by LAURIE NEIDERGAARDEN, Alternate Reality News Service Medical Writer
The most common metaphor for the brain is a computer. But, at different times, in different places, in different languages and/or at different altitudes, the brain has also been metaphorically compared to: a garden hose; a blank writable CD; a constipated elephant; a million police officers running down alleys looking for a black cat at midnight; a cracked watermelon; two polar bears on an ice floe; a fraying wire carrying an alternating current, and; a baby's arm holding an apple.
While these metaphors all have some validity, could the most accurate be that the brain is a cesspool?
That is the metaphor that drives the computer game Brain Sump. Already wildly popular in Japan, where its creator, Dinesh "Shemp" Fujimoro, is regularly seen on the news pontificating about the nature of intelligence and the most pleasurable sexual positions for people of various heights, weights and blood types, the game was recently introduced to the European and North American (except Utah, Nevada and some parts of Hoboken) markets.
The theory behind the game is that the brain accumulates information in the same disordered way that a sump accumulates dreck. In order to improve our ability to access meaningful information in a timely fashion, we must learn how to effectively clear away the garbage in our brains and efficiently process it. We must all, in effect, become intellectual garbage collectors, carting off green bags of nonsense in order to beautify our neuronal neighbourhoods.
Brain Sump does this by giving players a series of puzzles, games and...other things that aren't exactly puzzles or games meant to stimulate our information processing powers. At one point, you have to find five differences in a pair of pictures that actually have nothing in common; at another, you have 30 seconds to find two primes that when multiplied result in a 127 digit number. Throughout, Professor Fujimoro, an icon of the game's creator - with better pecs and more hair - shouts encouraging words such as: "You think like bat monkey!" and "Stupid Salaryman! Your brain too toxic!"
But, does Brain Sump actually make you smarter?
Research conducted at the Poynter Sisters Institute, currently based in Denmark because of an embarrassing disagreement with the Internal Revenue Service over definitions of such words as "dependant," "deferment" and "income," suggests that it doesn't.
"Are you kidding?" Rebecca de Monterey, lead researcher on the project, scoffed. "Whoever thought this would work needs to clean out their own brain sump!"
In one imaginative experiment, de Monterey divided 50 baboons into three groups of 17. One group was given PDAs on which they could play Brain Sump. A second group was given PDAs on which they could watch the movie The Hangover. A third group was given a pile of bananas and told to "chill." Not surprisingly, almost all of the baboons that had been given PDAs destroyed them within the first two minutes, while only one quarter of the baboons that hadn't been given PDAs destroyed theirs.
"If Brain Sump had affected the baboons' intelligence," de Monterey pointed out, "fewer of them would likely have destroyed their PDAs. QED."
"Oh, that just crazy!" Fujimoro groused. "Experiment was biased! Everybody know baboons don't use PDAs! Research should have been on orangutans!"
But, that was only the first phase of the Poynter Sisters Institute research. It was followed up by an experiment in which real, live actual human beings were tested for their IQ (four dropped out of the experiment at this point because they were afraid of needles). The subjects were then divided into two groups, one asked to play the game Brain Sump, the other asked to get drunk and attempt to seduce each other. This was allowed to go on for six years, after which all of the subjects who hadn't been arrested for lewd behaviour were given a second IQ test.
Although the group that had played Brain Sump appeared to have an additional two IQ points, de Monterey was quick to point out that this was well within the margin of error of the tests. Moreover, when the subjects were given a standard Binet-Headroom Sociability Exam, it was found that those who had played Brain Sump were more likely to be aggressive.
"They...they were more likely to daydream about hitting you in the head with a baseball bat," de Monterey, stunned, stated. "It was like...like somebody had smuggled Grand Theft Auto: Tallahassee into them! And, I thought social science was such a peaceful career!"
Of course, Fujimoro has aggressively defended his game in public. "You are thinking you be clever boy to insult Brain Sump, yes? Well, what you know? You ever play game? No? You need game! You think like bat monkey!"