Every Time a Light Goes Off New Brain Cells Are Being Born

The culminating proof of an hypothesis that was proffered by what Bernhard Riemann denominated "geistesmassen" or loosely "thought-masses" some 150 years ago is to be applauded. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute have demonstrated that neurogenesis in mice correlates with learning and memory. This has been for readers of these pages been a recurring theme from the first.

But here I want to pause for a moment to reflect on why with what would see to be no empirical evidence Riemann could have foretold this astounding development. The effort to locate some intimate connection between the "soul" and the material goes back to the earliest of thinkers. Leibniz who successfully refuted Descartes' formula for force, posited an harmonic principle of continuous development among differential degrees of substance in his great work the Monadology.

It was a major setback for humanity that Leibniz' bid to become prime minister of England was put down by the Cabal of practitioners of the black arts promoting the crazed Isaac Newton's useless mathematical scribblings. It is to be rued that this anti German prejudice continued to be fueled in the nascent American republic. For example, it was considered slander to label Poe's writings "Germanic." The fact that Schiller's ideas of aesthetics were instrumental in ousting that meglomaniac Napoleon notwithstanding...

But the genius of Franklin's Constitution that hearkens back to Cusa's Universal Concordance principles knows no boundaries religious or dogmatic. And it is the establishment of a government of, by, and for the wise that promotes the improvements in physical wealth that correlates with scientific breakthroughs, that provides the proof of the same principle discovery of the function of neurogenesis writ large. So, it is only lawful that there is a concrete parallelism in the realm of the small, even within the brain of a mouse! For as Leibniz would have it, we are not a blank slate thrown into this world as empty potter's vessels, but rather the willful microcosm of unfolding universal harmonic and continuing development best exemplified most immediately in the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven.