The intimidating amount of intensity and determination etched into his sweat-dappled brow is enough to make the occasional onlooker presume him to be a neurosurgeon, mathematician, or rocket scientist; though, he is never aware of these disembodied suspicions floating around him, and the preening bystanders never guess that they are right some of the time. Not yet. Even at a good heart rate (somewhere between 130 and 140 bpm), his vermilion eyes are as still as a frozen pond as they search inward, inward for answers, answers to questions about the brain, questions that plague him. A traveling electrical storm surges through the occipital lobe at the back of his skull forming the steady pulse of a million strands of electrically charged threads of tissue, networks of cells that somewhere in the visual cortex may eventually point to the answers, but not in the visions that every newspaper machine and garbage can he is jogging past, occupy him, lost like he is. Somewhere branching out from the hippocampus, the seat of memory, are another million weaves, forming the pristine hologram of a patient’s fMRI that he is searching over, looking for an explanation for her newfound inability to recognize faces: prosopagnosia. As he enters the topographic map pf her brain, the obstacles on the sidewalk vanish.

The cadence of his feet is measured and the course he is on is given over to the work of the muscle memory hardwired in the motor cortex, as the environment of Central Park West melts away into the vacuum of lost perception, wherever it is that visions, unattended to, go to die. His determination, his intensity, is born of a need to know, to consume information. Like a horror flick zombie seeking out its macabre pabulum, no detail, no study, no paper, no case, escapes his notice. What he does, the art of it, is not the albeit precise slice and dice of other surgeons digging into muscle and bone—what Jacob Coburn cuts are the concrete (as you and I call them) ideas and memories of his patients—the tissue where we say ideas exist. A mistake does not result in sutures—it results in the loss of that which is most precious: the soul. The soul as a neurosurgeon understands it to be, anyway.

His predilection has left him without many friends or a significant relationship for the most part, its gargantuan appetite too ravenous to allow for trivial concerns like feelings and the banality of so-called “lives”. Feelings. Primitive. Most emotion was located in or around the amygdala, one of the oldest evolved parts of the brain, one of the most animalistic. He felt it was almost pathetic to be guided by such compulsions and it was hard to have a reasonable conversation with anyone who allowed himself or herself to be persuaded by feelings. They were sticky, absorbing, inconsiderate. He could not afford to get lost in that mixture of ether that blurred the cut. His current hunt lay in the fusiform gyrus where facial recognition occurred. His next tumor would be there. He could already see in his mind’s eye, the pussy yellow-brown mass. He takes a deep breath and focuses.

Running freed him from the incessant monologue of debate concerning all the decisions—frequently composed of life or death dichotomies—idiotic in their ignorance of the species as a colony—that he had to make. When plucking a tumor out of neuronal tissue it was never a question of savior—not enough meant re-growth and death—too much resulted in brain damage. So the running never quelled the questions. When he hits 60th street he turns around, breathing heavy, (oxygen to the brain!) to head back to his apartment, hardly thinking about the change in course. Rather, as he turns, he closes his eyes and reminds himself that now he has fifteen minutes left to try to achieve an internal quiet, the alpha wave pattern of meditation, before the onslaught of phone messages, emails, patients, greetings, hand shakes, meetings, feelings. He turns his attention like radar to the urgency and nobility of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 playing out between his ears, and sets into the final twenty block obstacle course of cracks, curbs, streets, cars and bodies.

Read the whole thread: Brain->Wash, The Memory Thief