Here's something I found unposted from 2015: I had my brain scanned. It was an experiment in which I had to lie in a tube playing word association games every five minutes, in between which my brain was supposed to wind down while I counted to twenty. I found the counting surprisingly difficult, knowing I was being scanned; it's one of the most basic things to forget, and there are very few clues to find your way back into it if you've simply forgotten how to count. Afterwards I was shown the inside of my head, which was great fun. Yours is probably not dissimilar. Enjoy.
It should play.
That's super cool - if it weren't for the fact hat I've been giving too much thought lately to the whole 'brain sitting in a fish tank' trope (more à la Griselda Promogrew/robot-Queen Victoria than Frankenstein's monster - unless the latter is capable of perceiving the alienation of being transplanted into a strange body/vessel) and now the mere sight of a brain is enough to fill me with a mild sense of existential dread.
ReplyDelete(On a side note, I'm not entirely sure how to articulate this, but the brain being capable of looking at/thinking about itself is - enough to send my mind in a spin, I guess? Like, who the hell am I talking to when I tell my brain to stop reacting in a certain way?)
I find the idea that I am my body just as weird. In some "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman" commentary, it's said that Lugosi's monster was given the line "Frankenstein put a new brain into my body", which seems a weird way of identifying onself. If it's Ygor shamming though, this also makes more sense.
ReplyDeleteHow - is the body even supposed to be aware that its original brain has been replaced? And do the brains implanted in any of those incarnations of Frankenstein's creature even retain the memory of their previous lives, anyway? (I'm not really familiar with either the original novel or any of the films adapted from it, I'm afraid. I'm guessing Robert Hudson's Frankenstein and the Sharks of Doom wouldn't be particularly informative here.)
ReplyDeleteI think my (incredibly generic and quite possibly very much misinformed) view on the subject matter is that we are our own mind (/soul/consciousness/perception?), but for all that I know virtually nothing about neuroscience, I don't suppose the mind could quite exist as a separate entity without a brain (and possibly a body/our senses) as its hardware, so - I don't know.
(All I know is that, given the choice, I wouldn't want to go for the option of being transplanted into a different body. I shouldn't think so. Hopefully I will never have to find out.)
In retrospect I'm surprised how familiar "Sharks of Doom" was with the brain-swapping side of the Frankenstein canon.
ReplyDelete