Humor: So, That’s What They Mean By “Fuck Your Brains Out”

Humor: So, That’s What They Mean By “Fuck Your Brains Out”

– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com

For a brief time many years ago, I was fascinated with the phenomenon of amnesia, which, in case you’ve quite ironically forgotten, refers to “the loss of memories, such as facts, information and experiences,” as the Mayo Clinic helpfully notes.

The reason my fascination with amnesia was so fleeting was that it turned out what I found interesting about amnesia was the comically inaccurate version depicted in works of fiction – and on television, particularly.

You Know, A Reboot in Which Gilligan is Secretly a Government Assassin Would Be Pretty Dope

Don’t get me wrong; even as a very young child, I had enough sense to know amnesia in real life didn’t work the way it did on Gilligan’s Island. I wasn’t that dim. (Among other things, I was pretty sure people suffered from amnesia in places where there were no coconut trees.)

Still, I was disappointed to learn that amnesia generally didn’t involve forgetting one’s identity, because that sure made it hard for me to sustain belief during the Bourne Identity movies, despite apparent attempts by The British Journal of Psychiatry to assuage my doubts.

Come to think of it, I never watched a few of the later Bourne movies. At any point did they try bonking Jason on the head a few times to see if that recovered anything useful about Operation Treadstone?

So Many Medical Journals, So Little Comprehension

Honestly, I thought I was done being interested in amnesia, until I stumbled across an item from a different overseas medical journal. And lest you think I spend my days digging through various medical journals for fun, I’ll admit I found this item by way of a slightly less reputable publication. 

The thrust of the underlying story here is, as the Post put it, a “66-year-old Irish man was rushed to a hospital with short-term amnesia after an afternoon romp with his wife.”

To address the first question you might have, no, this story is not fake. The Irish Medical Journal is a legitimate publication. Basically, it’s just like the New England Journal of Medicine, except its contributors pronounce words like “car” very differently.

At any rate, the IMJ article sports the super catchy title “Recurrent Postcoital Transient Global Amnesia Associated with Diffusion Restriction within the Left Hippocampus.”

Now, right off the bat, I’ll admit I’m not sure what liberal hippo college students have to do with homeless people, or why we’re going around restricting diffusion after they have sex. Hell, I’m not even sure if the “they” in the previous sentence refers to homeless people or liberal hippos, but I am suddenly more interested in amnesia again.

Ask Your Doctor if Getting Bonked on the Head is Right for You

As some of you probably realized as soon as you read the word above, it turns out the “left hippocampus” does not refer to a college where hippos are being indoctrinated by socialist college professors. Instead, it is “a complex brain structure embedded deep into temporal lobe,” according to the National Library of Medicine.

I’m not going to look up what restricting diffusion means, because what got my attention in the first place is the “postcoital” part. I remember enough of my Latin to know that “post” means “after” and “coital” means “doing the Wild Thing, or more colloquially, “fuck”,

“We present a case of recurrent transient global amnesia (TGA) triggered by sexual intercourse,” the authors of the study write. “In both episodes, onset of retrograde and anterograde amnesia was within 10 minutes of sexual intercourse…. MRI performed within 24 hours of the first episode identified the classical TGA radiological findings of diffusion restriction within the left mesial temporal lobe. The second episode was not associated with MRI changes, but imaging was performed more than 72 hours after event.”

My laywoman’s summary of this is a bit more prosaic: This man’s wife clearly fucked his brains out.

If you think your brains might have been fucked out, the other take from this research is that you should endeavor to confirm the out-fucking of your brain via MRI within 72 hours.

And if that MRI doesn’t yield any useful information, there’s always hitting your husband in the head with a coconut.