Augmenting intelligence

To augment your intelligence, you need to be stimulated, indeed shocked. Your brain needs to receive a burst of energy that makes it cogitate. A bolt of cerebral lightning. If that doesn’t happen, then you’ll finish the day no more intelligent than when you woke up. In certain places, at certain times, there might be so few flashes of cerebral lightning that your brain might even go into hibernation. This happens, I believe, in binary situations where crowds are watching win/lose happenings such as sporting competitions. The brain is not really being stimulated in a cognitive manner. It is simply being turned on to applaud in joy, or turned off to weep in despair. People in such situations are being manipulated like pigeons in a Skinner box, designated technically as an operant conditioning chamber.

The ancient Romans believed in a protective spirit of a place, known as a genius loci. In certain wonderlands, the spirit of place can operate in a way that makes passers-by more intelligent. It all depends on what’s available in the way of cerebral surprises. The other evening, I watched a TV documentary about the huge sewage canals beneath Paris. Crowds of onlookers in the street were behaving feverishly because workers digging up the street had asked them to step back a little… to make way for an emerging boat. When people are told that a boat is about to appear from beneath the street pavement, their brains are indeed capable of going into overdrive. First, you imagine that somebody is cracking a joke, and making fun of you. When you do indeed grasp the image of a big flat-bottomed vessel being hauled up from the bowels of the City of Light, your neurons go wild, and start to chatter like a Geiger counter in a nuclear fallout zone. I should explain that the above vessel is simply used in Paris sewage canals to pick up solid rubbish. It needs to be taken out of the water from time to time and brought up onto dry land, to be cleaned and repaired.

For understandable local reasons, often historical or purely incidental, there are more chances of a spirit of place becoming excited in the streets of Paris than in a dull Antipodean neighborhood, regardless of the sunny weather. The sewage canals are more ancient and complex.