Aliens are broadcasting into my brain

I’m writing a short story that may (or may not) be included in an anthology that I may (or may not) publish in the near (or far) future. I got this idea for a story the other day and thought it would be fun to write it. And Carrie liked the idea, too. I like to have something to be doing while I’m playing online poker, like reading and responding to emails or writing articles, so I started writing the story.

In doing the research for the story, I came upon this true story about a man who was beaten up in a bar brawl and turned into a mathematical savant. I highly recommend the article. The beating changed his brain. He went from a low achieving high school graduate to an impressive prodigy who loves the mathematics he sees in the world around us. He says that there have been some bad consequences of the beating, such as PTSD and OCD, but he wouldn’t change anything because his new abilities to see the world in a unique way are "so good, I can't even describe it."

I find savants incredibly interesting. I once employed a genius programmer on the autism spectrum. He did incredible work, solving difficult problems easily, and was self-aware enough to recognize his relatively poor social skills and talk about them, so that he was interesting to be around too. I’m sure I’ve hired others on the autism scale, though they just seemed really bright but also really annoying.

Now, I’m not comparing myself to the geniuses, but I find that sometimes I get ideas seemingly out of nowhere. I can’t explain where they come from. I do know that my brain tends to fixate on interesting things, and ideas swirl around in my head, until some creative solution just appears. I often wake up after a peaceful night’s sleep with a solution to a problem. I then need to head directly to my computer to write it down or implement it. I jokingly say that it seems like aliens are broadcasting ideas into my head, and I’m simply a receptacle.

For example, in this short story I’m writing, one of the initial pictures in my head, after coming up with the overall concept, was of the main character desperately clutching a microwave oven. Why a microwave oven? I can’t say. It just seemed perfectly fitting and perfectly absurd, and the vision was so clear that I didn’t want to give it up. But thinking about it, the microwave oven didn’t make any sense. It could have been almost any object. Why a microwave oven? Even in my satires and comedies, I want things to progress logically. So I put the vision away and figured I’d come back to it later when it was time to write the ending to the story.

I started writing the story about a week or two later. Last night, while playing online poker, I really got into it and the words started gushing out, and each scene became clear in my head. Toward the middle of the story, the character, a highly obsessive mathematical genius, is fully engrossed in solving a problem but has no income and must find a place to stay. He rents an apartment with the bare necessities—a bed, a table, a chair, and… a microwave oven! Suddenly, the microwave oven made complete sense because it was the only thing he owned that he could hold in his arms and, conveniently, had a timer.

I’ve had this happen with my novels where some idea fits seamlessly into place much later in the story. Did I subconsciously know that would happen? Did I actually have the entire story planned out somewhere in the recesses of my mind? Or did aliens beam these thoughts into my brain piecemeal, kind of like packets on a network that can arrive at different relative times but are eventually pieced together in the correct order by my computer.

I don’t know. I know that this ability has benefited me my entire life. When I was younger, I actually felt guilty about it—as if I didn’t deserve credit for the things I dreamed up.

The human brain is an incredible, unpredictable, amazing machine. Or is it a machine? Maybe one of those savants will figure out the answer or contribute to finding the answer. Or maybe aliens will beam the answer into my head. I’ll let you know if they do.