My eldest daughter is studying Posthumanism at school for a research project and it got me thinking… Do you remember those old sci-fi horror movies where a disembodied brain was floating in a giant tank of clear or cloudy liquid? Or the various versions of Frankenstein’s monster and the stories of the body snatchers? Are you old enough, I wonder, to have seen the television series about Steve Austin “The Bionic Man” who was an injured soldier (I think) who got jacked up with medical miracles to become a hybrid machine-man, operating better than before?
Hoping to get an image to help me along, I asked an AI art generator to show me “a lady who keeps her brain in a jar” and this is what I got:
“Sweet” comes to mind… which wasn’t where I was headed (pun intended)… although it does make me weirdly tempted to get a purple-rinse for my gray hair!
Anyway – the point I set out to make is that the line between science and sci-fi has always been blurry. Mary Shelley apparently wrote her novel “Frankenstein” (1818) because she had heard about real ‘reanimation’ experiments, in which the legs of dead frogs twitched when an electric current was sent through our poor froggy friends… and later humans…
In terms of today’s medical (mechanical) miracles, you can get a cochlear implant to improve your hearing. Dodgy hip? Have a porcelain and metal installation. Trippy-ticker? Get a pacemaker. It gets far weirder when you take into account ‘out there’ options such as cryogenic freezers.
‘Out there’, that is, for now.
It made me wonder what a sci-fi take on migraine treatments of the future might look like. What bio-engineered wonders (or monstrosities) will be invented – and will they benefit the creator or the patient? Could we organize a think tank on brain tanks?
I googled the future of migraine management and got a lot of pharmaceutical pages and a couple of neuromodulation ads, and not much else.
This time, when I asked the AI art generator to show me a futuristic migraine saving device, I got these:
I think I like the lolly-lady better… here’s hoping that migraine inventions are more natural than this. I for one, do NOT want to wear half a car-engine on my head! (Although I’d love to wear those ice-blue eyes around for a weekend!)
Take care taking care, Linda x.
PS – I went back and tried some other AI filters for the lady who keeps her brain in a jar… I’ll leave their strange ethereal glow here to disturb your sleep for the night – you can thank me tomorrow… or not:
PPS – is it just me, or is there something very funny about matching the color of your clothes and makeup to your brain?!?
The Mindful Migraine 
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