Friday, February 11, 2011

Weird Scientific Thought

Last night I dreamt that I went to the little convenient store down the hill, you know, the one next to Starbucks run by the Pakistani family?   I bought a pack of my favorite kinda smokes.  Stood in the parking lot and smoked every last one of them.  And it was good.

I have been a smoker most of my life.  About two months ago, I just kinda laid them down and haven't really thought about them again.  Weird.  No fuss.  No cravings.  Just done.  Even weirder considering that I am unemployed and the stress is sometimes - well - yunno - the kind that results in me sitting in the corner playing my lower lip like an instrument.  And that kinda thing sometimes makes the cravings obscene.  But no.

It got me to wondering though.........

As a scientist, I know:

1)  that the more you smoke the more nicotine receptors your brain cells make.  Those receptors are demanding little fucks that yammer constantly for more.  When you quit they go bat shit crazy and tantrum like a toddler in Kroger's who can't have his Lucky Charms.  But if you resist long enough, they begin to be recycled and they get fewer and fewer in number.  One smoke is all it takes to get the machinery rolling again to make more pouty receptors.  Any smoker who has quit and gone back can tell you that even one can lead to tremendous backslide.

2)  that my brain does not distinguish between what is really in front of me and what I remember, at least as far as activity.  If I see a book in an MRI a certain part of my brain becomes active.  If I remember a book, same area lights up.  It clearly does some kinda brainy hocus pocus in there to sort them out because, if everything I imagined were real the Sta Puft Marshmallow man would be the least of our worries.  Some sort of neural higher process is applied to the raw data that sorts it into 'real' v 'memory'.

Damn, that girl is thinking some weird shit.  How she ever gonna bring it all together?

Well here goes.  My question is this:

If what I imagine has the same result in my brain as what is, then if I imagine smoking a cigarette, or in this case dream I smoked a whole pack, does that start the receptors being produced?  


Inquiring minds wanna know, because I may just have to send the dreamtime board of health in to that market and shut it down if the dream smoking continues.

1 comment:

  1. I think if your awake / left brained self sat and visualized smoking a pack of cigarettes, you'd develop tons of those little receptors. Since it was your right brain in the dream state - alpha or maybe theta - then it isn't going to have the same physical effect. Imagining would do it - dreaming wouldn't. But I'd rather you didn't do the experiment. : >

    ReplyDelete

 I have written a lot about my belly - series of poems dedicated to it. I happen to like my belly. Always have Oh, I know it's not what ...