Brain Cells

I find the way brains work fascinating. I've always been a sucker for shows that are talking about how our brains function or why we do certain things based on how our brains handle information. I just think it's pretty amazing (much of the reason I can't imagine human existence was an accidental lightning strike on a pool of water with amino acids in it...I mean honestly, the probability of that happening and ending up with the human brain is FAR bigger than the probability that there is a God who engineered it...but I digress).

So, I find the way that brains remember items from long ago extremely interesting. Let's take for instance, say a video game that I haven't played since I was, oh 13. Sandor got Mario Brothers on the Wii last week and so today while I was waiting for the crock pot to finish our dinner (by the way, I LOVE crock pots) I started playing. Now I have not played this game in quite some time, and haven't' even thought of it beyond the time period when we were picking out games to load on the Wii and I said, oh, load Mario, I used to love that. And yet, as I'm running my little Mario through the Mario world I start remembering where to go down the tubes to get to the extra coins, and where to jump up for the invisible coin, or where you can jump above the screen and get to the warp zone. No matter how crazy it seemed, I kept remembering it. In fact, I made it through to the first part of the 3rd level before my brain ran out of memory of the game - it was amazing. Seriously, couldn't those brain cells have been put to better use over the years? Did I really need to store them up for the off chance that I would play Mario again? Apparently I did.