Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Cheese Heads

I'm guessing that Douglas Adams would be pretty amused. It was the late science fiction author's notion that it was mice who were doing the experiments on us all these years, not the other way around. That's how he suggested that we might learn the answer to life, the universe and everything: by listening to the mice.
Well, as it turns out, scientists at MIT have figured out a way to plant false memories in the brains of our little rodent pals. They told one that he was married to Sharon Stone, but since not everymouse had seen that movie, it wasn't as funny as they had originally planned. It might have been funnier in this blog if I had connected it back to the Philip K. Dick story from whence it came, but most of my memories are stored as video, so this will have to suffice.
Unless these movies and TV shows that seem to clutter my brain were stuck in there by some superior intelligence. Why? To distract me, of course. Distract me from what? That's a more difficult question, one that would benefit greatly from my entire mind's focus. That's not going to happen, however. There's far too much Gilligan's Island in there. And music videos that nobody else remembers. Okay, there may be some other people wandering around out there with songs by the Residents and Snakefinger keeping them from accessing their full potential, but figuring out a way to make them all come together to purge that sector of their frontal lobes to make room for more vital information.
My son's cerebral cortex is constantly barraged by images of sports cars and their various engine sizes and types of transmissions and how this is going to get us all of the planet before it explodes is beyond me. I've suggesting some sort of rewiring, wherein each automotive tidbit gets attached to some fact about global warming or sustainable energy. So far, I've had very limited success. If it became possible to download his high school curriculum into that space, we might all sleep better. Unless, as these merry pranksters at MIT have done, they are installing bad information. "Hey Morty, remember that doe I saw you with last week? Turns out she's really your sister." Not cool, science guys. You're just putting your names at the top of the mouse hit list when the time comes for the real masters of the universe to take over.
Or am I remembering that wrong?

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