August 5, 2025
Your Amazing Brain
Whatever you practice — tennis or typing, reading or rapping, it’s useful to notice that brains are capable of processing several words, thoughts, perceptions per second. This is normal and enjoyable. In everyday speech, just regular people speak a couple of words per second. Spanish speakers tend to go around 3.6 words per second, and French and English are a bit slower. Japanese speakers often go faster than Spanish. In Rap, Busta Rhymes and Eminem blow the lid off, hitting more than 4 words per second. It’s ecstatic to throw yourself into listening so deeply that you are receiving the message.When you meditate, welcome this speed, and even celebrate it. There will probably be times when it feels like there is some space between thoughts, and even that you are watching them from a comfortable distance. Know that celebrating flow is one of the “open secrets” of a happy and healthy meditation practice.
People in every field celebrate speed and responsiveness, except in the general field of thought around meditation, yoga, and whatever mindfulness is.
Meditation teachings tend to be clueless about the natural speed of perception, always complaining about the number and quality of thought, as if this is a problem. It’s not. It’s exciting. Literally, each impulse of thought is a current of excitement.
In the Broadway musical Hamilton, the average speed of speech is 2.4 words per second, and parts of “Guns and Ships” by Marquis de Lafayette race along at 6.3 words per second.
Our brains and bodies are always streaming with rivers of electricity and vibrant fluids that sustain life. This miracle of creation is not something you or I invented, we find ourselves here in these bodies. The whole universe has been building the materials we are made of, since the beginning of time. The dance of the elements taking place in every star continues unto this moment in the motion of breath and blood flowing through every cell of our bodies.
Any body on Earth is a whole ecology of little streams feeding into rivers. Whether it’s an ant or a horse, electrical signals that are also chemical flows are streaming through senses and nerves as that body interacts with the Body of the Earth. These streams are composed of intelligent life energy manifesting now as electrical charge, now as fluid flowing.
Neurons are cells specializing in receiving, processing, and transmitting electrical signals throughout the body. Your neurons are supporting you right now to be breathing, assimilating the air, reading this, thinking, wondering, and walking. Your neurons are supporting you to live in joy or walk around feeling sorry for yourself.
Ants, according to ant experts, have around 250,000 neurons they use to run around, find your picnic, grab a crumb, then carry it back to its nest to supply the underground farm that feeds the babies. You have around 86,000,000,000 neurons, according to scientists. That’s 86 billion. Each neuron has somewhere between a few thousand to 10,000 synapses connecting it to other neurons. This is the Body Internet, the Innernet, and if you multiply 86 billion by a few thousand, you realize that your little brain is running thousands of trillions of tiny electrical signals per second. This is the song of life, a continuous hum and symphony of the life force, given the beautiful name pranashakti, in Sanskrit.
Any brain, ant or horse, is awesome, but Nature has really outdone herself with mammalian brains in terms of inconceivable numbers of connectedness. In any given moment, a mammalian brain is thinking, computing, thousands of trillions of microscopic thoughts, each one a tiny impulse of energy. When a few neurons get together and decide to say, “Hey, conscious mind! We detect a NEED – it’s time for you to step away from the computer and go drink some water,” that group of impulses might attract your attention. When you recognize that thought as a thought, as a need, it is wrapped in a whole set of movements and choices. Your body quietly activates the motions involved in grabbing that cup of coffee, water, juice, Red Bull, Monster, Bang, Alani Nu, or Mountain Dew.
Whether you notice them or not, billions of thoughts are quietly flowing in your body, and that’s fine. Just like you can be at a concert enjoying yourself, dancing, with thousands of other people around, so in meditation you can be in rapture listening to the song of life while billions of teeny tiny electrical thought signals are flowing everywhere in your body.
When thoughts are noisy, it is because you have needs. Somewhere in your body, your heart, your relationship to other people, there is a need that is calling out to be attended to.
—Dr. Lorin Roche
