We Are Not Alone

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The Spiritual Brain: Not what you think!

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I recently read a brilliant short novel from Brandon Anderson called The Emperor's Soul. It tells the story of a woman named Shai, a thief and a Forger—a person capable of rewriting the pasts of objects in order to change their present.

As I read the Forger’s descriptions of how she duplicates and changes the appearance of things by understanding their essence, it struck me that Anderson presents some lovely ideas about the life of things that seem powerful reflections of how the brain works as well. So let's capture some of those ideas:

We Are not Alone: The Phantom-Pain of the Brain's Grief

I've had a rough past week.

We have lived with a dependable family member for 18 years -- the AlarmCat. We called him this because of his reliability and skill in managing the two humans of our household: wake up times (different for each of us), dinner time (depending on who was home to remind), bedtimes (again, different for each of the humans, one of whom was incredibly inconsistent and just had to be kept company after getting the other safely to bed-- or eventually yelled at that enough is enough - Get to bed! Yeow!!!)

Our AlarmCat was gradually getting older (aren't we all?!) and sicker. He was alternately having days of repeated vomiting, being shaky on his feet, and sleeping the day and night through -- then rallying to do all his usual routines and human-caretaking for a couple weeks. But the cycles were getting shorter and shorter and last week was the point at which it seemed necessary to stop his growing discomfort.

His last day was the best we could create together.