Faces of the Brain
Just when it seems as if everything on the human mind has been put into writing, people continue to discover things about it that is either the missing puzzle piece of some unsolved study, or a negation of some common belief we once thought was undisputable. A funny thing about the brain: it doesn’t just get the experts and genii involved, but also with us common people who try to give names and pictures for the pains it puts us through.
The light bulb is a traditional image of an idea. You and I have seen it a million times in cartoons and comics, even on science text book covers; I remember at least two or three science books with light bulbs on them even before I reached high school. But I know its association with ideas better from cartoons. It’s like the very first thing children learn about the brain: that when you are stuck with a thought, all the “wires” create this bright “spark”. Basically, it’s a precursor to learning about neurons. And then, there’s the image of cogs. I had this book of the human anatomy simplified for children, and it showed the brain as an organized array of wheels and cogs; that would be the first time I’ve seen thinking made tangible. Somewhere around high school, I saw I, Robot and Will Smith said something about robots being unable to feel because they were made of “just lights and clockwork”—which is quite ironic, since that “clockwork” pretty much makes concrete the idea of thinking about how one feels.
Several times I’ve watched cartoons with my brother, and there’s now a new trend of portraying brain activity. There’s this one show we both absolutely love called The Grimm Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and I can’t forget my brother’s laugh when he saw this one character’s brain being portrayed as a hamster running in a wheel, then tripping and unable to run further (this is exactly how the show will make you feel, so unless you have a test coming up, I suggest you watch it sometime). So this I guess, was the animators’ way of showing our inability to process incoherent things; when the brain can’t just put two things together, our hamster trips. I’ve even seen another cartoon use a mouse making its way in a maze to show the process of thought. And as if that wasn’t enough, even the feelings of a brain freeze and suppressed anger have an image: the all too familiar disaster of a nuclear mushroom cloud erupting inside the skull. I know about three shows that use this imagery.
The best way I’ve come to learn about how the brain makes people feel is through people, specifically friends. Everyone I know uses “sabaw” or soup when the brain is either too tired or unable to work properly. It’s only recently that I’ve really thought about this and pictured a simmering bowl of thought nuggets swimming in thick brain cream. A friend of mine even asked how my brain was doing after studying for an exam, and if it had already liquefied to a soup so thin, it was pouring out of my ears. This soup just might be the nosebleed people associate with processing difficulty. Another image of brain activity was the “reset” or “reboot” button, which I’m not quite sure where I picked up from. When people are exhausted from a test, they just press the reset button to allow normal processing. You know how, after a long day or a difficult test, the brain just sort of feels like it’s taking a breather? That would be it: the reset or reboot button (it’s a variation of the expression “pressing Control-Alt-Delete” when the brain has hanged, which isn’t too popular). One of my best friends has unwittingly taught me a fun—but strangely violent—way of expressing a struggling brain: gunpoint. It was around freshman high school when she first showed it to me. She made the famous L-shape of a gun and pointed it at her temple. It’s a mannerism I never unlearned; I still do it today, only I prefer using both “guns” on both temples…it makes the pain in the head seem more accurate, I guess, like the brain’s just about had enough and gets suicide impulses. The same best friend even showed me what happens to the mind when on drugs. She drew an egg to represent the healthy brain, and a sunny-side up for the stoned brain.
You have to admit, the images are quite often exaggerated when showing how the brain works, but if you think about it, that’s almost the farthest we can go with our understanding about it. How ironic that the brain itself is what feeds us these images to make its abstract processes concrete. I suppose this is how we cope with the wonder that is the brain; we try to fill it up to the brim, but it seems as if that isn’t enough. After all, we are told that only 10% of it is being used, and already we can’t take much more. It kind of makes me wonder if our images of suicide impulses and tripping hamsters are ways of the brain’s communication with its owner…telling him that he tries too hard, and makes him feel undeserving of it.
frances
