Access denied

I have always been fascinated by how the human brain works.    One time when I was peeling an apple, suddenly, out of nowhere, I remembered standing on a playground with some junior high school age kids when I visited a rural school that my friend attended.  That had been almost twenty years ago!   I had only visited that friend’s home and school one time, could not tell you much of anything that we did during our 24 hours together, and furthermore, was no longer in contact with that friend as an adult.    So, why?   Why on earth did peeling an apple spark that memory?   Had I eaten an apple that day?  Was someone on the playground wearing a shirt with an apple on it?  Did somebody make a joke or tell a story involving an apple?   Or maybe it was the knife, or the running water at my kitchen sink, or the rhythmic movement of my hands.    The possibilities are endless and unknowable but somewhere, deep in the recesses of my brain, an entire experience, a detailed memory, is trapped.

I once heard that every single thing we experience, every sight, every sound, every scent, every touch - everything - is all imprinted on our brains. We may not be able to recall even a small percentage of it, but everything we go through in life is there, like a little video in the archive drawer of our minds.

So, I am fascinated.  I am fascinated that sometimes the brain recalls seemingly insignificant details from our lives at odd times, and that same brain can not retain information that is desperately needed such as the babysitter‘s phone number, what time I last gave the child medicine, or when faced with a grizzly bear, how to deter him from turning you into his lunch.   Well, I guess the information is retained, but not accessible, which does me absolutely no good when I'm stuck in traffic, eye-balling the Tylenol, or wondering when is the last time that bear ate anything. 

It got me to thinking, is this what goes on with Big Kid?   Perhaps the very things I get so frustrated over are really not the lack of a common sense gene as I so often say, but rather that the information is in there somewhere, but he’s been denied access.

I’d like to think this is true, because the alternative is really going to make me lose my mind.   There just seems to be no common sense department in Big Kid’s brain, which is frustrating, but equally fascinating on another level because this same child is a straight A student, can rattle off movie and computer game facts by the millions, and has the vocabulary of an English college professor eight times his age!

So, why would this extremely intelligent boy, stand at the back door of our home, with belongings in each arm and say, “Uh, a little help here?”    Really?  I’m fifty feet away, chasing after Little Kid, as usual, and I have to stop what I’m doing because you can’t figure out how to turn a door knob?   So frustrating, I mean, FASCINATING.

And of course, I say to him the same thing, “Really? How do you THINK you might be able to solve that problem?” 

But I swear to you he stood there and stared at me like not a single idea fluttered through his mind, even briefly.    The access door to the common sense department was firmly closed, sealed on all sides, dead bolted, triple locked and set with an alarm.  Nobody was getting near that top secret information!

My very clipped words were an indication that my common sense door swings wide open and has a huge neon, flashing welcome sign on it apparently because I was very quickly able to surmise that if he just, let’s see, SET SOMETHING DOWN, he could then free up a hand to turn the door knob! 

The level of frustration this caused him was very apparent, but I just can’t help getting irritated.   I mean, if his brain were an old tv or a vending machine, I’d probably be smacking it on the side by now and ordering it to work. But as it is, I must fantasize about how wonderful it would be if he was the droid character, Data, from Star Trek, the Next Generation, and I could simply open a flap on the side of his head and start tweaking the circuitry in there.

I am in complete awe of the intricacies that God has placed in our brains, so complex that medical science is a long way from mastering an understanding of  it.    It is a strange irony that human brains are required to understand the human brain, and yet, we lack the consistent firing of all those little connectors to retain the information needed.   Whether this misfire happened after Eve ate that first bite of Apple (hey, maybe I was thinking about sin back on that playground!) or whether God designed it that way, so that he would always be looked upon as the only All-Knowing One, I don’t know.    But, no matter which way this miscommunication in our brains began, I sure wish he would have at least given us some sort of reset or reboot option. 

Big Kid has a glitch, and I just know that if I could “clear” a pathway to that common sense department, then at the very least, we could maybe drill a peephole in that door. Because seriously, if I have to give him step by step instructions on how to perform basic functions for the next ten years, while Little Kid is multi-tasking like a steak knife juggler who is eating an ice cream cone mid-act, I’m going to quickly lose my life long fascination with the human brain.