Notes & Queries response - If the brain uses the most calories of any organ, can you think yourself thin?

This is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 12th February, 2023.

The Guardian is apparently no longer happy to host my comments on their site, so it is appearing here instead.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented here under the terms of fair use.

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If the brain uses the most calories of any organ, can you think yourself thin?

image generated by Craiyon

“You will never transform yourself into the hero of the beach by attempting to prove the Riemann Hypothesis,” declared William Goaman. “Trust me when I say, from hard won experience, that it doesn't build upper body strength. Any gains you make remain in the brain. In an outdoor environment, especially one where volleyball is played, some bruiser with a vaguely self-deterministic moniker (Biff, for example) who has an intuitive understanding of the way that sand particles behave when they are kicked into some scrawny nerd's face, is always going to have the upper hand. You all need to resign yourselves to the unwelcome truth that Mary-Lou is going to the sock hop with a quarterback named Chad, whose customary attire is a letterman jacket. After the dance, they will drive to some nearby site of outstanding natural beauty, where, under the sight of god and Chinese spy balloons, he will do unspeakable things to her tight end in the back of his red T-bird convertible, with the top all the way down.”

“Why would I want to take a smooth-brained NPC like Mary-Lou to the sock hop?” enquired Brian Shove.

“Like a bit of brain cleavage do you, Shove?” said Paul Rinaldi.

“I am sure Mary Lou is lovely,” said Stephen O'Shea, “but there is usually some smart, nerdy girl named Esmeralda, who is shunned by her female peers because she wears thick librarian glasses, and because she was once caught eating plasticine. If I am taking anyone to the sock hop then it will be her.”

“Fuck you O'Shea!” said Rinaldi. “If anybody is taking Esmeralda to the sock hop, then it will be me. I will present her with a corsage made entirely from plasticine by my own fair hand, so that she will know my love for her is pure.”

“I will prove the Riemann Hypothesis, then ask her to attend the sock hop with me before the assembled guests at the Nobel Prize awards ceremony, in Stockholm,” countered O'Shea.

“The sock hop will be a distant memory by then,” said Rinaldi. “You could ask her to the Winter Formal Dance. By then, I will have taken her to see Roy Orbison play at the Reseda Country Club and she will have eyes for no man but me.”

“As if they'd let someone like you through the doors of the Reseda Country Club,” said O'Shea. “You talk a good game, Rinaldi, I'll give you that, but you're playing out of your depth.”

“What is the theme of the Winter Formal?” enquired Goaman.

“I believe that it's 'Some Enchanted Evening,'” said O'Shea.

The door to the classroom opened. Professor Michael Boley, put his head around the side and ushered me out.

“What if resolving the Riemann Hypothesis yields some counter strategy to Biff's sand-kicking?” queried Shove. “A strategy that places nerds and jocks on an equal footing of mutually-assured destruction?”

Boley closed the door before I could hear the responses to Shove's conjecture.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “The faculty likes its struggle sessions these days. I was able to duck out of this one. Hopefully by the conclusion of the academic year, I will be ensconced at an institute where a semblance of sanity still prevails.”

I asked him where he might be going. He told me that he couldn't say.

“You must worry about those boys; their future.”

“There'll be fine,” he said “They're where the next generation of intellectual properties are coming from, that'll keep this place afloat. No-one wants to fuck with that. All the rest is just garnish. Everything okay while I was gone?”

“Well, I am still none the wiser regarding what a sock hop is.”

“They were dances they held in the 1950s. Kid used to take off their shoes and do the twist in school gymnasiums. They can be a bit of handful, those boys. They weren't rude to you?”

“They ignored me. They're on a different wavelength. I'm probably like drifting plankton to them.”

“They're blowing off some steam. They don't have many outlets. Nobody in that room is going to the sock hop with anyone.”

In the staff dining hall I was confronted by the slouched, gone to seed spectacle of academics, whose bodies had been shaped by long periods of dormancy, devouring enormous platters of eggs and red meat.

“There's over 7000 calories on this plate,” said Boley of his own dinner. “You have the rare privilege of watching me eat it.”

I had opted for a modest crayfish sandwich.

“We're all bulking up for a big think,” he said. “It takes a boatload of effort to advance the Sisyphean gland even a few millimetres in the direction of the frontal lobe.”

“About that. Because I've been doing some research.”

“I'm very proud of you,” said Boley, following a pause, where he swallowed a mouthful of steak.

“If I may: There a disembodied nugget of brain matter that is ordinarily situated just above the cerebellum...”

“The Sisyphean gland,” said Boley, through a mouthful. “Or the brain stone after death, when it calcifies.”

“Okay, let's say the Sisyphean gland. It's connected to the rest of the brain by means of bio-electrical activity Through the application of deeply-focused thought, this gland begins to advance along a passageway in the brain that runs all the way up to the frontal lobe.”

“The best theory that anyone has been able to come up with is that the brain needs to physically reconfigure itself for higher mathematical thinking,” said Boley. “As soon as you take the pedal off the gas, it begins to slip back down towards the cerebellum.”

“And that's what all this mass calorie intake is all about,” I said. “It's bloody revolting. There is something gruesomely sexual about it.”

“Things are always transitioning through your body aren't they?” answered Boley. “You sandwich is doing exactly that right now. If it's any consolation, most people, yourself included, will never manage to move their Sisyphean gland by even a millimetre. The most anyone's managed on record was John Harte when he was contemplating Landau's twin prime conjecture. In my opinion it's a far better measure of intelligence than IQ. Heaven knows what would happen if you managed to get it all the into the frontal lobe.”

It took Boley an hour to finish his dinner. No sooner had he set his fork down than he was on his feet.

“Okay, that's 7000 calories,” he said. “I've got to get across campus before I burn too much of it off.”

I accompanied him for part of the journey.

“I wonder what did happen to Mary Lou and Esmeralda.”

“mmm?”

“Two characters your boys came up with – the prom queen and the nerd.”

“Ah, I think my father married them both, one after the other,” he said. “In the wrong order unfortunately.”

I hope this is of help.

image generated by Craiyon