funny: our brains / are these stacked piles of fatty mush / subdivided from the bottom up / into medulla oblongata / cerebellum / and cerebrum

and the cerebrum / is neatly cleft longitudinally / with a switchboard operator in the cleft / called the corpus callosum

since most poetry readers are language fans / here are some fun translations from the latin: / medulla oblongata = elongated marrow / cerebellum = little brain / cerebrum = brain = thinking organ / corpus callosum = calloused body

as for bicameral / the fatty meat of this roller-coaster ride / it means “two chambers” / and that brings us to julian jaynes

who in 1976 had published “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” / in which he suggests that we’ve only been introspective / for the last four thousand years or so

before which we got our notions / via auditory hallucinations / sent from one half of the brain / to the other

and lately most of us have learned / to handle a brain simulcast / and not be scolded or how-about-thatted / by a spooky mysterious voice

but much more lately and thanks to an explosion / of sensory input and distractive seduction / our attention spans are going down the tubes / so let’s quote an ultradense passage from Wikipedia to sum bicamerality up:

“Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so.”

and then there’s ambrose bierce who said something like “man doesn’t think, he only thinks he does” which is pithily paradoxical

so i’ll leave on bierce’s sour/sweet note / hoping i have given you / something to think / and/or non-think about.