Is stress always a problem?

‘Cerebral climaxes’ are those moments when we experience a high, a life-changing realisation, a joyous epiphany. I have studied these brain peaks for many years, and they are associated with crises and extreme emotions. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow called them ‘peak experiences’, but the truth is that we know surprisingly little about how these climaxes come to pass – and, indeed, about how the brain itself works.

Our ignorance was highlighted recently when Harvard and Google AI experts announced that they had successfully mapped one cubic millimetre of brain tissue (about one millionth of an adult human brain). The imaging and mapping exercise produced 1.4 million petabytes of data. One neuron was found to have over 5,000 connection points to other neurons, of which we have an estimated 86 billion. A member of the Harvard team, Professor Jeff Lichtman, said: ‘We don’t understand these things, but I can tell you they suggest there’s a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.