Cerebral flush or crammed cranium?
By Burton W. Cole
I told you so!
Not YOU specifically. Science. I called it way back in 2014. It was the only thing that made sense.
Sure, I was a little shaky on my assertion that the octopus is the spider of the sea, and on my plan to raise a breed of roof goats to keep moss from growing among the shingles and plants from sprouting in the gutters.
But I was absolutely positive about this one. Finally, science is slowly catching up to me.
An article published a couple weeks claimed that we have dirty brains. Not the lurid thoughts kind of dirty. The mop and scrub brush sort of filth.
Except instead of plugging in a vacuum, you need to go to sleep.
Researchers at MIT, that prestigious university chock full of smart people, said that like cats and ovens, the brain is self-cleaning. While we snooze, a wave of cerebrospinal fluid briefly flows out of the brain, washing away the day’s buildup of gunk cluttering our gray cells.
Your brain is swirling down the drain — or at least the day’s dirt smudged into the grooves of your gray matter and the debris stopping up your synapses.
If you don’t sleep, the whoosh of cerebrospinal mop water sloshes through the lobes while you’re awake, causing brief losses of focus. Simple tasks feel like slogging through a river of peanut butter and marshmallows when your brain is going through The Big Flush.
Your mind blanks out and you can’t remember PIN numbers, the names of your kids, why you walked into the room and other pesky facts and figures.
I congratulate the fine folks at MIT. They’re getting close, but they need to check the laundry.
The real reason for loss of focus, of course, is what I dubbed way back in April 2012 as Crammed Cranium Syndrome.
My reasoning is that life is a giant yard sale of facts, figures and song lyrics from 35 years ago, and we’re all hoarders. The older we get, the more jam-packed our brain cells become. But the daily assault of information continues.
If the brain doesn’t make room for today’s gobbledy gook, our heads will explode. The only thing the brain can do is dump old knowledge and memory banks, but in no particular order.
This is why you wake up one day remembering your eighth-grade locker combination or the stat line from Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game on March 2, 1962 (36 of 63 from the field and 28 of 32 from the free throw line), but have no clue where you left the car keys last night.
Most of the accumulated knowledge cluttering our intellect is useless chaos, like selenium is the 34th element in the periodic table (but not what either selenium or the periodic table is) or that the circumference of a circle is pi, which is 3.14159265 (but not for what purpose we’d ever need to know the circumference of circle).
Those things your brain didn’t dump. Instead, it deleted the date of your anniversary, what your spouse told you 16 times yesterday to pick up at the store today, and maybe even your spouse’s name.
Where did all that lost knowledge go?
The laundry.
That’s right. Once your brain pegs “full,” all the things you need to remember leak out your ears and soak into the pillow. From there, they are washed away with the Tide, or Whisked away in good Cheer. Gone with the suds.
MIT may call this leakage cerebrospinal fluid. I say it’s a side effect of the real cause, Crammed Cranium Syndrome.
You may award me the Nobel Science Prize now.
Impart knowledge to Burt at news@falmouthoutlook.com — if the genius remembers to come to work.