August 23, 2000

A mind is a terrible thing to waste

By MIKE NORTON
Herald editor
       Scientifically speaking, humans utilize less than fifty percent of the vertebrate central nervous system known as the brain. Unfortunately, my temporal lobes will move decimal points and gray matter around to make room for the most trivial things.
      Perhaps this is why I find myself humming "Goin' to the Fair" nearly three weeks after I went to the Northwest Michigan Fair.
      A mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste - especially when your cerebellum resembles a coffee can chock-full of obscure pop culture references and factoids devoid of usefulness. Television theme songs, Trivial Pursuit answers, junior high locker combinations; all assorted nuts and bolts rattling around a half-full cranium.
      Why a particular song gets irrevocably stuck in the folds of long-term memory can often be traced back to childhood.
      At a time when your sponge-like brain could have been absorbing Latin, you memorized the words to "Found a Peanut" or variations of the limerick "There once was a man from Nantucket" while riding the school bus. Music, however, can be credited with teaching the "ABC's." I discovered this seven years ago as a police beat reporter, where I found many a sobriety test citing the driver "now knows their ABC's," even if the alphabet was anything but alphabetized
      While I will never forget my "ABC's" thanks to music, unfortunately I will never forget many a commercial. Jingle writers have permanently scarred my cerebral cortex with such outlandish concepts as my bologna having a first name and teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony. Instead of memorizing something worthwhile like a Mozart piano overture, I have brain cells permanently devoted to this:
      "Come on down to Meat City Market,
      Bring your car there's room to park it,
      Everyday's a special day, when you shop the Meat City way,
      Meat City, Meat City, Rah, Rah!"
      Despite all the wonderful things I don't have room to remember, I do know one thing - I'm not alone.
      Everyone has their quirks when it comes to committing certain items to memory. For example, my father still remembers the serial number of his rifle six decades after his stint as a paratrooper in the United States Army. He also uses his old taxi cab number as a good luck trifecta pick at the horse track.
      College exams and term papers also have a funny way of messing with your mind. One of my friends memorized a timeline of early Christianity to the tune of Steve Miller's "Mercury Blues" for a religion class. An English professor told me that once - after pulling an all-nighter- she woke up her roommate and proceeded to recite all 131 lines of T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
      When you stop and ponder all the extemporaneous stuff kicking around in our heads, it's amazing that our cerebrospinal fluid doesn't spring a leak. License plate numbers of cars long since melted down into license plates, the American League home run leader for 1961, "i" before "e" except after "c," the capital city of Ecuador. Despite this overcrowding of obscure pop culture references and useless factoids, there always seems to be room for one more song.
      Several years ago, I read an inutile tidbit on the plight of a classical music composer driven to the brink of insanity by a solitary note. Unfortunately, not only does his name escape me, but at the moment I can't recall the note over all this humming.
      Grand Traverse Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or e-mail at gleiva@gtherald.com.