LOBE 1: FRONTAL

Buddha's in your in frontal lobe tonight
He's spelunking in your brain tonight
Little tin hat, divine light on,
Through the medulla, down the pons
Buddha's in your frontal lobe tonight

LOBE 2: MOTOR

Rush hour makes your motor cortex flash
Devils floor their impulses and crash
Red for stop and green for go
How little you know of how much you know!

Tonight, in your neural net,
Ecstasy and deep regret--
A gridlock brain , or Soul Train!

LOBE 3: OCCIPITAL

Eye in the back of your head--occipital lobe
Laser show and disco ball and strobe
What you see is all reversed--
Crossed and mangled as liverwurst
First is last and shall be first tonight

LOBE 4: PARIETAL

Nowadays I'm no pariah at all
But I came close to lacking an I at all
Feral kids, are we a group,
Or just some dirt in your people soup?

My language center cannot see
Abstract terminology--
All your human grammar's mad to me!

BRIDGE (frantic)

LOBE 5: DUALITY

I bet you think you have a single soul
All of you think you have a single soul
Yet you got two brains inside
Left and right of the great divide
Both of you think you have a single soul

LOBE 6: CORPUS CALLOSUM

Slender bridge across a dark abyss
Your identity narrows down to this...
Fiber-optic corpus callosum
Shares your data (if you know some)

But if your line goes down,
Sudden divorce, but share the house!
Blindly chasing I and I around

CODA (slower)

Let's all imitate Broca's brain--
Drop who we are and start again...

SONG NOTES

• The Krelkins are a Bay Area trio: Mike Marrelli, Nic Griffin, and Chris Wayan. We write our own songs--a lot of them from dreams.
• Lyrics, music, lead vocals and piano by Chris Wayan; percussion and vocals by Nic Griffin; guitar, bass and vocals, Mike Marrelli.
• "Brain" is a musical experiment. Two songs I found compelling, "Hotel" by Vic Chesnutt and "I'll Be With You Wherever You Are Tonight" by Robyn Hitchcock and the Soft Boys, had nearly identical 2-4-1 chord structures (Dm-F-C is an example of 2-4-1). So I stole that pattern and tried to write a third song sounding like neither of its sources. It finally worked when I realized both sources sounded like great, catchy half-songs. Once I added two more chords, the Am-E of "But if the line goes down..." etc, it felt complete--but still a bit too much like its parents. At last, I had to get drastic: I sacrificed common time, which both source-songs, (being rock) were written in. Instead I banged the chords away to a relentless 3-beat, and the music steadily sped up like a pacemaker gone mad. Soon it was an Irish dance. The price of independence was mania. I had no choice, I tell you. It held a gun to my head.
• The lyrics were channeled--as soon as I asked "what's this song about?" I heard "Buddha's in your frontal lobe tonight..." and the lobe-by-lobe brain tour just poured out.
• FRONTAL LOBE: if Buddha were living in your brain, surely his base camp would be up front. But I bet he'd explore the hinterlands. Can't you just see him crawling around the primitive, perilous lobes of desire like some spelunker with a safety hat on, using his third eye like a miner's lamp?
• MOTOR CORTEX: I couldn't help seeing those impulsive neurons like drivers at rush hour motoring around... and getting into gridlock. And road rage. What our impulses lead to!
• OCCIPITAL: the brain's visual processor, at the back end of the brain. Images really are all flipped left-right, then split, and reconstructed into a 3-D picture. It resembles a Chinese master chef carving vegetables. What you see isn't raw reality, but stir-fried truth.
• PARIETAL: the side-lobes have specialized areas for language and socialization. I was an outcast kid; I never developed these normally. But which came first? Was I mildly autistic, thus shunned? Or did solitude stunt my pariah-tal development?
• DUALITY: split-brain research fascinates me. Two personalities coexisting, scarcely aware they're separate, seeing themselves as one. The mere word "I" seems to hold us together. Am "I" really a program, one that can even run on distributed hardware?
• CORPUS CALLOSUM: this connector between our brain-hemispheres has always reminded me of the Bridge of Khazad-Dum in The Lord of the Rings--poor Gandalf falls into the abyss between hemispheres! Ooh, it's all so Jungian! A chasm between good and evil, a bridge between with a Maxwell's Demon named Gandalf working as gatekeeper... Half perpetual-motion scam, half Jekyll and Hyde. It was only a small step from here to a grumpy divorce where you see your ex as a Balrog--after all, in the bicameral brain, if the corpus callosum is cut, the lobes live in the same house but separate bedrooms. A sham marriage. (Okay, okay, my associations do take go their own ways, don't they?)
• BROCA'S BRAIN is a classic book on early brain science. It wasn't really Broca whose abilities and character changed after head trauma, though; he just studied a patient who did. But it rhymed nicely. And some days I'd like to drop who I are. But I remain...

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