My Prescription in a Dangerous World
by Ben Carson, MD
As boys, whenever my brother, Curtis, or I offered our mother an excuse for failing to accomplish something—whenever we complained about some seemingly insurmountable problem, whenever we grew weary or discouraged by some obstacle in the road of life, or especially whenever we whined about anything—she always offered the same response. She would get a puzzled look on her face and ask, “Do you have a brain?”

The implication was crystal clear: If you have a brain, use it! It’s all you need to overcome any problem!

My mother instilled in me a deep respect for the potential of the human brain, and that respect has deepened over the years to an attitude I can only describe as awe. Every time I open a child’s head and see a brain, I marvel at the mystery: This is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what holds all our memories, all our thoughts, all our dreams. This is what makes us different from each other in millions of ways. And yet if I could expose my brain and your brain and place them side by side, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference—even though we might be very different people. That still amazes me.

Inside each human brain are billions and billions of complex interconnections, neurons and synapses, which science has only barely begun to understand. When you add to that the mystery of mind and spirit, the human brain becomes a laboratory so vast and intricate you could work in it for a millennium and hardly scratch the surface.

Whenever I speak to audiences, I try to inspire them to consider the power and implications of such potential. I tell them that no computer

network on earth can come close to the capacity of the average human brain. This resource that each one of us has is a tremendous gift from God—the most complex organ system in the entire universe. Your brain can take in two million bits of information per second. I tell audiences of several thousand people that if I could bring one person up onstage, have her look out at the crowd for one second, and lead her away, fifty years later I could perform an operation, take off the cranial bone, put in some depth electrodes, and stimulate the appropriate area of her brain, and she could remember not only where everyone was sitting, but what they were wearing.

That’s how amazing and complex the human brain is. It’s literally mind-boggling.

When I speak to students I sometimes illustrate this further by asking how many of them remember what they had for lunch in the cafeteria that day. (If I’m addressing accountants, I’ll ask who remembers the last time they did a sum total of values.) The point is to get them to raise their hands.

Then I run through a rapid-fire riff something like this: “Let’s think about what your brain had to do when I asked that question. First, the sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air into your external auditory meatus, travel down to your tympanic membrane, and set up a vibratory force that traveled across the ossicles of your middle ear to the oval and round windows, generating a vibratory force in the endolymph, which mechanically distorts the microcilia, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy, which traveled across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus at the ponto-medullary junction, from there to the superior olivary nucleus, ascending bilaterally up the brain stem through the lateral lemniscus to the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate nucleus, then across the thalamic radiations to the posterior temporal lobes to begin the auditory processing, from there to the frontal lobes, coming down the tract of Vicq d’Azur, retrieving the memory from the medial hippocampal structures and the mammillary bodies, back to the frontal lobes to start the motor response at the Betz cell level, coming down the cortico-spinal tract, across the internal capsule into the cerebral peduncle, descending to the cervicomedullary decussation into the spinal cord gray matter, synapsing, and going out to the neuromuscular junction, stimulating the nerve and the muscle so you could raise your hand.”

Of course, that’s the simplified version. If I were to get into all of the inhibitory and coordinating influences, I would be talking for hours about this one thing.

The point is, we can decry the dangers we face or ignore them or even allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear.

Or we can ask ourselves, do we have a brain?

Then let’s use this incredible tool God has given us to assess the risks that we face every day. We have the means to analyze risks and decide which are worth taking and which should be avoided.

Do you have a brain? Then use it.

That’s the secret.

That’s my simple but powerful prescription for life, love, and success in a dangerous world.

From Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk by Ben Carson, MD