To: all-ai Subject: GSB, Friday 5:30, 7 AI --text follows this line-- An unnamed genius in the lab believes that there is a reliable inverse relation between the quality of a conversation and the number of apocryphal references to case studies of patients with massive brain trauma. If he is correct, GSB is the perfect forum for such stories. There are certainly enough of them. Go to any introductory cognitive science class, and you'll hear something like "Bigburger [63] describes a subject that when asked to count from one to ten, experienced involuntary spasming of all major muscle groups. Post-experiment examination of the cranial volume revealed a complete evisceration of the anterior, posterior, lateral and distal cerebellum and cerebrum. Spielhauser [67] interprets this failure as evidence for the motor-theory of counting." But what sticks in your mind is not that men can't tell their wife from a sled named Rosebud, or that for many people, in the words of a former lab member, "another neuron and they'd have a synapse". What sticks in your mind is not that with sufficient hemorrhage, a patient may vote Republican. What sticks in your mind is not that there are people who get out of bed each morning by trying to throw their leg out the window, imagining that it is trying to gnaw off their private parts. What sticks in your mind is the extraordinary manner in which some people sustain injuries. Every day there are people in the Midwest who walk into hospitals with crowbars sticking out their ears, carefully avoiding the revolving door. They fall out of planes without parachutes and get hit by twenty shotgun blasts at close range. Then they walk over to their friend Sue and say "You know, Betty, I can't seem to prove the Chinese Remainder Theorem anymore." An F-16 fires an AMRAAM missle at a nearby test range and the thing embeds itself midway between the prefrontal cortex and the supplementary motor area. Microscopic blue whales enter the blood stream and grow to full size in V1 and all someone notices is "blue spots" and the sound of the ocean in their ears. After extensive testing in neuroscience laboratories, they are given a diagnosis: "you see blue spots because there is a 200-ton mammal living in your brain." It may be that we can not, hard as we try, sustain these injuries ourselves. But we can achieve nearly the same effects, without invoking fate, by enjoying a beverage at this week's G I R L S C O U T B E N E F I T in the 7th floor playroom at 5:30 on Friday, where lab members will be encouraged to use their own personality quirks as evidence for specific neural failure modes.