Ben Larson Last summer, after a Door to Imagination workshop, a young father who had attended alone gave me this recording. He plays guitar and was enthused enough by the music I wrote for The Hidden Grail: Sir Percival and the Fisher King to learn it by ear. It seems his son was also familiar with the story. As this father sat and played into a tape recorder, his little boy joined him and spontaneously began to recite. This completely unrehearsed excerpt from Percival reveals the extraordinary degree to which this musical tale captured a little boy's imagination. Ben Larson was four years old at the time. Enjoy. --Odds P.S. I apologize for the audio quality. You'll get the idea.   Listen to Ben Larson in RealAudio

 

IP
CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

First, take five minutes to bury your face in your pillow and learn to observe phosphenes, that's right, those sparkling pools of light in your eyes that look like a really good screen saver. Those are your retinas firing away at the back of your eyeballs all by themselves.

Did you know that your brain is really made up of millions of little biological wires called neurons? And that they all talk to each other with tiny pulses of electricity? Most kids have seen pictures of brains, but if you look at a small piece of brain under a microscope, you’ll see the tiny neurons, all linked together in networks.

There are so many neurons in your brain, they’re hard to count. But here’s an interesting way to imagine how many you have. Let’s say we took a cubic inch of your brain. No, we’re not going to do that, of course, since you need every single part of it. But imagine we could, and I told you to start unraveling the tiny wires in that cubic inch. What’s unraveling? Well, have you ever found a loose thread at the hem of a sweater, and pulled it, and said to yourself, "Oh, no! It won’t stop!" The thread just keeps pulling loose? That’s unraveling.

So I say to you, "We’re going to unravel this cubic inch of your brain to see how densely packed the wires are." I give you the first little neuron string, and tell you to start walking. Let’s say you live on America’s East Coast. "Head west, " I say. And off you walk, pulling out the wires from that cubic inch of brain.

Well, you arrive in California, by the Pacific Ocean. "No, I say, there’s still quite a bit left." So you wrap the little wire around a flagpole and head back east. You arrive at the Atlantic Ocean, but I say, "No, better head back west again." So you find another flagpole, wrap the wire around it, and head west again.

You arrive back in California. "Sorry," I say, "better head back again." You make it all the way back to the Rockies, let’s say around Boulder, Colorado, and I finally say, "Good, you’ve unraveled all the neurons in that cubic inch of brain."

That’s pretty amazing to me. There are 10,000 miles of tiny biological wires in every cubic inch of your brain.

And there are quite a few cubic inches.

--Odds Bodkin

The Thoughts to Grow Deep By Division, Mini-poster Department

Download this mini-poster, print it, and cut it out. Stick it anywhere (except over your computer screen--ha ha!). I'll have a new one now and then. There is also a slightly larger, higher resolution version here (103 Kb); just click the link, and print from your browser ;-)