A Fully Working Brain

The neurologist Oliver Sacks tells of a ward of aphasic patients listening to President Reagan give a television speech. Although the patients were unable to fully understand Reagan's words, they compensated by being particularly sensitive to his tone and inflections, which they found farcial. A patient with a right hemisphere lesion who could not judge tone was there, also. She focused on Reagan's exact words - which she too found ridiculous. Sacks concluded from this that it takes a fully working brain to be deluded by politicians.

Ten years ago, I was in a neurologist's office. One of Dr. Sacks books - maybe A LEG TO STAND ON - tumbled out of my purse. "Oh, you are reading Ollie Sacks!" exclaimed the doctor. I hate it when people who don't know him ( certainly don't know him) call Oliver Sacks "Ollie". "Yes," I said, "he is my inspiration." "So you like his books?" the neurologist asked. "I like his books, I like his articles, I like him. In fact, if I could be anybody in the whole world, I would choose to be Oliver Sacks," I said. The neurologist looked askance at me. "But," he remarked, "Sacks is a man." I looked him dead in the eye. "Yes. I know," I said. He gave me an extra hard pound on the knee.

But I am not really thinking all that much about Sacks today, I am thinking about the brain. I am thinking, with my own brain, about the brain. Which seems and sounds odd. (How can that be?)

Actually, I know very little about the brain. I know that the brain is a thinking machine, but I do not know what a thought in a brain is. What is an idea in a brain? I know that the right hemisphere is music and the left hemisphere is language and that the left hemisphere is good for logic and the right hemisphere is good for visual kinds of thinking. If thinking can be visual. Well, of course it can.

I know that the male brain is often called the penis. I know that the male brain on sex produces chemicals that create a high similar to being high on cocaine. I know that the "lust center" in the male brain automatically directs men to notice and visually take in the delights of the female form. Like buxom women. Of which I am not one. I even know more than all this, I know the brain's limbic system plays a crucial role in mood and, therefore, in depression. I know that when a patient's depression is treated, their frontal lobe changes.

I know that, in many ways, I possess a quite good brain, but I also know that my brain has what I call "gaps" in the arena of mechanics, directions, visual-deduction or figuring things out and lower level mathematics. I know that these gaps have been both a blessing and a curse. They certainly keep me human. I have spent years, for instance, watering extremely life-like but artificial plants, to the great amusement of family members who kept it a secret from me and would roll around in their chairs and muffle their considerable laughter. I know I once told a job interviewer that I most certainly could type at least one thousand words per minute. Seemed reasonable to me AND I got the job, so go figure. My friends know tons of stories about my gaps, no need to embarrass myself here.

"The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use."
- Arthur Koestler

'If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we wouldn't."

I must go now. My brain is tired.