Deep reading — the kind that you engage in when you get lost in the syntax and imagery and the long, convoluted sentences of a really meaty book — is a special sort of exercise that creates a new part of the brain that did not exist at birth.
“It’s semi-miraculous, really,” said Dr. Wolf, the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. “We don’t have genes for reading. It’s an activity we invented, and by doing it, we show that our brain has the capacity to go beyond itself, to take all these circuits that were created for oral language or vision, and do something entirely different with them — deduction, critical analysis, imagination, contemplation.”
A friend is collecting brief statements about how her friends’ brains work, to be collected into a book. This is my contribution.
I feel obliged to note that it is 21:00 on July 1st, 2009. The Michael Fogleman that is writing this is not the same as the Michael Fogleman that might write a similar essay a day, a year, or a decade from now.
I outsource the functions of my brain wherever possible. To-do lists, journal entries, mind maps, doodles and poems all encompass parts of me adequately and significantly. Perhaps this is a result of my fear of memory loss; I regret that I can’t remember (almost) everything. I also consider other resources, most notably the Internet and Google, a part of my brain.
As a child, I imagined God having a large database of all the information and statistics in the world, whether or not humans collected that data or not. I wanted to sort through this information and narrow it down as it was useful to me. I think we’re getting there. Needless to say, I don’t believe in God.
My brain works in patterns, loops, functions. I think at the age of eleven or twelve I realized that my brain would look for patterns in things. Although I pondered cataloguing them, I never attempted it, simply because I was only conscious of such patterns for a week or two before they disappeared into the dark, deep areas of my subconscious, to bubble up sporadically. One overlying pattern I’ve recognized is that between following the tech industry as a hobby and taking AP English, I sort things into concepts and trends and patterns. Society is going in certain directions, and works of art or entertainment are constructed.
My brain has been permanently altered by my interest in chess and debate. I think ahead and flow. Life is a game and conversation must be won.
Sometimes I think so fast in conversation that my tongue gets tied. I’m not sure whether it’s that I think really fast, or that the part of me that talks just can’t construct sentences fast enough. I’m going to be egotistical and assume it’s the former.
I used to attempt to catalyze my search for my own identity by researching and subscribing to various ideologies. I have recently recognized that this is a potentially dangerous shortcut, so for now I’ve narrowed them down to Love and Anti-fascism. It works. So keep love in your heart, and peace in your mind. No matter what.
