Monday, June 15, 2009

The Human Brain: Computer or Just a Jukebox?

Hello fellow patients,

Have you ever had a phrase from a movie, or a poem, or a stand-up comedy bit, or some other random sentence, get stuck in your head for like a week?

No! You haven't! No one has!

Information of that sort is not allowed to continually run in your brain. The only thing that gets to run an infinite loop in your cerebral cortex (or, "run itself over and over in your head", for those of you who do not speak nerd), other than the nagging suspicion that your wife is sleeping around with the guy from the video store, is: a song.

I bet if you think about it, you realize that pretty much most of the time, there is a song of some sort stuck in your head, just running, over and over and over ad nauseum (Author's note: Please note how the preceding Latin phrase is set off in italics. Only the finest writers care enough to let you know, via font variation, exactly when they are trying to sound more intelligent than they actually are. Remember: Italics. The sign of superior craftmanship in the literary arts.). How it got there can vary. Maybe you heard it on the radio on the way to work; maybe you heard it as a jingle for the ad for hemorrhoid cream you saw on TV last night; maybe someone else had it stuck in their head and sang it to you just out of spite; maybe it just popped in there completely out of the blue. However it got there, I can tell you how it did not get in there:

You didn't put it in there yourself.

Not only do you have no say in what song gets to go into the ol' cerebral 8-track (or, "I-Pod", for those of you who do not speak geezer), you have no say in how long it stays. It could be for a few minutes, a couple of hours, or all damn day. You have no say in the matter. Oh, you can try to get it out of there. You may even succeed for a minute or two. But it's coming back. It always comes back. You can't even stop it by killing enough brain cells via alcohol to short-circuit the whole process.

Trust me. I've tried.

The song leaves only when it's ready to leave, not a minute sooner.

Have you ever done this one? You manage to get some awful song outof your head, then you pause and think, "Hmmm... ...I did it. I can't remember what song it was." And then what do you do? You actually sit and think about it! You think for a second, and...

...manage to bring the song back. Hooray. You can't remember where your keys are, or when your kids' birthdays are, but you can remember that yes, it was in fact "Groove is in the heart" that you had finally vanquished from your brain.

"One... Two... Three... Wblwblwblwbl!!!"*

It makes you wonder, doesn't it? How much of our brains are we wasting running song loops through out head all day long? How much smarter could we be; how much more could we accomplish, if we could simply click the "X" in the uper right corner and turn that media player off? Could we solve all the world's problems, simply by putting that wasted power to better use?

Probably not. Let's face it; we can't even set the clock on the microwave without calling tech support. I doubt that just by wiping out that FreeCreditReport.com song, we'd be figuring out climate change.

But, considering I can't remember Maxwell's Equations (Author's note 2: What? Are you waiting for another one of those handy translations in parentheses? I just told you I can't remember them. Besides, I'm not trying to impress you with my genius this time. Otherwise, there would have been italics.), and yet I can easily pull up the music from a Dr. Pepper commercial that hasn't aired since 1976, it's hard not to feel that evolution, or God, screwed up somewhere (Author's note 3: I am not getting dragged into that debate today. Let me just say this: I am not trying to insinuate that God makes mistakes. Who am I to judge His plan? It's just that, if we are made in God's image, then He must have pretty bad taste in music, if the crap that gets stuck in my head is any proof.). At the very least, if this is the way it's meant to be, could someone at least put Maxwell's Equations to music?

And make it as crappy a song as possible, so I can remember.

I guess the point is this. I'm angry. It's four in the morning, and I can't sleep. Why? Because I have this "Halle Berry" song stuck in my head, this god-awful rap song (I know, I know. Redundant, these days.), just like it has been for the last eight hours. Hell, I've gotten sick of a song that I had only heard one time because it was stuck in my head for so long. It's irritating. It's frustrating. It's... It's...

"Miss Berry... Miss Berry."
"Miss Berry... Miss Berry."

Screw this. I'm going to bed.

His Holiness Pope Salty I

*If you have a better spelling for the sound that chick makes in that song, other than Wblwblwblwbl!!!, I'd love to hear it.

Just don't sing it.

HHPS1