Broca's Brain

The title of this entry, in case you didn't know, is a book by Carl Sagan, a popular astronomer, astrophysicist, and I don't know what else. He wrote about science in a way that the average person could understand, tried to bust a bunch of myths and popularized science. His book was titled after a French scientist, Paul Broca, who studied brains. In fact, Broca kept hundreds of them in jars of formalin in his lab. He believed that if you compared what you knew about a person's behaviour to his post-death brain, you could discover the reason for much of his behaviour. Broca had a section of the brain responsible for speech named after him. Eventually Broca's own brain ended up in the collection and when Carl Sagan discovered this fact, he named the title essay of his book, Broca's Brain.

I mention these interesting facts because I have been interested recently in how brains work. There are actually two things about how brains work that fascinate me.

The first of these is my own brain's unaccountable tendency to tell me things at really odd times. For instance, last Tuesday I had a workshop to present in Edmonton. I packed all the materials on Saturday so I could leave post-haste on Monday morning. It was a terrible trip and I was tired enough to go almost directly to bed on Monday night. I woke suddenly at 4:00 a.m. hyper-alert. My brain had just informed me that I had forgotten to pack my felt pens - and I really need them. There are two things about this: the first is that my brain was absolutely right, even though it was the first time I had ever made this particular mistake. I mostly leave the pens in the travel case so forgetting to put them in is not an issue. Obviously some part of my brain had registered that I had not seen them there when I put in all the other materials.

The second thing is that it felt a bit like sabotage. Why not tell me Sunday morning at 4:00 a.m. or even Monday morning? I could have done something about it then! It seemed pointless, although it was pointless to tell my brain this, to tell me at four o'clock in the morning when it was everlastingly too late to do anything about it. I couldn't even check, since the travel case was in the trunk of the car. What part of Broca's Brain is responsible for this annoying behaviour?

In reality, my brain often tells me things I was not thinking about at all, and didn't know before it told me, at least on a conscious level. Here is another example. I have been working on a course to present next week. I thought I was finished it yesterday, but I woke up this morning with my brain telling me that there was a change I needed to make - use a different example for that exercise and use the example I had already put in for something else. So I got up and did it. My brain was right, the course is better now. Was my brain thinking about that when I wasn't thinking about that? Do our brains think about things we don't think about?

If anyone has an answer to this quandary I would certainly appreciate some enlightenment.

The second thing about brains that I have been pondering is all about memory, but I think I'll save that for another post.