st. petersburg, 2000
Attention is a human faculty we typically take for granted, but its successful functioning is essential to our experience of the world. Meet someone with Balint Syndrome who can only experience one object in their vision at a time and you start to realize how important attention is for our typical understanding of the world. So when the brain's networks turn their eye on you, and your eyes work only for them, things can change very quickly. In July of 2000, for 24 hours in St Petersburg Russia all I saw were crosses. None of them were actually crosses, but go ahead and try to tell my neural networks that. My trigger finger was their slave. Maybe it my Reticular Activing System, more likely something went funny with my frontal lobe. It ended at 23 hundred hour twilight near the Malaya Neva, when my frontal lobe was put to sleep with a fifth of vodka.