My brain scan: a look at the organ I have carried in my skull for half a century [irishtimes.com]

I am lying here on a slab in the Beacon Hospital about to meet my maker. Oh, I don’t mean I’m going to die – it is much more significant than that: I’m going to see my brain for the first time.

I’m having a brain scan. Nothing prepared me for the emotional side of this. I’m going to see the organ I have carried inside my skull for half a century. This is the repository of the good and darkest thoughts, shaped by happy days and long dark nights of the soul.

This is the innermost director I hardly know. Did I shape it, or did it shape who I became? What I do? There is an Edgar Allan Poe story I remember as I lie here. It concerns a man who sold his appetite so the buyer could eat, drink and be merry and the seller would feel the effects. The man who sold his appetite would wake up hungover, wondering what damage, what scars he would find on his body, his liver. Is this how I feel about my brain? Is it a separate, unknown, possibly dark director of my life choices?

[For more on this story by Tim O'Brien, go to https://www.irishtimes.com/lif...-a-century-1.3331485]