Your brain blew up because it got into an infinite recursion. That's a common beginner mistake.
Believe it or not, you already understand recursion, you're just being dragged down by a common, but faulty metaphor for a function: a small box with stuff that comes in and out.
Think instead of a task or procedure, such as "find out more about recursion on the net". That's recursive and you have no problem with it. To complete this task you might:
a) Read a Google's result page for "recursion"
b) Once you've read it, follow the first link on it and...
a.1)Read that new page about recursion
b.1)Once you've read it, follow the first link on it and...
a.2)Read that new page about recursion
b.2)Once you've read it, follow the first link on it and...
As you can see, you've been doing recursive stuff for a long time without any problems.
For how long would you keep doing that task? Forever until your brain blows up? Of course not, you will stop at a given point, whenever you believe you have completed the task.
There's no need to specify this when asking you to "find out more about recursion on the net", because you are a human and you can infer that by yourself.
Computer's can't infer jack, so you must include an explicit ending: "find out more about recursion on the net, UNTIL you understand it or you have read a maximum of 10 pages".
You also inferred that you should start at Google's result page for "recursion", and again that's something a computer can't do. The complete description of our recursive task must also include an explicit starting point:
"find out more about recursion on the net, UNTIL you understand it or you have read a maximum of 10 pages and starting at www.google.com/search?q=recursion"
To grok the whole thing, I suggest you try any of these books:
- Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. This is the cutest non-mathematical explanation of recursion.
- The little schemer.
