Bag the TV movies and read the book for the real thing. The premise is a drug is given to an experimental rat named Algernon and it increases his intelligence enormously. The sciencers watching see the immense success so the first thought is one of them must try it.
Sure enough, he does and his intelligence goes into orbit so he's chewing up physics like it's a game of Tic Tac Toe. That's when they notice Algernon's intelligence is decreasing again and his strength is weakening. You don't need me to tell you how that goes but it's still worth reading.
The story is only sci-if insofar as it sets the stage for the most fundamental aspect of life. Intelligence comes but it will go in time. Gaps appear in memory and they get larger over time. For the worst cases, they eat all of your memory but most of us aren't in that extreme situation. Nevertheless, most of us will develop gaps and hence the story of Algernon. Where he goes, we all go.
We can put it all in a thimble if you like: Time waits for no Man.
Your life is in front of you; it is not behind you and it is not ahead of you but both of those will improve if you focus where you are rather than somewhere you might be. That aspect is inner skiing because if you believe you will crash, you sure as hell will.
The lesson is not to you but to myself and I need to repeat it every so often like when I try to remember Bill Murray's name and it's not there. My head is riddled with details like that and I enjoy that fact, it took years to accumulate them, so there's a measure of inevitable confusion if it's not there ... but we're all Algernon. It probably confused him too.
The novel thing is when something you know is missing then your brain goes into some kind of autosearch routine and pops it back up. Suddenly the name pops into your mind, hours later maybe, so it is in there somewhere apparently. We will leave it to the brain cases to figure out how those mechanisms work because it seems there must be one brain search which looks for stuff and gives up if it doesn't get an immediate find. It seems like there must be another one which goes looking under every rock. Whew.
The science articles give me high confidence there are some major brain cases out there and we never hear from them directly because they're off in some Sciencer Central somewhere doing sciencer things and we or most of us are not of that world. It's highly cool to see it exists, tho.
If that triggers Cyril Kornbluth in "The Marching Morons" then stop on down. You win today's trip to Puerto Vallarta where you can hang out with the other winners from The Hollywood Squares.
(Ed: we are the morons?)
Yep, want a party hat? You can have one of mine (larfs).
Sure enough, he does and his intelligence goes into orbit so he's chewing up physics like it's a game of Tic Tac Toe. That's when they notice Algernon's intelligence is decreasing again and his strength is weakening. You don't need me to tell you how that goes but it's still worth reading.
The story is only sci-if insofar as it sets the stage for the most fundamental aspect of life. Intelligence comes but it will go in time. Gaps appear in memory and they get larger over time. For the worst cases, they eat all of your memory but most of us aren't in that extreme situation. Nevertheless, most of us will develop gaps and hence the story of Algernon. Where he goes, we all go.
We can put it all in a thimble if you like: Time waits for no Man.
Your life is in front of you; it is not behind you and it is not ahead of you but both of those will improve if you focus where you are rather than somewhere you might be. That aspect is inner skiing because if you believe you will crash, you sure as hell will.
The lesson is not to you but to myself and I need to repeat it every so often like when I try to remember Bill Murray's name and it's not there. My head is riddled with details like that and I enjoy that fact, it took years to accumulate them, so there's a measure of inevitable confusion if it's not there ... but we're all Algernon. It probably confused him too.
The novel thing is when something you know is missing then your brain goes into some kind of autosearch routine and pops it back up. Suddenly the name pops into your mind, hours later maybe, so it is in there somewhere apparently. We will leave it to the brain cases to figure out how those mechanisms work because it seems there must be one brain search which looks for stuff and gives up if it doesn't get an immediate find. It seems like there must be another one which goes looking under every rock. Whew.
The science articles give me high confidence there are some major brain cases out there and we never hear from them directly because they're off in some Sciencer Central somewhere doing sciencer things and we or most of us are not of that world. It's highly cool to see it exists, tho.
If that triggers Cyril Kornbluth in "The Marching Morons" then stop on down. You win today's trip to Puerto Vallarta where you can hang out with the other winners from The Hollywood Squares.
(Ed: we are the morons?)
Yep, want a party hat? You can have one of mine (larfs).
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