Twenty Watts

In darkness on a lab bench a small bulb glows beside a human brain on a tray, lit only by it.

Twenty watts.

That is how much the organ you are reading this line with consumes. A fridge light bulb takes fifteen, a laptop under load sixty, a kettle two thousand.

For those twenty watts you get sight, hearing, speech, memory of the summer before last, the ability to lie to your boss and the understanding that you are lying; an engineer commissioned to build such a device on such a power supply would think in the first minute that he was being mocked.

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