So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. That is going to be optional for the sleep of most people.

Sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-nego­tiable biological necessity. It is your life-support system. I do hope you sleep well.

Whether judged in mo­lecular, cellular, systemic, behavioural, or cognitive terms, the human nervous system is a stupendous piece of biological machin­ery.

Given its accomplish­ments—all the artifacts of human culture, for in­stance—there is good reason for wanting to understand how the brain and the rest of the nervous system work.

The debilitating and costly effects of neurological and psychiatric disease add a further sense of urgency to this quest. The aim of this concept of Emotional Surgery is to highlight the intellectual challenges and excitements—as well as the uncertainties—of what many see as the last great frontier of biological science.

The information presented should serve as a benchmark for professionals in Neuro­sciences, and others who want to understand how the human nervous system operates. Like any other great challenge, neurosci­ence should be, and is, full of debate, dissension, and considerable fun.

What do we know about the inner workings of the human mind? Surely ev­erything that humans do from designing to compos­ing symphonies is not the product of simple cellular interactions and yet it might be because everything that humans do or think or feel is a result of these basic units of brain structure – the Neurons.

The human brain con­tains more than 100 billion neurons just like a single ant can never build an ant hill. A single neuron cannot think, feel or remember. A neuron’s power is a result of its connections to other neurons. Each neuron is connected to as many as millions of its neighbours.

These trillions of connec­tions provide the playing field upon which complex activities of the brain takes place. Each neuron can turn its neighbour on or off depending on the signal it sends. And the result­ing stable patterns of neurons firing represents memories, images and thoughts. We do not yet understand the relation­ship between neuron activity and mental expe­rience. We do not know what the precise pattern of memory or image or thought looks like.

We do not yet know how to read the cere­bral code of the neurons but progress is being made through emotional surgery, neurokinetics aesthetics engineering and surgery.

We can now watch exact­ly how various stimuli and memories cause the firing of hundreds of neurons. Perhaps these techniques will allow us to work our way up from the activities of a few neurons to see the structure that emerges from the process.

By Robert Ekow Grimmond-Thompson