Are you as smart as you’d like to be? Excessive computer screen time has been proven to impair brain structure and function: Every email you send annihilates billions of your neurons.
A television commercial suggested that my brain might be undernourished. Viewers were assured that the problem was ubiquitous – and after ubiquitous the word “widespread” appeared in brackets. You may assume they defined ubiquitous just in case someone with an undernourished brain was watching.
I once read that the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. This was probably written back before anyone who bought a Canon MX922 printer tried to get it to scan a document.
Would you be surprised to hear that there is a Brain Awareness Week? Or that there is a National I Love My Feet Day and a National Go Barefoot Day?
If you missed Brain Awareness Week this year, don’t worry, it will be back. So it doesn’t sneak up on you next time it comes around, you can start thinking about it on National Make Up Your Mind Day.
There is also a National Heart Day, and, in case you missed it, there is an American Heart Month. There is a National Eye Donor Month, Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month and a World Kidney Day. For our friends who have never heard of Ignaz Semmelweis, there is a National Handwashing Awareness Week.
After the recent debates, we must accept the fact that every organ is worthy of celebration on national television. Before long, it is more than likely that an enlightened Congress will designate a week to honor each and every one of our body parts. This will be hailed throughout the rest of the world as a great breakthrough, signifying that the U.S. Congress can do something.
Because brains are in general use by everyone, with the possible exception of teenagers in a parked car, you might well ask why the American brain is only honored for one week when in China a rat gets an entire year. No one has ever heard of the Year of the Brain.
When you research the topic, however, and read that rats created the universe, brought light to humanity and then stole seeds of grains to feed us, you might agree that rats have earned their intellectual pedestal.
For those of us with hypoglycemia, lubricating the brain with nutrients every three hours is essential. You probably know a few people you don’t even dare look at until they’ve had a good meal. They are … “touchy.” They go wild over nothing. If you live with one of these unfortunates, you know that when they’re hungry, no matter what you say, they’ll start an argument or snap at you. You might be able to look up and point at one of these people right now.
A lot of road rage, and any number of weird or nutty things you read in newspapers, could be attributed to hypoglycemia. I was well over 40 before I learned that if I ate something every three hours the chemistry in my brain would behave and I wouldn’t have senseless rage attacks, like a spoiled child, when things didn’t go my way.
You are familiar with mental blocks. I have never been able to memorize the definitions of ontology or epistemology. Whenever pressed, I have simply looked them up in the dictionary, even as I have done countless times with “complement” and “compliment.”
What a curious and complicated thing is the human brain. One part of it enables some of us to memorize the melody and chord progressions to hundreds of songs, learn to read seven or eight languages and yet digs in its neurological heels and keeps us from recognizing faces and spelling words.
I get email from an astrophysicist who can’t spell. And a brilliant Rockland attorney with a similar handicap once said in my presence that he could hire any number of secretaries who could spell.
It might be profitable to close by mentioning John of Salisbury, a humanist who preceded Erasmus by several hundred years.
John of Salisbury disliked big words. What do you think about that? Do children who start school with a fairly decent vocabulary have more brain power than children raised by parents who communicate with slaps, grunts and shrugs of the shoulder?
Only their teachers know for sure.
Are there unique situations where snarls and grunts will earn you more points than a bushel of multisyllabic words?
Indeed, if you’re running for president of the United States.
The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:
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