Mind Scalpel

As part of my Secret Plan for Global Domination, I have of course been developing an army of nigh-invulnerable, genetically-engineered super-soldiers, which, as Steven Covey would say if he were a would-be Global Despot rather than a self-help guru, is a “Quadrant II” activity for evil geniuses. (Incidentally, when I execute Phase I of my Rapid International Takeover, self-help gurus will be in the first group against the wall; self-actualization will be irrelevant when everyone’s highest values will be whatever I dictate. But, I digress.)

Anyway, one typical downfall of standard evil geniuses who develop super-soldier armies is that their super-soldiers tend to rebel, often at the most inconvenient times. I’m not a standard evil genius; I’m an exceptional one. So a primary focus of my research and development activities has been not just on enhancing my minions’ physical abilities (strength, power, speed, reflexes, resistance to pathogens, ability to endure long car trips without bathroom breaks, etc.) and mental powers (situational awareness, rapid learning so they can be speedily grown in vats and quickly infused with appropriate skills, high aversion to daytime television, and so on), but also on ensuring that they will remain fanatically loyal to me.

So naturally I’ve been sticking electrodes in subjects’ brains and figuring out what can be done with them since, oh, heck, it’s been so long I can’t even remember. Perhaps you are now starting to understand a few of the reasons this blog is named “Mind Scalpel.”

That’s why I enjoy seeing news stories like this one, describing some “new” discoveries that I had developed and surpassed, in secret, years ago. See, some doctors are all excited that when they were poking around in the brain of a 50-year-old obese guy in search of the “don’t eat so much, knucklehead” synaptic center of his brain, they discovered that their patient recalled, in great detail, a scene from 30 years before:

“He reported the experience of being in a park with friends from when he was around 20 years old and, as the intensity of stimulation increased, the details became more vivid. He recognised his girlfriend [from the time] … The scene was in colour. People were wearing identifiable clothes and were talking, but he could not decipher what they were saying . . . . As we increased the intensity of the current, we got spontaneous memories of discrete events. At a certain intensity, he would slash to the scene [in the park]. When the intensity was increased further, he got more detail but, when the current was turned off, it rapidly decayed.”

Of course these physicians fell all over themselves in their haste to get their findings published, hypothesizing this could lead to wonderful results in restoring memories and brain function in people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other brain diseases.

Having spies in pretty much every institute of higher learning and R&D lab throughout the world, I can tell you a few things that these doctors did not disclose about this experiment.

First of all, their patient was screaming “Turn it off! Turn it off!”

And their bland reference to “when the current was turned off” masks the fact that the current was turned off because the obese guy broke his restraints, leaped off the table and yanked the machine’s plug out of the wall socket.

Come on! The guy was 419 pounds! The memory they were forcing him to relive was probably the last one in which he had a girlfriend! Why the heck did they think he’d gained all that weight in the first place?

My independent research (which caused me to abandon this particular line of experimentation) determined that oddly enough, when you run electrical current through peoples’ brains, it inevitably stimulates recall of their lives’ most embarrassing or mortifying moments, which typically means, of course, high school. So aside from this guy being a late bloomer, humiliation-wise, that suggests that there is a high probability that this scene was in fact the one in which the guy’s girlfriend broke up with him.

My results, gathered through brain surgery on approximately 1037, um, “nonvoluntary patients,” can be classified into rough categories as follows:

• 37%: gym class depantsings
• 28%: Mom/Dad trying to have “The Talk” with you
  • Subset: Realizing you know way more than her/him
• 26%: rejections of prom date requests (male subjects)
• 23%: prom dates with geeks whose date requests were accepted out of desperation (female subjects)
• 17%: attempts at love poetry
• 17%: receipts of love poetry
• 13%: realization that your existence means that your mother and father must have, on at least one occasion, had sex
• 12%: mother discovering stash of “adult” magazines

(remaining categories omitted due to broad spectrum of uniquely embarrassing situations) (note that these percentages sum to more than 100% because (a) some of the categories were gender-specific; and (b) some of them overlap (e.g. parental discovery of “adult” magazines resulting in parental attempt to have “The Talk”)).

With respect to the doctors’ observation that “as the intensity of stimulation increased, the details became more vivid,” they completely missed the most obvious inference that can be drawn from that detail: lightning deaths!

See, when someone’s struck in the head by a gajillion-volt lightning bolt, it’s not the electricity or burns that kill them – they’re just dying from embarrassment.

So I hope they don’t start trying to use this on too many Alzheimer’s patients, because they’ll only wake up long enough to look at their doctor and say “shut that damn thing off!”

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