What’s wrong with you? my wife asked. The light just seems a bit bright, that’s all.

I had always taken my brain for granted, just as I had taken for granted the agelessness of youth, but now I wondered if my brain was working as it should.

UNIDENTIFIED BRIGHT OBJECT BY JOHN MARTIN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 34

The way the neurologist explained it to me, this unidentified bright object (UBO for short) that the MRI had found in my brain could either be a lesion, indicative of something potentially serious, or it might be nothing more than an anomaly in the white matter of the cerebrum. There was no way of knowing for sure. But given my age (I had just turned 62) chances were that it was benign and that I would live out the rest of my life without being affected by it. Shaking my hand then, he left the examining room.

The news of this so-called bright object certainly gave me pause, and my thoughts turned to it often over the course of the next several days.

When I told my wife later that evening she pondered the news for a moment, and then launched into a barrage of ques…