#brain wrinkle

It wrinkles my brain to think I am made of purely physical matter, yet here I am having conscious thought. Like, I'm just a bunch of physical stuff—cosmic guts—arranged in such a way that I'm able to think and feel and be alive. I am an awoken branch of the universe experiencing itself. And here I am, a chunk of cosmos stuff, transmitting my thoughts and feelings out there only to animate the thoughts and feelings of other chunks of cosmos stuff. The thoughts and feelings you're having right now as you read these words are brought to you to by 13.8 billion years of inevitability, from one happily-sentient arrangement of matter to another. Here we are. Awoken. Tiny. Trembling. Momentary. Glorious. Precious. We are conscious cosmic appendages communicating to one another, sparking chain reactions of ideas and feelings into the very fabric of the universe itself... Now, if you'll excuse me, this piece of cosmos stuff is hungry and has to chew up other chunks of cosmos stuff and melt it in my belly.

It wrinkles my brain to watch people do things while reminding myself that humans are apes. Like driving on the highway and looking around at these fucking monkeys piloting metal death traps at 70 miles per hour. Or watching someone write something down—like holy shit this bald ape is transmitting a cloud of brain electricity into symbols to communicate with other bald apes. Look at that primate read a book! Look at all these animals flap their mouth holes and vibrate air to coordinate and cooperate on vast scales! That bespectacled simian's doing math! That one's painting a self-portrait, and that one's slapping drums into a lovely melody, and that one's wobbling in perfect rhythm with the beat, and that one's mindlessly participating in an exploitative capitalist system! If a chimp or gorilla did any of these things it'd be the most viral video ever. But here we are, a bunch of lanky naked monkeys in a continuous cycle of astounding behaviors, and hardly anyone takes notice. What a bewildering type of monkey we be.

It wrinkles my brain that "normal" matter—quarks, protons, electrons, photons, all the stuff with which we're capable of interacting—makes up less than 5% of the universe. The rest of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy, both of which remain total mysteries to us. We can't hear, touch, smell, or see the stuff that makes up 95% of the cosmos... Considering this, would it really have been too much to ask for Donald Trump to have been made from that stuff?

It wrinkles my brain to think that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. And it wrinkles my brain again to think there are more atoms in a few grains of sand than there are stars in the known universe. We are utterly enveloped in vast and invisible worlds… No wonder I can never find my car keys.

It wrinkles my brain that at this moment we are spinning around the iron core of our planet at 1,000 mph, that we are circumnavigating a colossal nuclear reactor at 67,000 mph, that we are in a 500,000 mph dance with a supermassive black hole, and that our entire galaxy is shooting through the vacuum of space at 1,300,000 mph… So, no, Doctor, as a matter of fact I don’t think I’m living a sedentary lifestyle.

It wrinkles my brain that female marsupials, like kangaroos and koalas, have three vaginas and males have two-pronged penises… Could you imagine if humans were like this?? Republicans would have to work three times as hard to control women’s bodies!

It wrinkles my brain to think about how biased our brains are. Like, if I think that women are bad drivers, then my brain will remember every time that I see a woman driving badly and totally neglect all the times where women are driving just fine. Or if I think that prayer works, then my brain will focus on all the times where my prayers worked out and totally forget all the times where my prayers remained unfulfilled. Our brains are confirmation machines. We have beliefs about this world and then our brains proceed to find all the evidence we need in order to make us feel good and justified in those beliefs... At least it's good to know that I'm the only person in the world whose brain doesn't work like this. I'm pretty sure I'd remember if I misremembered things.