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I recently had to write a short, fictional story for my psychology class. This story had to explain the different parts of the brain and how they worked. I thought it might be useful for those of you trying to process this information!

"I sat there, in the principals office, with the sympathetic division of my peripheral nervous system in overdrive: my palms were clammy with sweat, my heart was beating at twice its normal rate, and I swear my goose bumps were so large that the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up.

Okay, so maybe knowing why all this was happening to me does make me a little geeky. Perhaps, you think I'm not the kind of kid who would have to cheat on a test, and normally I'm not; but yesterday we got the news that Uncle Charlie, my favorite uncle, would not be coming back from the war. My forebrain simply would not kick into action to contemplate the answers to my English questions and the left hemisphere of my brain, which usually solves my algebra equations in an eye blink, was numb. Studying for my history test was out of the question; my eyes stared blankly at the page, my occipital lobe refusing to process what they saw, and my hippocampus storing none of the information in my procedural memory.

Now that I thought about it, cheating probably hadn't been one of my greatest ideas. I should have told my teacher why I hadn't been able to study or accepted a bad grade. However at the time I had been unable to think clearly, the logical abilities of my left hemisphere had shut down while my right hemisphere produced images of my mother's disappointed face and a giant red F being stored in that mysterious permanent record teachers are always telling you about.

Anyway, what was done was done, and there I sat, sweating like a pig in a sunbonnet, while my right hemisphere kicked back into action, summoning up unwanted images of expulsion and a blood stained cane. Now it might seem like I was overreacting, but I'd never been in this much trouble before and I simply didn't know how to handle it. All I knew for sure was that my hypothalamus was calling for water and my medulla was sending my brain messages that said 'I simply can't keep this boy breathing much longer, if his parasympathetic system doesn't wake up.'

Just as I was finishing up with these thoughts, the secretary popped her head round the corner and my heart rate, which I'd thought couldn't get going any faster, skyrocketed. She gave me a gentle shove in the direction of the Principal's Office and left me standing there, my sympathetic system still working up a storm. Eventually, I found the courage to go in and, with a few lightening quick messages to my mesencephalom, I lifted my hand to the doorknob and entered the room.

'Son,' said the Principal, 'I heard about your uncle and I really am sorry...' His words trailed off and I sat gaping at him for a few seconds as my temporal lobe struggled to process his response. Then all of a sudden, as if Niagra Falls had suddenly decided to move to our hometown, the floodgates opened and I was crying worse than I ever had before. I was crying so darn much, I didn't even pause to consider which system of my body had told my eyes to respond with tears, I just let them come down without thinking. To this day, I still don't know if relief or grief caused those tears. Maybe they were a bit of both."

Learn more about this author, Augustine Bauer.
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