Ethanol

The superego is that part of the ego that is soluble in ethanol

My recollection is that my friend Sarah Birks (an Aries, like your humble correspondent) told me she heard it from Oliver Zangwill during her time as a med student in Cambridge. For her part she insists that she heard it from me. So now we'll never know. One of us is cracking up. I have no idea where i picked it up if it wasn't from her.

The point of course is that it is a parody of operationalist definitions in science. An operationalist definition is one that defines a natural phenomenon in terms of its interaction with your apparatus rather than in terms of the role it plays vis-a-vis other natural phenomena. Ribonucleic acid is so called because it dissolves in alkali. REM sleep and Slow Wave sleep are definitions that arise not from the physiology but from interaction with the EEG machine. (EEG machines are very good at picking up eye movement).

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