No one can explain what happened after 10-year-old Srinivasa Ramanujan was given a book on trigonometry. By age 13, he was developing sophisticated mathematical theorems on his own. How could a teenage boy from a poor village in India do such a thing with no formal training in advance mathematics? Worse, most of his notebooks were filled with theorems without underlying mathematical proofs. They just seemed to “flow from his brain” with no sign of effort, as one mathematician would later describe.

As word of Srinivasa’s genius spread, he was convinced to move to Cambridge University. But the change took a steep toll in culture shock, personal loneliness and adaptation to England’s climate. Frequently beset with illness, Srinivasa returned to India after five years. He died a year later at age 32, leaving behind thousands of theorems, some of which took decades to verify through formal mathematical reasoning.

It’s a privilege to share a species with a mind like that.

As I think about the many and varied tools of storytelling, I want to briefly celebrate the most vital tool of all, the most complex object in the known universe: the human brain. Like any great tale, the story of the brain is filled with surprise, no small measure of mystery and twinge of some things that may never be explained. As anthropologist Lyall Watson said, “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.”

We are, it turns out, a combination of what we do and what we decide.

In utero, a human baby grows an average of 250,000 brains cells every minute of gestation. At birth, she has the most neurons she ever will have — about 100 billion. After that, the brain is shaped as much or more by experiences as genetics.

For many decades, the dreary province of conventional wisdom held that the brain, like many over-achievers, peaks early in life. The traditional model held that by sometime in early childhood, you are what you are; the rest is just genetics and dumb luck. Conventional wisdom is always conventional, but not always wise. And on this point, apparently wrong.

The real story is not so such much the neurons as the trillions of connections between them that are wired into our brains by experience. We are, it turns out, a combination what we do and what we decide. Volitional effort, otherwise known as concentration, has been shown in brain studies to make actual, immediate, physical changes in the brain’s wiring. In breakthrough research over the past decade, patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder have been shown to make huge changes in the brain by changing their mind. Focus is the key. In other words, if you pay attention, you will literally be a different person by the end of this column. You’re welcome. 

After squandering most of my career as a devout multi-tasker, I made an astonishing discovery a few years ago. When I pay attention to something, and act accordingly, the thing I’m tending to gets better by virtue of the effort. On the other hand, just keeping a bunch of plates spinning usually results in nothing more than broken plates. And it’s not just me. It’s true of anyone — as long as we work within our gifts.

All of this is wonderful news. We are not helpless automatons, victims of our genes and circumstance. We are deeply influenced by genes, of course, but not bound by them. The brain is not just three pounds of gray meat, settled since early childhood. Instead, it is dynamic, constantly rewiring itself, constantly engaged. Or at least, as engaged as we allow it to be.

For those of us in the communications world, this is also sobering news: The brain is rewired and improved by focused concentration, but we are in the business of distraction. We compete for ever-smaller slices of the human attention span.

In addition to serving as an engine of distraction — which ironically does the mind and the brain precious little good — the social networking revolution is emerging as an amazing analogy to the brain itself. It is constantly changing, built and rebuilt by billions of tiny connections.

There’s much more to be explored later, but the virtual brain of cyberspace would be impossible without volitional minds in meatspace. We are able to distract ourselves only because our modern networks were invented by brilliant people who set aside distraction to pursue their passion.

Such passion, like that of Srinivasa Ramanujan and like the creative work we set our minds to every day, is what we were made for — what we were meant for, expressed in music, art, humor, poetry, prayer and, of course, storytelling. These passions are what change us, what move us, what make us human.