Pause for Thought - Fish Brains

Pause for thought - Thursday 07 September 2006

FISH BRAINS

A fish has one of the smallest brains in the world. And fish have the shortest concentration span of any known creature. Thirty seconds and their mental video automatically switches to rewind.

So as a kid I was never able to understand why people kept telling me that crunching fried fish heads was good for my brain and would make me ‘a clever boy’! And I used to think that the ‘cod liver oil is good for you’ line, was nothing more than a sinister adult trick to make you drink yucky stuff.

But now it’s official. Because more than 5000 students are to be given daily doses of fishy ‘clever capsules’ to improve their GCSE results. At a cost of £1m, Year 11 student in Durham’s County Council’s 36 Comprehensive schools will get a daily dose of fish – as long as their parents sign up. And there seems to be a lot of proof that the stuff really does work.

Well, even it doesn’t make them smarter it’s one way of parents getting their own back for the summer holidays.

I still can’t get my head around the relationship between fish oil and GCSE passes. But that could explain an awful lot about my exam results! But I am always fascinated by the eternal potential lurking around inside of us, trapped, perhaps by autism or suffocated by our history. Potential nonetheless, which is screaming to get out.

I can’t imagine for one moment that anyone is suggesting that holding your nose and gobbling six capsules everyday actually puts anything in us. But it does, miraculously pull something out.

So this is precisely why I have no problem believing that we are made incredibly in the image of God. That – as the Psalmist said – we are made a little lower than heavenly beings. That our sins are bigger than his nature in us - only if we want them to be.

So even in our worst nightmares about ourselves, God is always egging us on to be better than we think we are allowed to be.

Joel Edwards, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance