Potato Chip Brain

 I was up around noon I guess, packed some things that I could take without needing the bike trailer, and was out the door at 4, back here at 5. The drop offs went fine and I got sake and fish and things from H Mart. 

There's a row of newspaper machines in front of the post office and there was a bum there, a different bum from the bum who seemed to be living on one of the benches in front. This new bum was trying to get coins out of the machines, with some success. I think it involves sticking a wire into the coin slot then pushing the coin return in some tricky way. He was putting a lot of work into it. 

As usual there were bums all over the area and when I was waiting for a light to change and saw a dark form approach pushing a stroller, I was pleasantly astonished to see it was a lovely looking Asian mother with an actual baby in the stroller. At that intersection it's more often a bum pushing a beat-up stroller full of the kind of crap that bums collect. 

On my ride back, I got thinking about a thing I read years ago, pre-internet, in one of the popular science magazines like Discovery or Omni or one of those. It was about a group of people who had normal behavior and intelligence but if their brains were scanned, something like 90% of the brain wasn't there. They called this "potato chip brain" where there would be a sort of Pringle-shaped "brain" in there. 

At the time I believed it; it was in a science magazine after all. But since then I've learned that even rather minor-looking damage to the brain can have profound effects. There's no way in hell anyone's going around with a little slice of a brain and functioning at all. Why did they write that article? Was it that it just sounded interesting? At the time it wasn't about "clicks" it was about subscriptions and I got kind of burned out on subscribing to magazines because one thing they'd do is take one issue and put several really good articles in it. You'd read it and think, "Wow this magazine is really good! I'm gonna subscribe". You do, and find out there are maybe two good issues a year. I kind of doubt the New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc., did this but the mass-market mags sure did. 

I guess they made up all kinds of crazy stuff too. My latest beef with the popular science magazines is their taking science or technologies that have been around for at least 50 years and often double that, and being all Ooh and Aah over it like it was invented yesterday.