This is not a dream

It's more like a vision.

I woke up and in the foggy predawn of consciousness where I have all my great ideas (and all the bad ones too but bear with me), I realized that very soon we are going to have personalized medicine that includes brain scans so we can biofeedback our own learning.

This might be a bunch of crap but then again maybe it's brilliant.  That's the problem with the pre-awake ideas.  Many of them are genuinely awesome but they all feel exactly the same in that moment of encountering them consciously and groggily for the first time.

So generally I write these things down, and then I sit on them for a bit to see whether they are going to make friends with conscious reality.

I wonder if people who do really stupid, crazy or  unconscionable things are just like me except they don't bother with a waiting period.

Anyway I have somehow lost the seventeen notebooks I keep by the bed in case of early morning idea emergencies - I still have twenty-three pens but writing on my hand was impractical in this case (the idea "drink more water" is hand-compatible; complex near-future technology visions not so much).  So I went to the computer to record it in this forum instead.  The advantage being that if I'm right, maybe I'll be able to work out some legal argument to part of the patent rights down the road (more likely I'll just have bragging rights but that seems valuable too).

In any case, here's the intellectual wake upon which this particular notion was found surfing: I went to David Sedaris' book reading last night.  Two impressive things: the man is even funnier in person.  I've enjoyed his books but last night I laughed till I almost peed my pants which I didn't expect.  His humor is unique and well-timed on the page but it is also intensely sad so I don't often laugh out loud.

Somehow the comic timing of a live performance mitigates that, allows the absurdity more space to be both tragic and hysterical - and in a public space it is easier to fall down the laughing side of the mountain.  Everyone else is laughing at the mental image of an eviscerated man's lungs being used to create the wings in a human sculpture known as a "blood angel" so...

Before I go on, let me say that I know of no other person who can make the most honorable, appealing and interesting character in a story be a gerbil wearing a bikini.

The other thing, which everyone who saw the show will remember forever, is that WHILE HE WAS READING, at least twice, David Sedaris grabbed a notebook and jotted something down.  Without a break in his breathing, timing, or focus.  I have never seen anything like it.

When asked what he'd written, they were notes for two memory-anecdotes he'd realized he wanted to tell later on.

Which brings me to memory.  Unless you are a multi-tasking genius with an over-active intellect, that would only possible if you  had done something so often you could literally do it in your sleep.  I'm going to hazard a guess the first option above is actually true; but it is also certain that David Sedaris has written, pondered, re-written, read aloud and come to know his own words so well that speaking at least some of the word series is now in his muscle memory.

The very first thing that happened when I woke up this morning was that I started playing the movie of the choreography we learned in last week's salsa class in my head.  It is the next best thing to muscle memory.  It's also how I memorize public lectures if I don't have a space in which to  actually  pace and practise delivery aloud.

And I had this vision of the parts of my brain that are learning dance lighting up and all the connections and firing going on.  And then I thought we already have (fairly crude but constantly improving) ways to look at this electrical activity, and a rudimentary understanding of what it means when this part of the brain fires versus that one.

And then I realized that barring a complete global economic collapse or environmental disaster (both likely IMO BTW), we are going to have personalized medicine that - in addition to having all the genetic personalized biomarker testing and annotation you could want - will also have brain biofeedback. 

We are a completely self-absorbed, diy, gadget-hungry, consumer society.  Mood rings were the crude forerunners.  Now we have heart moniters, to get us in "the fat-burning zone" and pedometers to make sure we're walking 5000 steps a day and on amazon you can buy a device that mildly electrocutes you in order to discern your percent body fat.  It just makes sense - in fact in the first light of dawn seemed inevitable - that in the not at all distant future we'll have brain scanners that allow us to track and change how we learn.

I've been awake long enough to know this is not a crackhead idea.  I think it's solid.  I think I may need a patent attorney.  And you heard it here first...

I'm off to go dance.  And then I think I need to buy another notebook.