Brainiac

by Bethany Maines

I was staring at an app advertisement on my phone the other day when a brilliant idea for a novel came to me.  I’m not going to tell you what it is, because it’s awesome and I don’t want the net gremlins to steal it.  But as I pondered the awesomeness that was my own idea, and then shining beacon of sheer stunning gloriferousness that is my brain  (Yeah, I just made that word up.  What are you going to do about it?), it occurred to me to wonder – what would happen to me if I didn’t have my brain?

And ok, yeah, obviously, dead. Plop.  But what about if I had someone else’s brain?  We all look at the world from the unique transponder of our brains. We see the world differently, if only by a hair, than the person sitting next to us. 

For example, I have a friend who is somewhere around seven feet tall.  That’s not an exaggeration, that’s his actual height.  We met in college and we had several classes, including life drawing, together. (Life drawing, for those who haven’t been to art school, is code for “drawing naked people.”)  For one semester our life drawing instructor was a curly haired, 5’2” dreamer who once suggested that zoning out while driving on the freeway was a good place to get creative ideas.  (We don’t have time to really go into that statement.)  Anyway, at some point, she went around to my friend’s drawing board and suggested that his perspective was wrong.  He checked, he double checked, he thought about it, and then politely suggested that he really did have it right.  She stared up at him, she stared at the model.  Then she drug a chair over next to him and climbed up on it.  “Oh, nope, you’re right.” Your perspective is just different when you’re an extra two feet up in the air. 

Two feet and an entire picture changes. If I had someone else’s brain, surely the ideas I have for writing books would be totally different.  If I had them at all.  But since I love my ideas, I love my brain, I don’t think I’ll be heading to Dr. Frankenstein’s lab to test out that experiment.  But go ahead and thank your brain today, because it’s awesome.

Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mystery series and Tales from the City of Destiny. You can also view the Carrie Mae video or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.