Wake up, Brain!

What is wrong with my brain today? 

It’s full of – nothing.  There’s nothing worse than trying to think of something to say and nothing comes to mind, literally.  That’s a lot of nothing‘s but there’s nothing else I can actually think of to replace them with!

I blame the weather, really.  Something about rainy days that make me stare out of the window in blank contemplation (an oxymoron, I know.  I’m really good at those).  Every time a thought enters my brain, my neck, of its own freewill, turns toward the window, and no matter how hard I try to change my position, it remains that way until I have a veritable creak. When I am finally able to wrench my eyeballs of the misted up glass, whatever thought that had been there, trying desperately to hold on, has been washed away by the mind numbing wet outside.  And yes, it actually has taken me thirty minutes just to write this paragraph.

What is it with the rain?  The only thing I can currently think of doing is snuggling up in my warm, cosy bed.  And not even to read a book.  Rather to lie there, blankly staring at the ceiling, with random unimportant thoughts running through my head like my daily news ticker.  I guess it doesn’t help that I have the electric heater on and my toes are roasting nicely against it. ( I know I actually shouldn’t.  After all, it’s not winter and it’s not really that cold.)  What is the connection between warm feet and being lackadaisical?  I don’t know but there is definitely something in that.

And just to prove that my brain really is in sleep mode, I just wrote definitely as denitielt.  That’s not even a word(as far as I know).  Added to that, I was watching the snooker on BBC 2 and it did not even register that the program had changed to that antiques show.  I carried on staring at it for a full five minutes before my hand remotely changed the channel to the red button – my brain had no apparent awareness of doing this as somehow I still thought I was watching the original channel.

It kind of reminds me of something an advertising company did years ago.  I won’t mention the name of the popular fizzy drinks company that was involved in the campaign.  In short, some ad exec genius figured out a way to get people to buy more of their clients’ most popular fizzy drink by placing ads at strategic points in a cinema reel.  The genius of these ads was that each one was only one frame long.  In terms of a reel, that would be a blink of the eye.  Too fast for the brains’ conscious cognitive abilities but, subconsciously, the ads were absorbed into the minds of the unsuspecting patrons.  The result: when the film finished, everyone was exceedingly thirsty and went straight off to buy their favourite fizzy drink (the one advertised) and so subliminal advertising was born.  Of course, it’s not allowed these days but who actually checks on these things?  Who’s to know that it wasn’t subliminal advertising that made us eat that particular burger from that specific takeaway when we don’t usually eat takeaways and actually don’t even like the burgers from that place?  But we did recently watch a film that seemed to have a lot of scenes with that very takeaway as the backdrop.  Subliminal advertising, no? Hmm..

The point I was actually making there, (in some weird roundabout way) was that earlier on my brain must have been working subliminally.  It made me change the channel without me even realising (for a while at least) so as not to disturb my yen.  Makes one wonder how often the brain actually does this.  The whole time we are thinking of other things (or indeed nothing at all), our brains are performing subliminal acts that keep us on the right track and, indeed, sane.  And an hour later, somehow, my empty brain has managed to put this post together.

Thank you, Brain.  Remind me to write an ode to you tomorrow.  Right now I have to go and do something important.  If only I could remember what is was…

Copyright  © 230412 by Karen Payze – including the rain picture

• Posted in: Thoughts
• Tagged: Advertising, blank, Brain, cinema, cognitive, conscious, fizzy drink, Health, Hidden Persuaders, mind, rain, reel, remember, sleep, Soft drink, subconscious, subliminal, Subliminal stimuli, takeaway, think, Thought, thoughts, weather, yen