It was more fun than anyone lets on.
If you're one of the lucky few to have had one, you know I'm not kidding. This is seriously enjoyable stuff.
Enough about closets.
The technician was trying to talk to me and keep me calm, but I was already tired and super relaxed, so I wasn't much for conversation. I wore my softest, most comfortable t-shirt and stretchy pants; I wanted to see if I could make good use of the time and doze while they photo-copied my brain. From the inside, the machine sounded exactly like Captain Kirk's command deck. I'm pretty sure there was some dolphin mixed in there as well, but I was wearing ear plugs, so it was hard to tell. The technician then proceeded to take very loud pictures of my brain for the better part of an hour. I got a little bored at first, but soon discovered that I could make strange noises by swallowing or blinking- cool! After a minute though, I decided I had better stop with the fun, in case I was disturbing the process.
As I lay on my back and focused on being obedient, with my hands resting folded on my stomach, I remembered that this was the exact position in which I sleep. The ambient Star Trek/dolphin noise did a decent job of drowning out the loud picture-taking, and the technician had stopped talking, so I let myself drift. I was surprised when he abruptly fished me out of the machine.
Done already?
I was pretty happy with myself; I had successfully slept in an MRI machine! (sorry, I'm mixing tenses all over the place in this post)
I had a very pleasant time. And as a bonus, they let me know that all is well and perfectly normal in my brain.
It was a good day.
While we're on the subject of brains and falling asleep, I've got some thoughts about thoughts. More specifically, I've been puzzling lately about the concept of original ideas. Perhaps I'm the only one (though I don't think I am), but it seems to me that we don't see much original thought these days. In fact, it seems that we haven't seen any significant original thought for at least the last fifty years -closer to a century, with the exception of Einstein and perhaps very few others.
Let me explain: In Western society especially, we've long been in a state of complacency concerning our performance on the intellectual and scientific front. People aren't thinking new or earth-shattering thoughts anymore. Instead, they simply follow prescribed and accepted patterns of thought to reach the same conclusions at varying depths. That's not to say that there are no useful or innovative ideas on the horizon today; simply no new ones.
Take psychology for example. An explosion of new questions, thoughts, and suggestions about human nature and the mind began with the Ancient Greeks and, with the exception of a few dark spots, continued until the late eighteen-hundreds when William James introduced his pragmatism. Since that glorious and riotous handful of centuries, I truly believe we haven't seen a single original thought about human nature. We have only seen new people re-opening old arguments and revisiting old philosophies.
When was the last time a truly great thinker scrapped the universal blueprint of reason and interjected a wildly, deliciously different idea? What would it be like, I wonder, to have been on the earth when glimmers of new thought were touching the realms of art, philosophy, psychology, physics, chemistry, etc. through the influence of figures such as James or Newton? I could go into each of these fields and others individually, but I'm sure we would both get bored. Not to mention that I would just be restating old news, which would only further prove the redundancy of this post.
This brings me back to the thoughts I've been having about thoughts: Have we truly abandoned advancement on the intellectual, literary, and artistic trails? Or, rather, have we been pressing forward along the same well-trodden paths and been turning blind eyes all the while to the possibilities of forging new ones? Is there value in a 'new thought'? Aside from the purpose of entertainment, is there any use for a new idea in the world? This is an especially interesting question from a Latter-day Saint perspective, I think. If we believe that we have all of the necessary tools to live lives pleasing to God and worthy of eternal progress, should we be interested in a thought that could change the world? (A good friend of mine also noted that, if we believe in eternal progress, do we also believe that new thoughts that could change the world are always just around the corner? Since eternal progression is taking place right now, perhaps we really are seeing new ideas emerge on occasion.)
My attention has been called recently to the realm of medicine -especially the great chasm dividing natural medicine and traditional medicine as we understand it through empirical anatomical study. Both worlds seem fundamentally at odds with each other, neither is new, and each seems to have its own claim to effectiveness. Try to convince a sufferer of Fibromyalgia that their once-inescapable pain hasn't been relieved through acupressure, massage, and dietary changes. You might have as much luck convincing the recipient of a donor heart that their life-threatening condition could have been cured without the replacement of a major organ. This dispute within the field of medicine has made me wonder whether we really know what we think we really know. Is what we think is working, really working? What if we're burrowing so deeply into the rabbit hole, that we've entirely missed a different, more enlightened tunnel? Is there a new inspiration missing from the equation, or are there simply two acceptable solutions?
I'll stop my rambling, because I don't have an answer. And you're probably falling asleep now anyway. Go get an MRI.
Since my thoughts are getting me nowhere I'd like to hear yours: New ideas. Do we still see them? Are they valuable? Are they necessary? Or am I a just crazy person?
You are a crazy person. And I miss you SO MUCH!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking similar thoughts lately, though with a bit of a different bent. I was reading Emerson's essay on History (I should have been studying for one of my classes I'm sure but I needed a little transcendental break so I took it, and I'm not ashamed), and he mentioned how with every generation we have more and more opportunity to do more and more brilliant because we have at our fingertips the collective knowledge of our entire race's history. The world's most elite and advanced thinkers have left for us such a great store of knowledge that we can take what they've done, and then push past it to ever more dazzlingly wonderful realms of thought.
ReplyDeleteI really like that idea that we stand on the shoulders of the Newtons and Nietzsches of the world and are able to study their work and then take humanity to new levels. But at the same time I have a question about this: how familiar do we have to be with what has already been said before we can be original with our thoughts? Do we have to know everything that has been said about a subject before we can set off on our own completely original work? I'd like to say that know we don't need a comprehensive knowledge before trying to think of new and radical ways of changing the world, but if we don't have such a knowledge how will we know that what we're saying hasn't already been said? How will we know if our "original" thought is in fact original, or if it's an exercise in futility and we're just reinventing the wheel? If such a comprehensive knowledge is, in fact, necessary, then the thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries had a big advantage over us because they were still close enough to the enlightenment age that the body of work in any area of interest was rather small so they could attain a knowledge of what had been said rather quickly and could then set off on their own endeavors with little delay. But with the advent of public education and western civilization's obsession with making each member of society a free and individualistic thinker there has been an explosion of thinking and writing and publishing to the point where it's become nearly impossible to know everything that has been said. As such people think that they're being original merely because they haven't read or learned enough to know that what they're saying has already been said...repeatedly. Either that, or they dedicate their lives to attaining that comprehensive knowledge and either don't ever make it to the point where they know everything and can set off on their own, or they get distracted along the way and enter into a dialogue with a thinker or philosopher long since dead and begin to freshen up old ideas by coming up with those ideas' implications on modern society. I'm not saying that's bad, but, by your definition, it's not original. Although I think a case might be made for such work as being original because taking new ideas and giving them new implications can have an evolutionary effect on human intellect. (Look at how the Civil Rights Era reinterpretation of the old idea of equality radically changed America) That being said, I think you hit on something key in talking about the relationship between natural, holisitic medicine and scientific medicines. Like you say, these two factions perceive themselves as being diametrically opposed to one another, when in reality I think that they probably work hand in hand in a way that we haven’t yet discovered. In this case, maybe the modern push for originality isn’t just a matter of pushing beyond that which we already know, but rather in better understanding how our varied and perceivedly disparate sets of knowledge actually intersect and relate with one another. Wow, I really didn’t mean to go off like that. My apologies for this lengthy treatise.