By David Malcolm Rose |
The information I get from most of my body parts is reliable. If my feet tell me they’re cold, they are. When my nose tells me the carton of milk that has been sitting in the back of the refrigerator since before Christmas has turned, there is no need to ask my tongue for a second opinion. If my hand tells me the dish in the microwave is hot, you can bet that it is.
But lately, the information I’ve been getting directly from my brain needs to be taken with a grain, or often a pillar of salt. Let’s take the example of the hot dish in the microwave. My brain should have known that dish was hot when it sent my hands in there. If it had run that half-baked plan of action past the hands first, they would never have done it.
My brain is reliable enough when passing along information it gets from other body parts, but when it’s called upon to formulate thoughts on its own, it just can’t be trusted anymore.
I send it on a simple memory retrieval errand and there’s no telling what it’s likely to come back with. Information in my brain is stored in the form of short clips of audio and video tape. To retrieve a memory, my brain must gather the pertinent clips and arrange them in proper order and then deliver the finished product.
There are times when it does an adequate job, but sometimes not so much. Often it returns with partial information or with a data reel with info that’s out of order or flat out wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t come back at all. It just goes wandering through the memory banks with no reason or rhyme to the ramble. When that happens, I just go along for the ride.
David Rose, of Hot Springs, is an author and artist.
{More of David’s musings can be found at thespringsmagazine.com/category/arts/david-rose/.}
