If I Only Had a Brain

Did you know that March has been declared Brain Awareness Month?

I sure didn't.

That is, until an email popped into my inbox on March 22^nd declaring, “March is Brain Awareness Month!”

I repeat… on March 22^nd.

Is anyone else sensing a little irony here?

The email went on to tell me that The Society of Neuroscience has pronounced March 10-16 as “Brain Awareness Week.”

Is anyone “aware” that that was, like, weeks ago?

Here we are rounding the final turn toward April, and NOW they tell us. We could have been celebrating our full brain awareness all month long! Alas... such lost opportunities.

At any rate, let’s take some time out right now to celebrate brains. Don’t you just love ‘em? They’re so dang helpful for things like, well, thinking…creating… breathing…

or having awareness of those important dates on the calendar.

And yet, some of our most memorable characters of film and print are clearly cases of “brains gone rogue.” For example, Dory in Finding Nemo is endearing precisely because her noggin is so defective. And who, besides Dory, could forget Rain Man? Then of course, there’s the scarecrow in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz who claimed to have no brain at all — and yet managed enough “awareness” to notice that his “thinker thingy” had, in fact, gone AWOL.

And while a neuropsychologist could create an entire career out of the cast from Alice in Wonderland, who wouldn't want to have the brains of Hermione Granger for just one day?

Brain, Brains

so wonderfully pink,

the more you use ‘em

the more you think!

Clearly, my brain just had its own rogue moment.

PROMPT: Celebrate your brain today — with awareness! Just think, I could give you an alphabet of only 26 letters, and your brain could use them to write the greatest story ever told. Or, I could hand you just three primary colors, and your brain could mix them to paint a masterpiece. Or…

it could spend the entire day playing Angry Birds. The choice is yours.

What are you and your brain going to do today?