Tuesday, July 24, 2012

What If?

While writing, I often get the feeling that more is going on than the mere juxtapositioning of words.

I may feel lighter after I write, and not just lighter, but I seem to have much more clarity. I'm not a neuro scientist, but it suddenly occurred to me that my brain possibly knows how to defrag. I realized how important this is since there seems to be little room available in the right hemisphere for more information. So defragging the brain has not only made more room but helps to find things quicker and gain more clarity at the same time. Who knew? 

I hear my  reader thinking, "This is ridiculous." You may be right. But it makes me feel better knowing I can exercise my brain with greater efficiency and put new things in it. I always felt that it took forever to remember things. It wasn't dementia but my brain taking longer than usual to find the right signal and wait for the neuron to arrive along the neural pathway.

So?

Well, for starters, I have a better sense of what I want to write and how I can set the scene in a new way. Best of all, I've become a programmer of sorts, which is very strange for someone who doesn't understand words with the letters t-e-c-h or n-o-l-o-g-y in them.

Just because others say, "You can't do that because the brain isn't wired that way" or,"You can't do this because you're not a scientist," doesn't mean I can't. I actually talk to my brain cells. Do I know which compartment? No. What each cell's job is? No. Do I know a special language to use when talking to those cells? No. What I do know is that I won't know until I try something or believe something to be true or some combination thereof.

Scientist? No. Curious? Yes! Wildly!

I always wondered why humans couldn't grow their own limbs back when they were removed surgically due to an accident or war injury. If the lower animals could do that, why not humans? All animals, human and beasts, have consciousness and, in the main, many of the same elements such as oxygen, nitrogen and carbon they share with us uprights. It's been hypothesized the reason humans cannot regenerate limbs is that the process is much more developed in the lower animals such as hydra, starfish, planaria and lizards. Humans can regenerate the liver, blood, and bone. And now we know that brain cells can regenerate. Recent experiments have found that limbs outside the human body can regenerate with stem cells. All of this to say, the only reason it hasn't been done before, is because no one thought it could, so they never tried. No one said, "I think we ought to look into this."

So I proffer my peculiar version of finding a way to make room for more information. Since I've been on the planet for a while, I've collected a lot of data. I'm just trying my best to make room for more. And later, more defragging allowing more information to come in.

I'm constantly asking myself, 'What if?' 'What if I could use my mind to make something happen? What if I could create something I thought was possible? What if I could see things that are in front of me that I never saw before.' And so, today's what if brought me to thinking about a computer's ability to defrag and transferring that to my mind's ability to clear out what is no longer useful and putting it on a virtual platform, such as a blog making room for more what ifs. 

On my last day of work in a corporate environment, I was telling the new hire taking my place that I needed to learn how to defrag my mind so I could put more into it. "Oh," she said, "that's real easy. That's what we do every Friday night."