Monday, June 10, 2013

Minor Irritants

These are a part of life. Not just my life, of course. But what I'm thinking of is bodily irritants -- small imperfections or injuries on the surface of the body that aren't large enough to be worrisome, yet aren't small enough to ignore.

My latest acquisition is a burn on my RH thumb, received for absent-mindedly testing the toasted sandwich maker to see if it was still on. It was. The burn is small, quite hard, and perfectly circular. It's a reminder of the gap between what I would like my body to do and what it actually will do.

That's because the thumb pulp that's burned comes directly into contact with the pen while writing. When I'm not writing, I don't even remember that I have a burn. Yet when I pick up a pen, it's suddenly annoying.  The small circular burn temporarily becomes the centre of my world.

My consciousness of the burn, and the necessity of performing an action (such as handwriting) that counteracts my body's present wishes, shows the difference between humans' and animals' experience of bodily irritation.

Most non-human animals see discomfort as something to be avoided, even if that means modifying otherwise rewarding behaviour. If the original behaviour is retained despite the irritation, then the reward obtained must be substantial. (An example of this would be a rat knowingly receiving an electric shock by pressing a live food-release lever.)

Yet humans seem to have a different attitude to their minor injuries and abrasions. Instead of becoming something to ignore, they become something to obsess over. Our centre of consciousness is temporarily relocated to become engulfed by the burn, cut or bruise.

I'm going somewhere with this, but I can't figure out where. More thinking needed. 

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Circular Thoughts

Most of the time, I'm amazed at the sheer versatility of the human mind. It's been said before ad nauseam, but our mental capacity and imagination is pretty amazing by any standards -- even if we're inevitably biased in the matter.

Yet some things make me think of the engineering problems in our mental processes. Or, should I say, my mental processes. It's often difficult to determine how easy it is to step outside of one's own perspective and inhabit someone else's; evaluating the efficacy of one's own thinking patterns is particularly fraught.

Still. The flaw I'd like to focus on is the 'feedback effect' in thought: that is, the human tendency to focus on a trivial detail or irritant, and return to it again and again, multiplying it several-fold in the process.

This is extremely familiar to us, but why does it come about? Many of our other habits of thought are cleverly designed--attention, for example. The 'cocktail party' effect, where we are able to snap our attention into focus when we hear our name in a crowded room, has obvious utility for our ancestors.

But the gradual amplification of a small grievance through repetition seems to help no-one. If I had to come up with an evolutionary just-so story for this trait, I'd guess that attention feedback was designed to prevent us losing track of small grudges and grievances. Early humans, whose brains were focused entirely on keeping detailed accounts of their immediate social sphere, would have had plenty of cause to crystallise a specific hostility towards another member of their tribe.

There is also a clear physical incentive. Embellishing and deepening the antipathy felt for a rival through obsessive mental repetition would give the aggrieved individual a motivation to take action against him. In a small band-like society, where assuming a position of power must have meant physically overthrowing your opponent, being able to 'work up' a head of anger over a minor incident would have been a great asset in the right circumstances. If there are serious strictures preventing an usurper from killing a rival, mechanisms that temporarily override those apprehensions might be necessary to move up the food chain.

Of course, our current society doesn't reward the escalating feedback effect of anger. Instead, this impulse is punished. Those with a particular tendency toward anger may have been rewarded far more than a similar character would be today. The casual culture of violence toward one's enemies has only recently faded, and there are still many noble examples of it

I know that we aren't completely trapped within the biological structures handed down through the generations. Still, having spent the best part of an hour constructing elaborate fantasies of retribution over a trivial matter, I realised this: we're more in control of our behaviour if we remain aware of when our impulses override our thoughts.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Glittering Commodities

You can be as sceptical as you like about your susceptibility to materialism's gleaming surface. I know I am, most of the time. I look at all those people in shopping centre car parks, blindly grasping at whatever happens to be on the bargain rack in a futile attempt to convince themselves that it's all important. I'm not like that. Advertising doesn't work on me.

And then one day, I get it into my mind that I absolutely must have a particular object or other, and I find out (again) that the impulse is shockingly close to the core of my soul. In this case, it was a TV -- and then, of course, all the magnificent and absolutely necessary accessories that go with it.

Being fully on board in this case -- looking at speaker package deals uncharacteristically late at night, in the interests of shaving off a hundred bucks or so off my coveted 5.1 dream system -- makes me think that the feelings many people get from shopping on a regular basis might be worth it after all.

What I mean is: a common criticism of consumerism as an ethos is that it is only fleetingly satisfying. After all, no sooner have you purchased the latest model of car, say, than you crave the next one. Chasing a concrete object is a doomed quest, because your disappointment is engineered into your lust.

Still. The chase, if it's prolonged in a productive way, can bring a lot of pleasure. I can understand the perils of being able to have anything and everything you want straight away --  King Midas and Co. taught us that pretty well when we were kids. Yet if there's a temporary barrier between you and your chosen object, then perhaps the pleasant time spent imagining its reality is valuable in itself.

Since purchasing the TV -- which I spent several months beforehand mentally placing in a corner of the lounge -- I am now engaged in the same activity with the speaker system. Drawing pictures of speakers in the air has amused me greatly, to the point where I have to remind myself to think of more pressing matters when absolutely necessary.

I understand that I'm channeling intentions and focusing my resources onto hypothetical lumps of wood and plastic. But I'm still letting my imagination roam happily among the always-open, fully-stocked 'On Sale' aisle of the mind.