Caution: brain at work!

I absolutely love catching a glimpse of the brain in action, sneaking up on it actually doing one of those things we take for granted most of the time. Thinking, joking, jumping to conclusions, making connections…

A couple of weeks ago I caught it taking a short-cut. I was reading about the German E-coli outbreak in the online edition of the Guardian, and my eye glanced at the right-hand column which shows the most-read stories of the 24-hour period. I could have sworn I saw an article entitled “deadly tomatoes hit Massachusetts”.

Hurrying over to read the story, I found mere ordinary tornadoes. Which would probably have occurred to me first, had I not been softened up by fatal fruit and veg on the other side of the screen. Oddly, I just checked, and I’m still reading ‘tomatoes’ for ‘tornadoes’ when I do a Google search on that story.

So to today. This morning I read on the BBC site about a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh that has now been identified as probably in fact a painting of his brother Theo. Here they both are:

My brain went on processing the images, clearly, long after I’d moved on to other tasks. Later in the day, I decided to catch up with what was happening at Wimbledon, and I have to say, I was pretty surprised to see Vincent sitting in the crowd.

Or maybe it was Theo. The jury’s out. The outfit definitely looks like Vincent’s, but the coloring is more Theo, and I’m not sure about the ear…

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