Photo: jetheriot
Brains pulse with patterns of activation, sending out signals of life. These signals are invisible. Brains cannot see other brains directly, after all. In this way brains are blind to one another. Instead, brains communicate with each other through the bodies they inhabit. The muscles and the eyeballs to which brains are attached serve as their interpreters. One brain finds another brain and broadcasts signals in its direction. The second brain picks up the signals. Picks them up, even understands them. There is a warm reception. The brains hum in harmony. The brains are attuned. They pulse in a shared vacation from the dark and lonely wilderness. And the two feel felt. There is a knowledge between people which is shared without words. Words cannot ever describe this other way of knowing. Words can't go that deep.
The gazes of a mother and her infant, for example, are interlocked for years post partum, a dozen hours a day or more at first. Each day the brain of the mother sends out signals using the muscles of her face to broadcast its message of connection in the shape of a friendly smile. The pulse of her brain finds its voice not in her voice but in the loveliness of her smiling silence. Since the brain of the infant is unfinished when it emerges from the oven of its mother – no more than a brainstem really – it can breathe and move and suck and swallow, but it cannot reciprocate the smile. Eventually, with stimulation, the infant's brain matures into a new phase of sophistication. It learns to register and recognize the broadcast of its mother and move the tiny muscles of its cheeks to broadcast a smile in return. All of this happens wordlessly.