When I Held Your Brain In My Arms

[austin_dern]

I bet you haven't gone thinking about neuroscience in ages, possibly longer, which is fine, but it'd be pretty caddish of you neuroscientists out there to take me up on the bet. You should have better things to do than pick quarrels over my rhetorical tricks anyway. That's something for the advance team of offensive forensics experts to be doing. Let them have their glory.

Anyway, the neat thing about neuroscience is that most of what anyone knows about it is wrong, and what they know that isn't wrong is so misleading it would be easier if it were just wrong instead. For example, everyone has heard about how we only use ten percent of our brain. What's misleading about this point is that we don't say what it is we use that ten percent of our brains for. Some use it for thinking, some use it for light crafts, some use it as a place to keep the spatulas. It's the other ninety percent that ought to interest us, because that's the part the brain is using for its own purposes, and it'll tell us what those are only when it's good and ready.

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And do please follow me over to the rest of my main humor entry for this week. Also run in the past seven days are a couple of short bits, to wit:

• Comic Strip Celebrities Named, so you can know who are the most popular comic strip artists out there these days
• A True Story From The Star Trek Depths, about me doing something horribly stupid over a minor point of pride on Usenet
• How To Keep In Touch, or how to get back in touch with someone, really
• Further Warnings From The Dream World to all of us, based on my subconscious knowing better than I do
• Robert Benchley: Highways and By-Ways in Old Fall River, one of several short bits by Benchley I'm highlighting this week
• Robert Benchley: The Editor's Drawer, a set of anecdotes about cute kids which the master humorist wrote long ago

Trivia: While Nintendo sold more than 60,000 Donkey Kong units in the United States, it sold only thirty thousand Donkey Kong Junior (1982), twenty thousand Popeye (also 1982), and five thousand Donkey Kong 3 (1983). Source: The Ultimate History Of Video Games, Steven L Kent.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, July/August 2013, Editor Patricia Majher.

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I don't get ANY of those in "The Editor's Drawer".

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

No? They're spoofs of the precocious/precious-child-saying-darling-thing genre that feels a bit glurge-y to me, but, heck, someone must be buying the stuff. This could be a little too specific a thing to parody, admittedly, and it's not like we need much help to feel like little twee anecdotes are kind of silly things to bother with, though.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Are those real song lyrics....? ;>

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Sure. It's the song that the Observers/Brain Guys sang to Mike and the Bots, in the eighth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in order to show off some of their superior culture and whatnot.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Wow man.... obscurity purity :D

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You need to hang around more fanboys, obviously.