Library

A few weeks ago, I rejoined the Library and promptly put several books from my Amazon wishlist on the "request" list. They were sent to my local library (the Chinatown branch, which is near work), and I picked up EIGHT books last week. I started reading two at once (the one I pick up depends on my mood): Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov, and A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V.S. Ramachandran.

Here is an odd congruence of ideas that struck me:

From short story "Hostess" by Isaac Asimov:

"In short, there are not five intelligences in the galaxy, but six, and the sixth is parasitic....In the case of the parasitic intelligence, all physical attributes would be lost. It would become nothing but pure mind, living... on the minds of others."

From the V.S. Ramachandran book:

"One could think of this metarepresentation almost as a second 'parasitic' brain... that has evolved in us humans to create a more economical description of the automatic processes that are being carried out in the first brain."

I love that! 

I eat up books about the mysteries of the brain. I also just started The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. Fascinating stuff! It all started with some of more mind-bending episodes of excellent radio show Radiolab. The episodes on Memory and Forgetting, Sleep, Who Am I?, Where Am I?, Musical Language, Parasites, and Animal Minds are particularly amazing. 

Hello again. I'm going to take baby steps back into blogging. I promised my nephew Jordan that I would start blogging again, and I will Jordie! Bear with me!