but I've had a chance in my earlier days to experiment with some hallucinogenic drugs and been able to see what occurs when you kick your brain into overdrive for an extended period of time.

The mind is truly capable of much more processing power than we challenge it with during normal usage but there's a reason. Just as your car would fall apart much earlier if you ran the engine at a maxed out tach all the time, our bodies are not capable of sustaining maximum cranial output but for short bursts.

I was able once to play a game of racquetball while tripping and it was an amazing experience and my unsuspecting partner I'm sure thought he was in the court with someone with supernatural powers.

Racquetball is this three dimensional game of pool where the best players are reading multiple bounce trajectories in a very short time period and rapidly placing themselves in the best possible alignment to hit the next shot. The processing that occurs, once you become adept at the game, is pretty rapid and a wonderful exercise for the mind. You even become somewhat good at reading ahead the possible shots a person can make based on their body and court position.

That day however it was like I not only could read those things my practice and conditioning had attained but it felt as if I could calculate exact trajectories before the opponent even set up for the ball. My mind was always 2 or 3 bounces ahead of the ball. My athletic timing for my own shots was perfect and I broke 3 balls during our match because of the power I could generate. I don't think I missed a single shot and if I remember right, my opponent didn't score a single point. This was a guy I was pretty even with normally. During many volleys it felt as if time slowed down.

My brain power was being utilized probably as close to its full potential as I've ever experience in my life. It was most likely similar to that momentary time slowing phenomena we've all experienced when a threat instantly appears.

My next day however showed me the cost of this utilization. Every muscle in my body ached and my mind was slow and lethargic. I think I slept for over 12 hours. Who knows the danger I put myself into during that experiment. Looking back it was a very nutty thing to do.

What it told me is that there is a reserve brain power built into all of us for those times that we truly need it and that our normal activity is probably regulated to keep that high gear from being used at most times because the rest of our functions are simply not designed to be able to keep up with it.

That said however I'm also convinced that many of my abilities I've seemed to now have in life may be from the exposure to these powerful drugs in showing me how to activate that additional power from time to time. I've found however that utilizing that extra surge requires one to clear out extraneous crap - dates, times, names, those things that label you an absent-minded professor type.

Art