ForexSpirit

I watched ‘X-Men 3: The Last Stand’ last Saturday night with my wife. If you haven’t seen it already you might want to refrain from reading the first four paragraphs as I’m going to talk about one of the major plot points in the movie. Spoiler zone ahead.

I’m going to focus on the Charles Xavier storyline, specifically the bit where he dies (by being pulled apart atom from atom) and then the final scene of the movie (after the credits have rolled) where he had been ‘reborn’, entering the mind of a brain dead hospitalised individual that had been seen earlier in the movie.

The scene where the hospitalised figure is first shown involves a classroom scene where Charles Xavier is asking the students if this man (shown to the classroom on a television), who is being kept alive on life support, is really alive or not. If someone else were to take over their mind, would the original person ‘die’?

Two minutes of thoughtfulness in an otherwise pretty medoicre action movie.

When my wife and I were discussing this afterwards she brought up something that I had actually told her about from a book I had read last year.

It involves a real live incident where an invididual has almost no real physical brain what-so-ever, and yet has an IQ of 126 and is doing a maths degree at university!

You can find the full story on the Alternate Science website, but here’s a quote:

Is your brain really necessary? The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor the late Dr. John Lorber.

When Sheffield’s campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student’s head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination.

The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all.

Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column.

How could this guy be alive, never mind taking a course at univeristy? Nobody knows. One of life’s mysteries, at least for now.

So if it’s possible to do maths without a brain, I guess the only logical conclusion is that you probably don’t need a brain to trade either. All the same, I’d still make sure you have a trading plan.

Life can be pretty damn strange at times! Nothing is obvious or necessarily what it seems.