Blogservations by Drew Vics

The Cosmic Pirate Radio Show

Some cosmic pirate station hijacked my mental frequency again (see Must be on Top of the World). This time my morning routine soundtrack was Frosty the Snowman, and I have absolutely no idea why.

It wasn’t all that bad, the song is cheery enough and it had me pondering Christmastime and snow. I love winter; the smell of wood burning stoves cranked up all across town as the sun goes down, the crunch of fresh snow under my tires as I brave the elements in my trusty 4×4 on my way to work. It’s been a while since I built a snowman though. My wife and I will have to see to it this year. We can call him Frosty, why not.

Brains are crazy things though. There must be a lot of music stored up in there. It’s the ultimate MP3 player, storing tunes and playing back on such short notice. I wonder if the data stored by our brains is the same 1′s and 0′s that are used to reproduce music in digital technology. I’m sure a scientist somewhere is working on figuring that out at this very moment. If I hear anything I’ll let you know.

In a book called Mental Radio, by Upton Sinclair (1930), the possibility of mental telepathy is explored. Sinclair spent three years studying and testing his wife’s apparent ability to read minds. He described this ability as the brain acting like some form of radio, picking up on frequencies transmitted by another brain.

Maybe our brains can pick up frequencies from other sources, and in fact process these signals and present us with the result. Have you ever had a song in your head and then switched on a radio to find that actual song playing?

Strange? sure. Coincidence? probably; Brain radio? Can’t rule it out. I think in this case my brain just decided to play back a song that it knows. Maybe I was dreaming about Christmas and the soundtrack stayed with me when I woke up. Maybe, as a nod to Mr. Sinclair, my wife was dreaming about Christmas and my brain picked up on her soundtrack — our own wireless music network!

Either way, there I was in the shower minding my own business and Frosty the Snowman starts flitting about my cranial sound system. It stayed there most of the morning. That is until I left for work.

While cruising along the back roads I suddenly realized that Frosty was gone. My cerebral iPod had shuffled tracks again and I was listening to Gorilla Radio by Rage Against the Machine, maybe a rock radio station somewhere was playing the song and my brain just tuned in. Cool.

This afternoon my frontal lobe will probably tune-in to something from Rob Zombie, or maybe Rush. Hard to tell what’s going to play next. It’s almost like JackFM. There’s quite a selection in there.

Thank God it’s Friday. I’m picking up some weekend frequencies now…