The way the human brain works – or doesn’t – has long fascinated people. The trouble is that you need the brain to think about itself.
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You’re asking the thing you don’t understand to develop its own understanding of itself, and in that rotating thought lies madness and strong drink.
So, to try to put it in terms our brains might cope with, we often think of the brain in analogous terms.
It’s a big filing system. It’s a super-computer. It’s a vast room full of separate rooms. It’s a department store with thousands of departments. It’s mission headquarters.
I have a new analogy. It’s that one special drawer in your kitchen where you stash stuff which might come in handy one day and you can’t chuck out.
Most of its contents might well be rubbish, but they are also keys to memory and mystery. Especially the keys.
Mrs Whacked and I voyaged into this cerebral other universe yesterday when we were looking for the other half of a toy plastic gun designed to squash flies. I can’t quite remember why.
The first thing we found was a stash of 68 keys. House keys, car keys, locker keys, window lock keys, shed keys, motorcycle keys. None of them fit anything we now possess, but when they were being used they were possibly among the most important things we owned or did.
Why can’t we chuck out old keys? They accumulate and breed in the kitchen drawer for years. I swear there is one key which would give me access to the Ballarat Courier – 40 years ago.
There was a weirdly shaped bit of metal.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The bottom bracket of the fake owl we bought.”
“Why’s it in the drawer?”
“It could be handy.”
A couple of Warning signs were in there. Warning: Welsh corgis on guard duty. Warning: attack cat on guard duty.
One long slightly-used white shoelace. There has to be a story behind that.
About three dozen dead pens, paper clips, drawing pins, a dead walkie-talkie, 47 old birthday cards, a bracket for a shelf that never got built, old Post-It notes urging us not to forget to buy a new soaker hose, a brand new wooden drawer knob – but for which drawer? – a pair of white gloves, ONE sparkling Michael Jackson glove, packets of seeds best used before 2004. And that was just the first layer.
Down and down through myth and memory we worked, laughing like drains when we found silly stuff which fired memories.
A battery-powered tea candle, dried up Textas, a mountaineering-type shackle, two bamboo kebab skewers, until …
… the missing bit of the fly-swatting thingummy. And no, it still didn’t work.
Brains are a bit like this.
We stash so much into them, not knowing which bits we might need or when and occasionally when the mood takes us.
We go rootling about in the back blocks, often surprised, delighted or puzzled at what we tucked away and why.
I suspect that really vivid dreams are the result of poking about in the deep recesses, so that bits and pieces of your memories are put together in odd ways.
I often have dreams which involve old school friends I haven’t seen for at least 40 years, in places I haven’t visited for decades doing weird stuff which had nothing to do with any of them.
Time to tuck it all away again and have a little lie down.
WAYNE GREGSON