I recently spent three hyper-stimulated hours at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The Exploratorium is a hands-on museum, with devices and experiments that you usually only find in the proximity of "cool" high school science teachers with missing fingers. Various exhibits involving dry ice, piles of sand and other edu-thrilling materials allow you to observe all sorts of scientific principles. Have you ever spent an afternoon wondering why honeycombs are shaped the way they are? Then it's time you discovered something called television, and the Exploratorium can tell you how it works!



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The latest Exploratorium exhibit is called The Mind, and it explores those precious 3 pounds of gray matter that keep our skulls from making a marimba sound when we hit our head on the car door. I learned something I've always suspected: The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility. If you were dating the mind, all your friends would take you aside, and tell you that you can really do better, and being alone isn't all that bad, anyway. If you hired the mind as a babysitter, you would come home to find all but one of your children in critical condition, and the remaining one crowned "King of the Pit."

Let's start with memory. It doesn't exist. What you think of as your childhood memories are actually a haphazard pastiche of self-serving fictions, hazy re-creations and repurposed movie scenes held together with a minimal smattering of actual experiences. If you tell your mother about your Christmas memory of getting a new purple bicycle from Uncle Barnett, she will tell you that it was actually Aunt Minnie, and it was a red Go Kart. Whose memory is correct? Neither of yours! Go look at your family photos, and you'll discover that you were actually raised by hoboes in an abandoned train station in rural Turkey.

Perception? Perception is laughable. Did you ever, as a child, try to write a book report based on a quick reading of the first chapter and cover copy of a novel? That's perception. Your mind takes in a constant geyser of data every instant of the day, discards most of it as unimportant, then fills in the spaces with assumptions and diversions. If your perception were a sausage, it would be classified by the Food and Drug Administration as a pork-flavored sawdust tube. A parade of thugs and fashion critics could pass through your living room without you noticing, provided you were distracted by a sufficiently shiny piece of tinfoil.

Self-perception? One exhibit at the Exploratorium was able to convince me, in just 30 seconds, that a bronze sculpture of a hand was an actual part of my body. Thanks, mind! Good work there, getting my physical self mixed up with a cheap sculpture. I fully expect that one of these days my mind is going to convince me that my desk lamp is an extension of my physical body, and I'll electrocute myself bringing it into the hot tub.

How about decision-making? At least you have free will, the ability to rise above the limitations of your mind, right? You're precious when you lie to yourself. The fact is that by the time you actually think you're making a decision, a shadowy cabal of hormones and electrical currents have already set you on your course. I'm not just talking about fight-or-flight level stuff here. Even your hour-long diatribe about Neutral Milk Hotel that had everyone at the party last week checking their cellphones for new messages was delivered to you by some attention-deprived corner of your unconscious mind.

I learned that, in the end, you can't trust what you see, you can't trust what you know, and you can't even trust your sense of self. Sure, on some level you think, therefore you are, but when it comes down to it, all you really are is the Betty Crocker on the cake mix of your own existence, a pleasant fiction wrapped around a container of chemicals and carbon.

So, all in all, it was a pretty cool visit.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a figurehead, a figure skater and a figure 8.

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