Getting Our Body and Brain


Courtesy: National Human Genome Research Institute

The figure on the right shows how two germ cells from the parents, a sperm from the father and an egg from the mother, unite to conceive a single-cell life form that grows up to become an adult. It is unimaginable, how we all begin the journey of his life as a minuscule single-cell zygote, about a fiftieth of a millimetre in size, clinging to the wall of his mother’s uterus? Did we have a brain then?

As a single cell form of life, we start our life without a brain. But we inherit the seed of our brain from our parents just as we inherit the form of the rest of us from them. The blue print of our body, the brain and our mind is in our genes. We inherit half them from the mother and the half from the father. The brain and mind develop as our body does.

What is mind? Mind is something on the interior that runs the behaviour of the body. The genes on the interior runs the behaviour of the cell body.

Does the cell body behave? Does it need to survive? Are their dangers lurking around that threaten its survival? How does it know whether there are dangers or not? How does it save itself if there are? We need to understand these secrets to understand the nature of our mind to learn how to cultivate it.