DOES
your brain hurt? Why ask yourself that question when you are told that there are
over 30,000 different kinds of protein swirling around in
there?
Is it
any wonder it hurts when you consider that a gram of brain tissue uses more
energy in keeping you conscious than a gram of muscle uses to lift a barbell?
When you consider that your brain consumes about a quarter of all the calories
you use in a day?
But
before you weight-watchers start getting excited and begin reaching for volumes
of philosophy books, let me quickly add that bending your brain to understand
all of Keikergaard’s works uses no more calories than taking a bath or picking
your nose.
Unfortunately
for fat people, the fact is most of the calories get used in keeping the old
gray matter running, or Keikergaard would have been unwittingly responsible for
the world’s first miracle diet.
Dealing
with a normal headache is no easy matter, more so with
migraine.
The
problem is that brain cells are determinedly social. They will insist on
speaking to their neighbors – up to 100,000 of them at any one time. And with
all the mental sensation that is the inevitable corollary of an urban
thoroughfare in the middle of rush hour , the electrical firing that’s going on
in the central head set must look like the sky above Nagasaki during World War
II.
If
only the brain wasn’t such an efficient little bastard – just two percent of a
person’s total body weight. In my case, less than two
kilograms.
Like
a renegade computer, it will insist on making hundreds of back-up copies of
thoughts – even the thoughts one had hoped one had forgotten – storing them in
all sorts of neuronal nooks and cranial crannies.
It is
like the prudent man going abroad, who - having considered the possibility of
being robbed - separates his cash and spreads it around throughout his person
and luggage.
This
is why when one part of the brain is physically destroyed, for example that part
dealing with the recognition of color, there’s another part of the brain, which
can manage it just as well.
Try
as I might prevent it, my more hyperactive brain cells just love talking to the
others, explaining to them their logical pictures of facts, in an attempt to win
them round to their cause.
This
brought me no small discomfort until recently – insomnia being the worst torment
of the creative mind.
And
so I read to satisfy my brain hunger for knowledge and appease the angry and
restless natives.
To
read is to live within the pages of a book and the brain, assisted by the sense
of sight, is our mansion and vehicle. The rest of the senses – in the act of
reading – are inessential to say the least in the occurrence of the
experience.
Indeed,
many of my profound experiences have occurred within the pages of a book.
Experiences which have affected my life and yours.
Have
you ever caught yourself reading? You know, you’re sitting in a chair, engrossed
in a good book, enjoying the story and the author’s prose-style, then suddenly,
it’s as if you have an out-of-body experience and you catch yourself as you
really are; not trading wisecracks with Mike Royko, or struggling with Moriarty
atop Reichenbach Falls, but as someone sitting alone in a room, with a book open
in your lap.
It
can be quite shocking. Like a sudden jolt of Phenotiazine to the schizoprenic.
One minute, she’s battling terrorists on board Air Force One and the next, she’s
just a girl in a bed wearing a pair of dirty pajamas.
It
conjures up such a powerful image of someone not just living but lost within the
pages of a book, oblivious to the exterior physical world, to the hand which
turns the page, even to the eye and the visual field which conducts the printed
information to the brain and its ever active cell units.
It is the rare ability of our brain and our sense of sight, to step in and out of the picture, that distinguishes the act and experience of reading.
Without
a book, I am chained to the earth. Reading, I am Prometheus
Unbound.
I
think my brain feels a lot better already.