Free The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence

reason I like to keep that plaque on my wall, where I can see it every day.’
    I told Dr Enderby that I was still a little confused at this point – what with him being a Buddhist.
    ‘When I look at that poem, God’s just a metaphor,’ Dr Enderby explained.
    ‘So you don’t think that God created the brain?’ I asked.
    ‘No, I don’t think that,’ Dr Enderby replied. ‘I think that the brain created God. Because the human brain, however wonderful, is still quite fallible – as both you and I know. It’s always searching for answers, but even when it’s working as it should, its explanations are rarely perfect – especially when it comes to very big, complicated questions. That’s why we have to nurture it. We have to give it plenty of space to develop.’
    That was the gist of what Dr Enderby told me. His brain had spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about the brain.
    The first time we met, he said that my ‘first fit’ was probably
not
my first fit. It was more likely my sixth or seventh or thirteenth or twenty-third – but no one could tell me for sure. As I’ve mentioned, in the months preceding my collapse in the kitchen, I’d been having lots of strange, out-of-place thoughts – thoughts involving weird pictures and sounds, and often weird smells. I’d dismissed them as daydreams, even though they felt more like night dreams – short, peculiar night dreams that would start without warning and then, just as quickly, dissolve back into the present. Furthermore, they’d been bad enough, and frequent enough, to draw comment at school, where I’d been diagnosed with ‘concentration issues’.
    After I told Dr Enderby this, he said that mine were ‘classic’ symptoms of partial epileptic seizures originating in the temporal lobes, and usually, at this point, he’d be asking me if I’d suffered any significant head injuries in the past eighteen months. But in my case, this was unnecessary. Dr Enderby could see my scar with his own eyes, and he already knew about the meteor.
Everybody
knew about the meteor.
    Nevertheless, I still had to go through a lot of physical tests before Dr Enderby’s final diagnosis could be made. He shone a torch in my eyes and prodded and pinched me in various places to test my sensations and reflexes. Then I had to have blood tests, and then an electroencephalography, where they attach wires to your scalp to measure the electrical activity in your brain. In case you didn’t know, epilepsy is all to do with excess electrical activity in the brain. It works as follows.
    Everybody’s brain is a hive of electrical activity, and usually all the electrical signals behave as they should – they start, spread and stop as required. But in an epileptic fit, something abnormal happens. The neurons start sparking erratically, more or less at random, and instead of a narrow, regulated current, you get a chaotic flood of electricity pulsing through the brain. And the specific symptoms you experience tell you where the electricity has gone haywire. So jerks or twitches or convulsions indicate electrical activity in the motor cortex, the area of the brain responsible for controlling movement, and hallucinations indicate problems with one of the perceptual centres. And in a generalized epileptic seizure, there’s a complete loss of consciousness, which indicates that the malfunction has spread through the whole cortex to the brainstem. This is what I experienced in the kitchen and what most people would recognize as an archetypal fit. Dr Enderby said that an epileptic seizure was like a thunderstorm taking place in the brain – a storm that temporarily knocks out all the communication links so that any messages from the outside world get either lost or scrambled. All that’s left is your brain talking to itself.
    Needless to say, my electroencephalography showed lots of abnormal spikes. Along with all the other evidence, this pretty much confirmed the provisional diagnosis