Monday, November 07, 2005

My brain has no idea what is going on in my mouth.



My brain has no idea what is going on in my mouth. I say that because it's just spent the last hour telling me all the wrong things about what my dentist was sticking around with in there. Now I should say first that my brain is very good at guessing sizes, measurements and distances. My eyes can look down a highway or across a room and my brain will correctly report "It's a half a mile to that sharp corner." and "You're going to need twelve feet of rug runner." My brain is good at little stuff too. Hold up a number 8 sheet metal screw and nine times out of time, my brain will tell you whether it's a 2" or 1 3/4". So it came as a surprise to me when I realized that my brain can't tell sizes inside my mouth. It's all guesswork for the cerebellum When the dentist fills a tooth my brain thinks he is larding huge chunks of filling stuff into a gigantic chasm located in the back of my head, well beyond the limits of my mouth area, all while attaching a 3" C clamp to my lip. It reports that my masked friend used a four inch disc grinder on that back molar and is now trying to force a rubber bottle stopper between it and my gums.

Yes. I know none of that could be true. There isn't any way for me to have the reported giant C-Clamp on my lip, yet my brain insists that it is there.

At least the part of my brain that is supposed to report on stuff like this is saying that. The brain is divided up into about a hundred parts, I think, not just the three we learned in school, cerebrum, cerebellum and medulla oblongata. Inside all of those are little sections which help us guess what going on in the world, all observing, analyzing and rationalizing. "Excuse me," pipes up one, "that piece of cheese appears to be moldy." Well, yes, "says a analyst, "yes, it does." "But, I'm really hungry." observes a whiney, still four years old, section. "You'll get sick." says a predicter chunk." "You always say that."glows another, "It never happens. Well, hardly ever."
"Wait, I have it." says the rational part, "We eat half. If we are not sick in a half an hour, we eat the other half." ... "Oh, go ahead and eat" says the still stuck in there teenager. "How about fifteen minutes?" says the compromiser from your second marriage. And so it goes.

"All finished." says the dentist slamming down the chainsaw onto the instrument holder."Try to rinse." This part must really amuse dentists because they know your lips are still drugged out. "Hey," says the brain, "More bad news. You have no lips." It does feel just like that. I remind the brain that we are at the dentist and it has no idea what is going on, but that if it will shut up for a moment I will take it for a nice nap after we get home.

"Aounds moud" says the lip controller.

We get up and go pay our bill.

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