The pleasure of the 10 million
10 million is the round number that is handy if we want to refer to the population of Portugal. This country is Atlantic, and yet still many people mistaken it for Mediterranean, a term that refers to the sea "in the middle of the lands”. Just 10 million years ago, however, the tectonic plates of Africa and Asia definitely touched the Middle East and closed the Sea of Thetis. And thus the Mediterranean was separated from the Indian, the ocean that bathes India and through which Afonso de Albuquerque arrived in Goa, in the 16th century, precisely in its year 10, when the Portuguese were dominating in the East.
10 million is, in fact, the number of people believed to have died in India due to the bubonic plague, in an epidemic outbreak during the 19th century. This epidemic was so terrible that it is estimated that already in the 14th century, for a period of just four years, the entire European population was reduced in 50%. In the lack of an explanation, terror and superstition ruled and everything was a scapegoat: the obvious guilty, the mice, were ignored and misfortune was attributed to witchcraft, jews and comets.
10 million kilometres is, not surprisingly, the length that a comet’s tail can reach when solar winds lift its dust and drag it through space. This is an insignificant distance. However, if we think on a universal scale – the grouping of galaxies we are in is called Local Group and it spreads for some 10 million light years, a distance that our brain cannot perceive if not by reason, even though the light goes in through our eyes.
10 million is, curiously, the number of neurons that the human body uses to capture information from the surrounding world and forward it to the central nervous system. Our brain is divided into two hemispheres and the information is processed by the associative neurons, which add up to twenty million – 10 million serving each hemisphere. As we know today, both halves of the brain have some sort of independent life or, at least, different skills. While the right hemisphere is capable of emotions and information synthesis, the left one performs geometric, analytical and logical representations.
10 million is, thus, a number that the left hemisphere should understand, and even more so when it derives from complex arithmetic. So, when we realised that in 2009 INESC Porto closed its financial year overcoming, for the first time, the 10 million Euro mark in budgetary execution, no doubt remains that such amount will be weighed, counted and divided by the left hemisphere. Of course, that is not yet our turnover, but if we think that the Plan for 2010 already contemplates such a scenario, we can boldly take that step and place such claim. Reason assists us – and yet, when we see the number, also a strange synthesis of emotions take us by surprise and fulfil us: admiration, pride, awe, confidence, pleasure.
10 million Euros: if we didn’t have a right hemisphere of a brain, would we smile this much, and with such satisfaction? Possibly, though not for the same causes. But it is better to be of this nature, reason and emotion, as we've always dreamed of, and achieve pleasure combining both processes.
