … after the fact. Strictly speaking, according to my libertarian philosophy, the police have no business preventing crime. That’s what private security companies are for.

Now, let’s consider the government’s proper function of administering justice. Because of the very nature of earthly justice systems, it turns out that the smallest possible amount of unjust harm a government may inflict on its own citizens is greater than zero.

Sad but true.

In administering justice, earthly justice systems are prone to two basic kinds of error. Punishing the innocent and letting the guilty walk free. These two errors are not independent.

We could eliminate the first kind of error—punishing the innocent—by letting everyone walk free. But that would be a cop-out. It would not be administering justice at all.

We could eliminate the second kind of error—letting the guilty walk free—by locking everyone up. But that would be to unjustly harm the innocent en masse. It would not be administering justice at all.

In practice, our justice system is heavily weighted towards avoiding the second kind of error. As a result, very few innocent people are ever sent to prison. As a result, very many guilty people walk free.

Governments harm people. Even proper libertarian governments. Unfortunately, there is a tolerable level of unjust harm that is allowable. It’s just a harsh fact of life but one that we must accept.

Atheism, Bogus Science, Consciousness, Cosmology, Easy Listening, Evolutionism, Faith, Heaven, Hell, Hope, Indoctrination, Keeping It Real, Liberate your Mind!, Love, Monism vs Dualism, Personal Identity, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Quandaries, Rationality, Revelation, Science, There is a God!, Zombies

Space Truckin: Dead for 45 minutes.

Sunday 25 May 2014 Tim 10 Comments

reaper

From >>>Here<<< A trucker in Ohio shocked hospital staff after coming back to life nearly an hour after he lost his pulse following a massive heart attack — but it’s what he claims to have seen during those tense moments that has him sure there’s an afterlife. Brian Miller, 41, was opening the lid of a container when he knew something felt wrong — he immediately called 911 and told the operator, “I’m a truck driver and I think I’m having a heart attack.” Sure enough, his main artery was completely blocked — causing what’s known as a “widow-maker” heart attack He was rushed to a local hospital where doctors managed to revive him and clear the blockage, but after regaining consciousness and feeling the pain dissipate, he developed ventricular fibrillation, when the heart starts quivering wildly and is unable to pump blood. “He had no heart rate, he had no blood pressure, he had no pulse,” said ICU nurse Emily Bishop. “I mean think about that.” Doctor’s performed “strong, hard, fast CPR” and shocked Miller four times to try to revive him, but had no luck. trrrkk

It was during that time that Miller said he slipped away into a celestial world, “The only thing I remember I started seeing the light, and started walking toward the light.”

He described walking down a flower-lined path into white light — until he came upon his step mother, who had died recently, “She was the most beautiful thing when I seen her, it was like the first day I met her, (she) looked so happy.”

Miller remembered, “She grabbed ahold of my arm and told me, ‘It’s not your time, you don’t need to be here, we’ve got to take you back you’ve got things to go and do.’”

After 45 minutes his pulse returned “out of nowhere,” Bishop said. ”His brain had no oxygen for 45 minutes, the fact that he’s up walking, talking, laughing, everything is amazing.”

Glad to be back amongst the living, Miller now says there is one thing he is sure of, “There is an afterlife and people need to believe in it, big time.”

********************

mag5

I read an article recently that suggested that as many as 20 million people had had Near Death Experiences, and that despite Materialist monists fervent denials, there has been accounts which have ‘independent’ corroboration, and also other interesting ‘anomalies’ such as blind people ‘Seeing things’… for which the term ‘Mindsight’ was coined.
These experiences suggest that consciousness, thought, memory, etc carry on after Zero brain activity…. which supports the Dualistic theory of Body and soul… thwarting Monism which insists all our personality and consciousness is generated by the brain.

I find the article is interesting because it articulates my own scepticism about Materialist scepticism for Spiritual realities.

The truckie story above is a classic example of *What really happens at death* … ALOT!…. which Materialists have to reduce down to illusion.

I actually have a Jewish friend who died in a Car crash… was dead for several hours… and revived.
She reported seeing Jesus (which was a surprise… being a Jew), and meeting her Gand Father who said Nanna will be ‘here soon’.
She reported all this to her parents, and within a few weeks… Nanna had passed away.
None of this is explicable via notions of ‘hallucinations of a dying brain… loss of oxygen, etc’… Monitors detect Zero brain activity, and when people temporarily black out from lack of Oxygen they experience confusion and or memory loss, not Lucidity of thought… not vivid memory… and their black outs are not *Life altering*…. *perspective Game changers*…. which is a very common result of Near death experiences.
Objectively speaking, these experiences ought not to be written off as delusion simply because they don’t fit well with the common assumptions of the Material paradigm.
The Free thinker will be open to consider greater possibilities…. even if the evidence demands a person to forsake their cherished assertions.

Tim Wikiriwhi.

What is real?

Tuesday 20 May 2014 Richard Leave a comment

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. (NIV)

In what sense is the world “real”? What are we asking, when we ask that question?

Anna Salamon doesn’t know. I don’t know. Perhaps Jordan Peterson knows.

I’m going to talk to you today about a different way of looking at what real is.

It’s not easy to figure out what real is because we don’t really have infinite knowledge and so we’re always making some sets of presuppositions about what’s most real.

It really matters what you assume is most real because you base the decisions that you make, that run the entire course of your life, on those assumptions, whether you recognise it or not. And if you get the assumptions wrong, or even if you leave them incomplete, you’re going to pay a big price for it.

Consciousness, Cosmology, Hedonism, Hell, Liberate your Mind!, Nihilism, Psychology, Satan Laughing Spreads His Wings, Zombies

The Jaws of Hell. H R Giger

Wednesday 14 May 2014 Tim 23 Comments

H.R.-Giger-Photo-by-Katharina-Vonow

H R Giger has died… Aged 74.
By all accounts Giger was Possessed.
He gloried in Satanism and perversion.
His creations preyed on Humanity like Spiders eating flies.
He turned his God’given talents to Infernal ends.
Though he is Dead, his works will Go on Freaking the S#%t out of Generations to come, and inspiring other Devil worshippers, Nihilists, and Teens.
I dont know if it’s true or not yet I remember hearing a story once, that Giger sent some his works by plane for an exhibition to somewhere, yet they were stopped at the boarder by Customs officers concerned that they were photographs of Hell.

giger3

When I say ‘by all accounts’…. I simply mean that these are the impressions his art has left upon me… yet I cant deny that his works have always fascinated me from the first moment I saw them… I think it was in Playboy.
There is pleasure in sin.
His artwork appeals to all things Ungodly and Carnal which inhabits Human nature.
He capitalised upon our fear of the unknown.
Yet in the Final Judgement will he be Deemed to have been a ‘trend setter’ or the Ultimate follower and slave?

giger_necro041

By this I mean that when I hear some Rap songs, or watch Family guy, or See my fellow Bloggers Death Metal Tube vids…. setting aside their obvious artistic talents… I get the intuitive insight that these artists are a sort of ‘Knee jerk reaction’ to an overbearing ‘Christian society’… and as being an actual selling of ones soul to everything which is Base in Human Nature… ie that far from being Leaders … with the masses following in their wake, these Modern Art forms are the ultimate surrender to the pop Trend existent in Humanity since Adam ate the Forbidden fruit….the desire to escape morality and plunge head long into the abyss.
They are the ultimate conformists.

I think they consistently demonstrate the Ultimate destination for a society in decline…. a society which has Utterly rejected Christian Cosmology… and represents a Climax…. a result far worse than Nihilism (which may be said to be represented by Abstract Impressionism)….
The ultimate end of this Decent is one step further… intentional Hell and depravity.

Pro-actively Malignant Soul rather than a more Neutral Nihilism and disorder are the ultimate embodiments of Atheism… the Ultimate Anti-Christianity.

Just how Unholy and Low can Humanity stoop?

hr_giger_022

So to my way of thinking these Artists represent a Free fall… not an Heroic assent.
Satanism is Trendy Cool these days.

I don’t expect my comments will be very popular with Giger’s Fans… the legions whom enjoy his depravity.
It feels kinda weird to be writing such a moralizing criticism, considering I enjoy his Art myself.
I am doing my best to try and understand how he fits into the grand scheme of things, and why his Bizarre Subject Matter has such appeal to Carnal souls.

Herbert-family-guy-characters-19379157-650-520

Gigers Art… Like Seth MacFarlane’s Cartoons, Feed upon every vile lust and Mockery of Holiness, which dwell within us.
Their popularity is a testament to the extent of our social moral decay.
It bothers me that I enjoy them… It evidences my own spiritual condition.
I dont accept the excuses that entertaining ‘Art’, Acting, or Humour makes the Perverse and depraved acceptable.

Why do human beings find Circus Gladiators, or Feeding Christians to the Lions, Or Gore Movies ‘entertaining’???
Surely this Psyche is a testament to the truth of the Bible which say Humanity is a Fallen race of beings.

The biggest shock that guys like Giger, and Maynard James Keenan will get when they stand before God is how deceived they were about every thing they did.
They thought they were the embodiment of Freedom and innovation, when ultimately their works are a testament to their absolute slavery to sin.

May God have mercy upon his Soul… and mine.
Tim Wikiriwhi

Mankind is on the verge of creating Sentient artificial intelligence? BULLSHIT!

Monday 5 May 2014 Tim 19 Comments

mimicking-biological-synapses

It amazes me just how ridiculous are the myths of Materialism!
That all life forms are the result of mindless accidents.
That ‘unguided’ evolution can change a worm into a human with the ‘magic wand’ of time.
Etc Etc.
And this fundamental superstition of Materialist Naturalism has multitudes of whacky spin-offs… one being that Human consciousness is simply a product of a complex arrangement of atoms.
Following this rationale we end up with Sci-fi movies like the Terminator, whereby Machines have become self aware and decide that Humanity needs to be eradicated.
Now while I like a good sci-fi movie, It is tragic that the computing scientific community have been making such bold claims that they are on the verge of creating Humanoid Artificial intelligence, and are proposing such absurd moral dilemmas as granting their created so-called smart machines ‘Rights’!

Check out this link >>>> ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is already here. But how will the singularity, or the point at which machines achieve sentience be received by humanity?

How they can say such things with a straight face…. and why legions of otherwise intelligent people actually believe these are serious Moral questions which are eminent is a testimony to just how unfathomably deep their faith in Materialism really is!
They seem to accept the Idea that consciousness is merely a product of material complexity as axiomatic… only questioned by religious nutters who cling to primitive notions of a Super-natural reality.

Forget the fact that the latest scientific discoveries in Physics actually proves that our universe is not absolute, but finite, and that therefore a more primary reality *must exist*, and from which our universe was caused.

And the latest discoveries in scientific understanding of the Brain is also rendering Atheist materialism more and more absurd…. and exploding any delusions that Humanity is about to create sentient computer-beings.

Read the following….

Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth.

Researchers at Stanford develop a new imaging method that enables visualization in unprecedented detail of the myriad connections between nerve cells in the brain.

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) that humans haven’t been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week.

To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.

They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.