The Most Unaccountable of Machinery

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" - Virginia Woolf My view of the human brain differs greatly from the facts and diagrams listed in my anatomy textbook. I ignore scientific talk about the cerebrum or the cerebellum; only a person bent on confusing poor students would name two areas so closely located names that sound virtually the same. In reality, the brain is made up of countless rooms, much like the rooms of a house. In these rooms, memories and dreams are stored, just waiting to be examined and revisited. The brain’s first room is the room of knowledge; its appearance bears a strange resemblance to a slightly cluttered office. Knowledge tumbles into the room from what appears to be a mail chute: historical facts, new words, and interesting trivia are then sorted into their respective bins. A large file cabinet attracts my immediate attention; its label tells me that it is filled with useless trivia, such as football statistics and song lyrics. Every category of useless knowledge that I own has its own file, and they range in topic from the answers to KLOU’s mystery movie quotes in the morning to horoscopes from Seventeen magazine. The room’s second most prominent object is a desk, piled high with Charlotte Brontë novels and favorite poems. Nouns, verbs, and, heaven help me, punctuation marks sit in little labeled containers on the desk in place of pens and pencils. An ever-growing dictionary houses a vocabulary that I wish were slightly more impressive; yellow post-it notes on a bulletin board over the desk prompt my memory with uses for iambic pentameter and notes on the correct way to divide polynomials. The desk drawers themselves house many objects of interest; boxes of prime numbers, bottles of primary colors, and jars of rhyming words sit among the clutter of state capitals, quotes from T.S. Eliot, and the names of Henry VIII’s many wives. My eyes travel to the room’s one irritating spot – a small hole in the center of the floor, through which items of knowledge, such as the quadratic formula or the purpose of mathematics in general, seem to enjoy falling. The hole remains there day after day, and no amount of cramming seems to be able to plug it. The second room of the brain is more like a garden: a memory garden, to be exact. Memories grow like flowers in their separate flower beds. The first bed houses rose-like memories, memories sweet to recall now, but that were not obtained without their share of sorrows, hence the roses’ thorns. Falling in love is one of these memories, surrounded by the thorns of loss. Then there are the daisy-like memories – compliments, happy conversations, and good advice grow in this bed, little spots of sunshine in a full garden. Poinsettias grow along the garden’s fence; these memories are poisonous to remember, memories of past embarrassments and fights with friends. Poinsettias always tend to show up in my memory garden, no matter how I struggle to eradicate them. The best that I can do is to make sure that they don’t affect the rest of the garden’s blossoms. Lawn gnomes appear here and there throughout the garden, although I have not yet discovered a purpose for them; they do, however, serve as awfully handy items for tripping over. In the center of the garden there is a small pond – a reflection pool. In this pool, images of past decisions and thoughts swirl by, as I decide whether or not I acted wisely in certain situations. A tall tree grows in the corner of my memory garden; the "Lessons Learned" tree, it is called. Consequences of breaking a promise, of telling a lie, of revealing a secret are forever carved into its surface, preventing me from making further blunders in those areas. Other lessons – coping with the death of a loved one, the pain of being betrayed by a friend – are etched only onto the tree’s green leaves. These lessons are perennial, and must be forgotten at some point and learned once again in the future; only in this way is it possible to forget the pain of those lessons and to be able to trust and love once more. Next, I enter my thought room; it looks very much like my own family room, with comfortable sofas, a television, and a stereo system. My thoughts roll across the television screen at lightning pace, intermingled with images sent to the brain from my eyes. Sounds of my life form a continuous soundtrack that issues from the stereo; dogs barking, whispered conversations, and Frank Sinatra form the melody in the background. A cheerful fire burns in the fireplace, slowly turning logs labeled "Prejudice," "Hate," and "Resentment" to ash. On the mantle above the fireplace sits a row of framed photographs, the faces of the people I cherish most. A newspaper on the coffee table lists new ideas, all of which I intend to consider before accepting or discarding their merit. An elegant chess board draws my attention; each move represents a decision I must make, smaller choices being the movement of a pawn, while larger decisions call for the strategies of the queen. Dreams deserve a room all their own. As I enter the room, I see that it resembles a trophy room most closely. Glass cases line the walls on either side of me. The cases are filled with childhood dreams; an Olympic gold medal awarded to the world’s best gymnast is placed next to a certificate claiming me to be the winning jockey in the Kentucky Derby. To my left, countless adolescent manuscripts boast shiny golden Newbery medals, and an Oscar sits in the place of honor. At the end of the room, one case is illuminated more brightly than the others. This case houses the dreams of today. An official looking college diploma, the university’s name of which is still quite blurry, congratulates me for my hard work. A miniature doll house, a lovely Victorian with a secret passageway and a turret, represents the house I want more than any other. A small diary holds the rest of my dreams, the ones I dare not tell anyone else just yet; to these, only I hold the key. I climb a spiral staircase to the brain’s attic, where I enter a room filled with things I have forgotten. Uninteresting book plots, seldom used telephone numbers, and a year’s worth of chemistry formulas sit in their respective corners, quickly gathering dust. I kneel in front of a dusty wooden chest labeled "Childhood Innocence;" in it lay hours of restless waiting for Santa Claus to arrive, a knowledge that at some point during the night, the Tooth Fairy would replace my useless baby tooth with a crisp dollar, and countless Easter mornings spent hunting for my basket, only to find it under my bed or in the washing machine. Those childhood feelings are often forgotten; I must continually dust them off in order to recapture the feeling of being a young. A large cardboard box houses the glory of major events that have passed; seventeen years worth of Academy Award winners and Superbowl champions bask in forgotten victories. Dusty yearbooks contain faded photographs of grade-school teachers and second grade valentines. Their faces, blurred by time, are almost as forgotten as the periodic table. My last destination, my comfort zone, looks almost exactly like my bedroom at home. In it, I am surrounded by all of my favorite things. The movie Grease plays continuously on the television, interrupted only by home videos and the occasional "Boy Meets World" rerun. The air in the room alternates in smell from my mother’s perfume, to chocolate pudding, to a certain boy’s cologne. Under my bed, different shoeboxes store inside jokes, favorite sounds, and a never-ending supply of Hershey kisses. My comfort zone is the place to which I retire when I need to relax; it is where I go to take a load off of my mind. I suppose that my view of the brain differs from that of most people. But honestly...who really cares where the cerebellum is located? It is our memories and our thoughts that make our brains special, our hopes and our dreams that make us individuals. The brain really has nothing to do with anatomy whatsoever; instead, it is the main factor that distinguishes one human being from another.