05 Jan 2026
The Bennett’s Fracture is the most common fracture involving the base of the thumb. Fistfights and sports are the usual causes; in my case it was pugil stick training during Marine Corps bootcamp.
Luckily, I was told there was a “hotshot” Navy surgeon on the base and they wasted no time getting me fixed up. It was a fascinating process, actually. They gave me something called a nerve block in my left armpit; a few minutes later, everything below my left shoulder was dead to me (literally). The block meant that I could stay awake during the surgery. I got to watch on an overhead black and white monitor as the surgeon inserted three long pins to hold my wayward shard of thumb bone in place.
The next day, I met with the surgeon for his final inspection and seal of approval. He was kind of a hotshot, to be honest. A young, lean asian with a tuft of unruly hair, he was in a flightsuit rather than his doctor’s coat and seemed to be packing up to leave. As we spoke, he was hunting frantically through his desk for something.
With a shout of triumph he finally snatched up what looked like a fat bound notebook. “My ectopic brain!” he cried. “I’d be in big trouble without this.” New words always get my attention so I asked him what ectopic meant.
“Existing outside of the body,” he said, then told me I was good to go. He was clearly in a hurry to be on his way.
Let’s climb in the WABAC Machine 1 shall we? The year was 1990. Teenage Mutant Turtles and Home Alone would debut in theaters, while on TV, a couple of shows called Seinfeld and Law & Order were just getting started. It was also the era of the Day Timer, and it was to this that the hotshot scalpel jockey was referring.
Imagine something about the size of paperback (make it a Stephen King paperback: thick!). Inside, captured on sweet, sweet, paper sheets was an entire year of appointments, notes, important dates, etc. In addition, the fancy ones had various and sundry additional pockets, sleeves, and tabs to help the true control freak micro-manage themselves into oblivion. Certain types of folks well and truly put their entire lives into these, and it was a huge cash cow back in the day.
The surgeon who kept me opening peanut butter jars with my left hand had developed the habit of offloading data into his trusty ectopic brain, a repository of things that he wanted to remember and have access to, but which didn’t reside inside his own skull.
This was a fairly magical idea to me back then, as the deeper meaning of it sank in. A way of extending your capacity to retain and access data…but Whoa, mama! Whatever you do, don’t lose it!
Later, certain other strange factoids I came across would recall and reinforce this concept.
Such as the research that suggests spiders’ webs are examples of external cognition. External devices they can use to gather information and inform later decisions.
Such as the eight additional brains that reside in each of an octopus’s arms, allowing them to autonomously gather data simultaneously and feed it back up to the central brain located in its head.
There’s a theory in physics that posits the fundamental building block of the universe isn’t energy, or light, or time but information. Ultimately, everything is data. And we spend our lives ingesting, storing, retrieving, and representing it symbolically.
This is the deep resonant bell that I hear tolling in the background of my thoughts these days. Like Richard Dreyfuss staring at his mashed potatoes and pushing them into a mound on his plate, I look at our growing use of AI and think, “This means something!” Something as yet hidden, but something enormous and awe-inspiring and ultimately, yes, like the mother ship awaiting Dreyfuss at the top of Devil’s Tower, something alien.
So, I’ll continue to cobble together my own ectopic brain, and avail myself of the latest AI tools to help me wring some meaning out of this sea of data we all find ourselves swimming in.