Brain is mean

So this will be my new projection for my brain. Trying to sift through the brain isn’t that easy, because there are so many different subjects in my brain at any one time.

Sometimes they follow each other to the foreground like a dancing chorus line, all in the spotlight for a few seconds before dancing along and letting another subject flirt with me, making me interested, spurring on my imagination.

Above: The inside of my brain, with relative morality swiftly followed by cannibalism, agriculture and New Guinea hunter-gatherers!

For example, this morning, as I was turning on my computer, I was thinking about masturbation, particularly nocturnal masturbation (yes, it isn’t a coincidence that it was what I was thinking about when I woke up.) Then I saw an article on Facebook that made me think about feminism. Then I was thinking about education and the current British government, then about the role of religion in schools, then about the general belief in supernatural things, then the rise of militant atheism, and then about whether I could do my classes today and clean my room, and what I should have for breakfast (answer: crisps, and bread.)

As you can tell, it get’s pretty confusing. Within the space of 20 minutes, my brain has flitted between possibly hundreds of diffuse subjects.

Maybe I’m overstimulating myself. Just while writing this short blog post, I am also listening to a Ted talk, on Facebook, and doing a bill for work.  Hopefully, over time I’ll get better. Unfortunately, it also makes me a pretty confusing person to talk to, as within the space of a sentence, my focus may have shifted from the topic of discussion to something completely different, which means that by the time I’m saying something about, for example, public transport, my brain has already cycled on head, passed all tangent topics, and has settled temporarily on creepy Victorian era surgery. This is an actual conversation that I had not long ago, and the map my brain took is like this:

Problems on the Metro –> that article I read about dangerous stray dogs on the Moscow subway –> that article also mentioned the dogs were evolving to be really, really smart –> Smart Moscow dogs was the focus of the Michail Bulgakov novel “The Dog’s Heart” –> They did weird animal-human organ transplants in that book –> That real life guy who sewed chimp testicles into human testicles as a cure to infertility –> he might have been in Paris, let’s go find his house!

Pretty circuitous route, huh? But you can see how I got there. Unfortunately, this fascinating and colourful trip is represented in the conversation as:

“Yeah, it took me 3 hours to get home the other day, there’s been loads of weird delays recently. I hope it doesn’t stop me tomorrow, I want to see if that weird French surgeon who sewed chimp parts into his patient’s testicles lived around here and find his house.”

Cue explosive laughter, or disturbed silence.

I’m not trying to paint myself as a weird yet unique individual, as plenty of people are also interested in the stuff I’m interested in, and crazy 19th century scientists are very, very interesting. I just recognise that when it comes out, a propos of nothing, it is particularly surprising for my fellow conversationist.

Anyways, better get on and clean the flat (by which I mean eat bread in bed while reading The Guardian and considering what bad TV I can watch on a Sunday.)