We make choices...it's what we choose...
I was watching a movie the other night called “Wonderboys”.
Towards the end there was a great part about the student reviewing the teachers book draft telling him he was not practicing a technique he taught, and that was to make “choices”.
She said his book was too detailed, he lacked making choices, choosing what we see and what is told. Basically the narrative wasn’t sharp enough, anymore obtuse and we just have real life, or documentary without narrative, just observation. This sub-text or theme paralleled with his own character in the movie where he didn’t really live life, he just let things happen, he avoided making decisions, including harnessing the omens and the things nature throws at you..acting on the subtle signs.
None-the-less his character was great, and I did like the fact that his decisions of avoidance sometimes led to just endings.
Anyway I thought of this movie when I was reading a passage in a book by Deepak Chopra (Life After Death), who was talking about a book called “The Biology of Transcendence”.
It said that savant children don’t perform tasks from their own accord, they instead respond when asked, similar to a computer.
Deepak says:
“The normal brain filters out information for good reason-it takes narrow experience to form a self, a separate person with limited beliefs, goals, memories, likes and dislikes. We deliberately reject huge portions of information, but a damaged brain is exposed to everything through its inability to select and filter”
It seems that children with this type of condition, don’t carve out a life, they don’t make choices, all they do is process information and then incredibly recall it when needed, almost like a computer.
I wonder what would happen if I didn’t make any choices in life and passively absorbed the perpetual information that bombards me daily…I think I would have a break down, and perhaps this is why people with this condition seem numbed or indifferent to the world.
This is why I admire electronic musicians, I listen to lots of electronica and sometimes wonder out of all the sounds in the world, and ways to manipulate these sounds, how does the artist make a choice with what to go with, how do they know that’s the sound for that part of a piece.
It’s not like they have the limitation of a guitar or 5 colours and varation to paint with, instead their choices are infinite.
I often need constraints to act, if my task involves only the props and tools in a room, then I can start formulating, otherwise I just think on and on about the possibilities, never forming a narrative.
We are about making choices, these accumulate and shape what we are always becoming.
I guess being human is like sculpturing, you are carving out a life (your narrative), and sometimes a bad move in life is a piece of the sculpture that has dried hard and you can’t really remove it. Sometimes its concreteness is good as a reminder, it tells us who we are, where we were at the time, and instead of breaking it, we can learn from it and re-model it with the color of who we are now…evolving.
Another passage in Chopra’s book reminds me of Michael Talbot’s, “The Holographic Universe”. I remember a bit where someone saw a certain symbol in a street sign or someone’s t-shirt, but when they had a second look it was a different symbol. Talbot said that infact the first symbol was just as real as the the actual symbol. You actually saw that first symbol, as your brain pattern matched and displayed something similar you have seen in the past which kind of distorted the reality.
“Two people with different worldviews can see the same fact and give totally divergent interpretations of it, because no fact or event is perceived by itself. walking down the street, I may pass a woman with bright red lipstick, a faint whiff of wine on her breath….in my world view this is a natural encounter that barely registers on me. Therefore you might assume nothing happened in my brain.”
But, he says a great deal did happen.
“The sight of this woman entered my brain as raw data along the optic nerve, but I couldn’t actually “see” her until that data passed through my worldview. Imagine a series of filters marked “memory”, “beliefs”, “associations”, and “judgements”. Each filter alters the raw data in some way, invisibly instantaneously.
Should a person with a different worldview encounter the same woman, he would “see” her through his filters. If he happened to be a traditional Muslim or a Victorian or medieval monk, all the innocuous features that entered my brain-might cause a violent reaction in his brain…
A worldview provides fixed grooves for behaviour, which is dangerous, unfortunately, much of the time.”
NOTES
Fixed grooves are not good for serendipity and innovation.
Most of us are not savants, we pattern match, therefore we get things done from sourcing our network filter of people, and we contribute by participating in this network…rather than directly entering and seeking into a database.
It’s hard to make choices, create, or say what you know when there is a blank canvas, we respond better to triggers, symbols, stories.
- again this has been the failure of past knowledge management practices and is the boon of new social tools and techniques like blogs and anecdote circles…also remember a blank wiki will have low adoption inertia.
