It's too late for me to not chase flying saucers. My recent thoughts on Art Bell and store-brand mysticism continue.
Last night Art Bell was a rerun about out-of-body experiences. These kinds of things--telekinetics, communicating with the dead, out of body experiences--tend, anecdotally, to have less incidence in scientists and logic-minded intelligentsia.
So here's a quote from Reflecting on Autism (redux), a kuro5hin article I read in the submission queue the other day:
[I]n an autistic brain, facial images are processed in a region normally used for perceiving inanimate objects, the inferior temporal gyrus.... This data suggests that there is a physical difference either in the brain or the brain's wiring of autistic people.
The article also links to the Slashdotted National Post article--the missing, link-rotted one--that our UTC CS clique
parlayed into our LUG jokingly being a mild-autism support group.
In Jeff Noon's books in the Vurt world, there are characters called dodos who aren't able to experience the dream-based alternate reality of the Vurt. In Pixel Juice, a book of Noon's short stories, it's revealed this 6% of un-dreamers is because of meddling by a computer interface company:
[The product] was taken off the market by government order, and all existing devices were recalled, and trashed. By then it was too late for the 6 per cent who had already succumbed to the [dream] censoring [feedback] loop. Those darkened, veiled unfortunates, who would never dream again.
If you've discussed it around me, I may've mentioned that I hardly ever remember my own dreams. Only every so often do I have small bits of dream left remembered, crazy little stories drowning as I wake. There's, of course, also the issue of the dear high school teacher who admonished me to take a stab at writing professionally, forget the computer thing. Since starting college, the only times I've written anything creative were in my first year, one of those being when I got annoyed enough with myself for not writing--especially when I was in a professional writing course at the time--I had a spate of it. Maybe it was even that the only writing I was applauded for at the time was this solicitation letter I wrote for that course, that came across as fairly passable advertising copy. I had kept burning inside all through high school, then hit college, and finally they crushed my spirit.
So anyway, lying in bed listening to Art Bell and this doctor (logical-minded intelligentsia? eh?) talk about out-of-body experiences, with this backstory hiding in my head, it dawns on me that the reason I feel left out of all these abnormal experiences is that my brain isn't wired for it. My mind possesses physical properties that disable these experiences. My brain's broken.
This is an unwelcome insight that, had I had the foresight, would have certainly been a good reason to not chase flying saucers.
