Page:Astounding Science Fiction (1950-01).djvu/117

 Extra-Sensory Perception and/or Psycho-Kinesis!

Immediately, I laid Locke’s article down for an instant and took off on my own speculations as to why we reputedly use only nine-tenths of the brain and why, as he says, the brain is apparently too large for efficiency already. I was considering a normally healthy brain, of course; psychotic brains are no more attractive to me than polio or cancer.

Now why, I mused, is the brain so darned inefficient? Well, maybe it isn't! I remembered how other parts of the human machine were considered inefficient until more was learned about their purposes and limitations, and the final conclusion seemed invariably that their only major inefficiency was man's ignorance. But here was, it seemed, undisputable physical evidence of the contrary, evidence that we're actually lugging around more brains than we could ever use!

Why should there be so few connectors? For engineering purposes, nature obviously had to accept some limitations—but Ol' Momma Nature is fiendishly adept at sidetracking limitations! Now, why couldn't it just happen to be that she had stuck in another entirely different system of communications when she made human brains, to compensate the necessarily few physical line-connectors? Something, say, so far out