"oh, rabbit"

March 11, 2019 8:26 AM

Mind-motions: "thoughts that are hardly even thoughts at all, that don’t rise to the level of sharing with another human being. That millisecond when — again and again — a rusty pipe looks like an owl, or a newscaster’s voice reminds you of a long-gone uncle, or a daily routine sets off a small chain of involuntary associations. These things are almost nothing, and yet they are who we are." [SLNYT]
posted by Halloween Jack (12 comments total)

Okay, but how do you turn them off??

The recurring ones are trained neural networks, I suppose, where the groove of memory has gone deep so that every time you see the pipe you think "owl". And the easiest way to turn those off, if you want to, is to avoid the trigger for them, such as by not looking at that side of the road. Which of course can turn into the habit to not turn your head sideways for the whole trip and become us much as a frustration as having your train of thought derailed when passing the same lot every day during your commute.

Which means it is often better to get so used to them that you don't register them any more and get back to whatever you were trying to think or remember or notice so that the owl becomes one of the hundreds of sensations that don't joggle your train of thought, like the feeling of your toes in your shoes, and the tension in the corners of your eyes where you are slightly squinting and the windshield wipers at the bottom of the window, and all the rest of that stuff. It's much better to try to turn that owl into a reassurance of knowing exactly where you are on the road.

But what about the gazillions of split instant associations that don't recur but which crowd out your short term memory so you end up standing blankly in the kitchen aware that you got up to get... something. And you had a perfect concept of what it was when you got up, probably a semi-sound, semi-visual, semi-hand sensation but the fact that it was the kitchen scissors is gone until you go back to your room and see the piece of plastic on your desk that you had just given up on breaking by bending it.

How do you turn off the constant battering of things like that catching your attention and then steering you, so the light on the top of your computer reminds you of bad Star Trek movie special effects, which makes you thing of glowing pillars of light which makes you think of the kleig lights on top of Place Ville Marie doing endless sweeps in the dark that reminds you of the small planes that flew low over the expressways and autoroutes to give traffic reports, which reminds you of the comfort sound of hearing planes over the house in the dark, that at-home white noise, which reminds you of the home you lost...

How do you stop yourself from making all those associations? How do you ever finish a complete sentence or thought without yanking yourself forcibly back all the time?
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:57 AM on March 11, 2019 [11 favorites]

This is exactly what I use Twitter for, and also why I lose followers daily.
posted by bondcliff at 9:21 AM on March 11, 2019 [5 favorites]

I sometimes think that all I truly remember is these uncommunicated little things, and that the things I think I remember are carved out of them.
Just a long list of things associated with other things, with occasional groups falling into coherence and achieving significance.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:36 AM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

One can certainly gain a degree control of the type of thinking that Jane the Brown mentions above by engaging in meditation a few times a week.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 9:38 AM on March 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

sometimes while I chew gum I think, "the preceptor teeth"
posted by otherchaz at 9:50 AM on March 11, 2019 [7 favorites]

I was one at a performance of Mozart's Symphony # 35 (The "Haffner") performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. My father had died recently, and this was his favorite symphony. As I listened, I realized I was probably thinking the things he would have thought if he were there, and that my brain and the brains of everyone my father had ever come in contact with contained little pieces of his thought processes. Things he liked, things he had disliked, opinions; they still existed. As I listened, I also picked up from the music things about Mozart: his ego, the way he liked to orchestrate, his emotions. My fathers thoughts melded into Mozart's thought, mediated by my brain. Since I don't believe in an afterlife, these sorts of things are my only consolation.
posted by acrasis at 9:57 AM on March 11, 2019 [19 favorites]

Our minds will catch anything and mount it like a prize.

David Berman poetry is about 50% this kind of thing. Oh how I love them.
posted by es_de_bah at 10:16 AM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

I haven't even read the article and already I feel like this is my life and is entirely how I go through the world and if I bothered to try to explain all this shit to anyone they'd walk away and make me more lonely and this is literally how life is lived all full of tiny little references we can't really explain to anyone but they make us who we are and they make our life feel rich and full and worthwhile.

I'll go read the article now but I already feel like this is glorious and I'm glad someone finally mentioned it.
posted by hippybear at 4:41 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've trained myself, more or less, over almost 20 years of copy-editing, to notice a lot of my brain's patterns and associations like this. The only way to edit cleanly is to at least mindfully notice what context and semantic cloud of preconceived notions you bring to the text. Mindful noticing is a big part of my photography practice, too, just seeing the patterns that my brain thinks are there, the pareidolias and the gestalt and the nonobvious little parts and angles, rather than the obvious thing before me. I love this stuff. I love hearing others' stuff like this. I just went for a 2-hour walk where that's all I did. Mindfulness rules.
posted by limeonaire at 4:48 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Mindful noticing
Field geology (and all the observational sciences) requires this as well. To try and see without interpreting, to accept that the things before you have their own integrity and try to record it.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:38 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is exactly what I use Twitter for, and also why I lose followers daily.

I rarely post anything personal, and was just thinking about this as I went back and forth about posting an anecdote. I don't care to have people know about me, and don't want to talk about someone else, but sometimes your the only person able to tell a story.

These things will never be part of anyone’s biography. Unless we tell one another, they disappear.

That's why. I've been fascinated by how even recent history is mostly shaped by not only what people choose to tell, but what they think is important enough to tell. All the little things in life that are important to understanding how people really lived are rarely reported and we have to piece them together.
posted by bongo_x at 1:19 PM on March 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

That's why. I've been fascinated by how even recent history is mostly shaped by not only what people choose to tell, but what they think is important enough to tell. All the little things in life that are important to understanding how people really lived are rarely reported and we have to piece them together.

to artlessly conjoin to destroyers lines:

a chorus is a thing that bares repeating /
And a penny for your thoughts was never enough
Your head gets filled with that stuff
posted by es_de_bah at 2:58 PM on March 12, 2019