Alistair,
I have recently had my brain swapped with that of my pet cockatoo. I’m typing this – painfully – using my beak, while trying to distract my body by throwing seeds on the floor. It looks like it’s broken my nose trying to pick it up. Good recommendations for a clinic to return my brain back?
Chirpy in LA

Chirpy,

By “had my brain swapped” I assume that you mean that you’ve had that portion of your subconsciousness swapped with the cockatoo. I will be operating on this assumption for the duration of my response for the following reasons: (1) You speak as if you are self-aware as a human, while combating reflexive cockatoo behaviour. If your full consciousness was that of your pet, you wouldn’t even know what a keyboard was, let alone how to use one, because cockatoos have never been all that impressed by electronics. (2) If you physically exchanged your actual brain with a cockatoo, you would have a nut-sized lump rattling around in your skull that doesn’t hardwire into your neurological system properly. So you’d be dead. Your cockatoo, sporting a bizarrely-huge brain for which it cannot supply adequate oxygen with its circulatory system, would also be dead.

Assuming that this letter finds you before you kill yourself in some instinctive attempt at flight, you can do one of two things: (1) Just try reversing whatever happened to create this problem in the first place. I would only recommend a “clinic” for that procedure if there was a clinic that administered the initial swap. (2) Failing that, work at retraining your brain. Neural pathways are hard to manually rewire, but it’s not impossible. Start by using your hands when typing. It should be noted that you will never fully rebuild human instincts or eradicate the cockatoo instincts. This means that you will always be a weirdo, most notably in your reproductive habits.

Alistair