When 1 + 1 = 3 … Synergic thoughts…..

This isn’t an absolutely original post I should admit. But reading some similar thoughts on a friend’s journal has forced me to write about it.

To start with, lets take love. Love to me, isn’t about the individual parts. It is really about the entirety of the whole thing. The complete package, rather than the sum of the individual elements. Confusing you say? Well, it is. Here’s the deal. Let’s say there’s this person X you like. Now X may be good looking, smart, funny, nerdy whatever. But why you really like X would not be for each of these reasons, nor would it be for the sum of them all. There’s just that something more than the sum of the individual little bits that make this one just so adorable and special. Just that something that this one is love, while the rest are friends or special friends or whatever else they are. I mean, hell yeah, you will have tons of friends who meet the so called cut for the good looking + smart + nerdy + funny + rich + all the typical requirements combination. But to have that something that makes it beyond this sum total, only X does.

Similarly for experiences, sometimes everything seems to be right, yet you don’t come out feeling great. Just that extra something missing to make it from an “all right” individual elements sum to that perfect great experience you’ve always wanted!

Forgive me for rambling, but these were just some vague thoughts passing by my cluttered head tonight!

The Terminal Man – Michael Crichton

Book Name: The Terminal Man

Author: Michael Crichton

Genre: Fiction – Medical thriller

Storyline and plot spoiler:

Harold Benson – The Patient

Dr. Janet Ross – The Psychiatrist

Dr. John Ellis, Dr. Morris – The Surgeons

McPherson – The Chairman

Benson suffers from stage three psychomotor epilepsy (convulsions of thought, not of body) which results in strange thoughts and violent behavior. The proposed treatment is based on the theory that different parts of the brain correspond to different emotional signals and that it is possible to abort a seizure by delivering an electrical shock to the correct portion of the brain substance before the seizure takes effect.

The procedure is to implant 40 electrodes (trial and error to get atleast a few electrodes at the right parts) into Benson’s brain, controlled by a pacemaker embedded in the back of his neck. Whenever the contoller reads an impending seizure (fit), it delivers an electrical shock to parts of the brain which generate “happy” signals to the body, thus aborting the brain from getting into strange or violent thoughts.

Janet is totally against it, as Benson also suffers from delusions that machines are taking over the world from man. Her argument is that the surgery may only cure his seizures, and not his delusions. But Ellis and Morris get the go ahead from McPherson.

The surgery to implant the electrodes and the controller/pacemaker is smooth. The interfacing session the next day to find the correct electrodes also goes ahead with no trouble, and everything is in place.

However, they come up with a problem. Benson’s brain starts liking the electrical stimulations it receives everytime there’s an impending seizure, and as a result, his brain tries to bring on the seizures so that it can receive the stimulations more frequently. This could have been corrected, had it not been that Benson escapes from the hospital. The projection is that in 6 hours his brain would reach tip-off, the state where stimulations occur without any interval, and so the seizure takes over and he becomes more violent.

Everbody goes in search of him to his favourite haunts, and Morris gets assaulted by Benson. At around the 6 hour mark, Benson goes into a tip-off initiated trance and murders a dancer. He then comes in search of Janet to ask for her help but goes into a trance yet again, from which Janet escapes by switching on her microwave which plays havoc with his radioactive pacemaker.

The end is set in the hospital basement, where Benson comes to destroy the main computer that can re-program his embedded controller. In the end, Janet overcomes her doctoral instincts and kills Benson.