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Complex Numbers #1084400 added February 26, 2025 at 9:04am
Restrictions: None
Cerebral Musings
First, an Exclaimer! ▼EXCLAIMER
(explanation/disclaimer)
The theme for this round of Journalistic Intentions is "Banned Instagram hashtags! All of these will get posts shadow banned on Instagram." So there are a few things my readers should know:
#1- I do not have, have never had, will never have, an Instagram account.
#2- Consequently, I have no idea what a shadow ban is or what it entails, only that it has something to do with suppression of posts with the indicated tag.
#3- I do not acknowledge the pronunciation of the octothorpe (#) as "hashtag." That symbol is either "number" or "pound," and that's more than enough definitions for one character. Anytime I see the # with letters following, I pronounce it pound, which made #MeToo way more hilarious than it should have been.
However, I hold the belief that I can write about absolutely anything, regardless of prior knowledge. This contest round tests that conceit. All entries, including this one, were selected at random from the list of 16 prompts provided.
#brain
Not much I can say about "pound brain" except that, from what I hear, the brain itself doesn't contain pain receptors. So no matter how much you pound your brain, it's not the gray matter itself that hurts; it's the slightly harder stuff surrounding it.
Why you'd pound your brain is another issue, but, I mean... *gestures at everything in general* I get it.
My ex-wife had brain surgery. They took out a chunk of brain in an attempt to fix a neurological problem. This happened shortly before we separated. When I'm feeling charitable, I'll assume that the extracted bit was the bunch of neurons that made her fool herself into believing she liked being around me. When I'm not feeling charitable, I'll think that she had the surgery before the separation so that, in case something went wrong (as something sometimes does when someone goes digging around in a brain with surgical implements), I'd be on the hook to care for whatever was left of her.
The reality, of course, is probably something else entirely. Which is only fair, because whatever we think we know about the brain itself, we're probably wrong and definitely operating from incomplete information. And that makes it marvelous that we can even consider poking around in there with scalpels and forceps and whatnot, let alone doing so with any success.
For instance, there was this widespread belief that the two hemispheres of the brain ruled different aspects of one's personality. A "right-brained" person was, by this theory, creative, artistic, emotional, and so on. A "left-brained" person, in contrast, was considered logical, rational, methodical, etc.
Because people don't like to change their brains, this model persists in the popular imagination, but as it turns out, it's about as accurate as phrenology or astrology. Sure, some people are more creative and others, more methodical, but it has nothing to do with dominant cerebral hemispheres.
For another instance, there's a tendency to use metaphors to describe the brain's function. The latest involves comparing the brain to a computer, with different sections serving different functions like processing (CPU) or memory (hard drive). Before computers, it was fashionable to compare the brain to a machine; the image of cogs turning when someone is thinking persists in cartoons and whatnot.
These are more reflections of the current state of technology than of reality. But, like the Bohr orbital model of an atom, they can serve their purpose even though they're inaccurate.
So I say this: the brain is like a car. You don't have to know exactly how it works to use it, but a lot of people are really, really bad at doing so. |
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