I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. I assume it’s the old life in a state of flux thing again. Yes, once again, I am in a state of flux, but at least this time it’s not because an ex-whatever is giving me the old heave-ho.
Change is inevitable. It is the only way to make progress. Choose to stand still in life and you’ll end up frozen in time as the world passes you by. It’s a lesson I know well, have often embraced, and right now, am relearning again.
I know this because my head is making noises again. It does that, especially in times when I find myself questioning the status quo and wondering where I am supposed to be in this big universe of ours.
It is a very noisy place. I always knew it was. But it wasn’t until I stopped in for a bit of therapy with my old friend Dr. Hiram S. Burnshocker that I learned how bad it really was.
If you recall, Dr. Burnshocker is a dear friend of mine. I was his student at Green River Community College. He taught psychology there at the time, a young professor with big dreams. Little did we know that his pioneering research in Peer-Chair Pressure would lead him to a plum, tenured position at Peoria University.
The good doctor has moved into new fields of research since, some of them very avant garde. This includes the field of brain acoustical reanimation, where researchers can actually capture the sounds of your brain in action.
You’d think that there isn’t much noise up there. After all, current research says that it’s all a mass of synapses and electrical charges that make up the thoughts in our head. But what Dr. Burnshocker is finding is that this is far from the whole truth. There’s a lot of activity going on up there and technology is allowing us to finally listen in.
Let me explain how it came about. It all started with the Cochlear implants. These are used on deaf patients and it allows sound waves to be captured by the bone in the skull so it can be transferred electronically to the brain. Pretty cool stuff, by the way. What Dr. Burnshocker found was that if you reversed the polarity, the Cochlear device can listen to what’s inside your head instead and relay it to a set of external speakers. Think of it as having your very own radio station.
I volunteered to be hooked up to the experimental device that had been developed by the research team. I must admit, I felt a bit silly in the helmet they put on me. It looked like I was getting a makeover at a beauty salon.
Dr. Burnshocker flipped a few switches and adjusted some dials. It took him some time to finally zero in on the particular bandwidth my brain was using. He mumbled something under his breath about it being scrambled. But before long, the signal began to process and sputtered out of the receiver in the room.
My jaw dropped. This was the first time in my life others could hear what my head sounded like to me. I was pretty used to it, but I have to say, it was amazing to hear it broadcast through the lab.
I was able to capture a small part of the recording. Here, for the first time, is what my head sounds like: Robb Zerr/Head Case 1.
Frightening isn’t it? So many voices in so many conversations at once. It is a din of activity, not a den of iniquity as many of you thought. Since birth, I have been hearing this stuff… all the unsolicited advice about what I should do, shrieks of laughter at my ill-advised antics, the cries of sadness at loves lost, the jovial hilarity of a well told joke, shrieks of delight from a well played round, the roar of a big win, the anguish of an equally big loss and the bewildered voice of a little boy who is still lost in the wilderness.
Dr. Burnshocker was mystified.
“I’ve heard this type of sound before, but never in a test subject,” he said before excusing himself. He disappeared into the catacombs of audio files in the lab. Nearly 30 minutes passed before he returned. I didn’t mind passing the time. I had all these voices in my head to keep me company. And besides, I was amused watching the two college interns scribble madly in their notebooks, trying to keep up with what they were hearing.
Finally, Dr. Burnshocker returned. He had with him some old-school cassette tapes that had been gathering dust over the years. He popped one into the cassette deck and pushed Play.
It sounded almost the same. I was astounded. Someone else had the same voices in their head. But how could that be?
I asked him to overlay his recording with the live feed from my head.
“Oh my God!” I said. “Where did you ever get that recording from, Dr. Burnshocker?”
“The Office,” he replied, matter of factly.
“Well, I know that, doctor. I just saw you bring it out of the archives.”
“No dear boy,” he said chuckling. “The Office. It’s a bar. Lad, you have what we researchers call Bar Brain, a rare disorder that occurs when you spend too much time in a noisy, working class bar. Your brain has learned to speak in a language it knows you will understand – Barflytarian.”
Frankly, I was relieved. I thought that sound had a familiar ring to it. Now if I could just get my brain to have non-stop Happy Hour instead it always being Last Call.
Out on the Treasure Coast, wondering when it will come time to finally pay the tab,
– Robb