Okay, anyone who has experienced anything like this, write a comment.
Have you ever felt like all of a sudden part of your brain started running a different program? Or that it was just processing information differently? Are you aware that your brain—specifically how it processes information—one day is significantly different from how the information was processed a month, a year, four years earlier?
It’s hard to explain, but my relationship to text, to “reading”, is suddenly very different. I used to love movies, I enjoyed T.V., super-high-quality (often computer-rendered) animation really excited me. I claimed I just didn’t have time to read books much. I mean, yeah, being a computer person who’s always staying current with the latest technologies, I know how to use books as a tool to learn a technology; it’s a great reference tool. It’s not like I was illiterate or anything.
But of late my interest in visual media has almost completely disappeared. I rarely go to movies. In T.V. if there isn’t incredible plot, story, character development, etc. I’m just not interested. When I left L.A. I sold my HDTV television with the condo; I sold as many DVDs as the used-record store would accept and donated the rest to my local video rental store. (If I have to see a favorite movie again, there’s always Netflix.) I have this huge sudden detachment to T.V. and film.
But text has this strange new “electric” quality to it. I’m a news junky for one, always anxious to read the next The New Republic article. Just a few minutes ago I was reading the most recent issue of Wired magazine, about the engineering struggles with battery technologies or the newly identified mental disorder called “prosopagnosia” and I feel this weird, almost overwhelming electrical anxiety in my mind, like I’m having dozens of thoughts and once. I’m becoming quickly addicted to the New York Public Library, starting to build a queue of books (mostly on social and political issues). I checked out Nickel and Dimed, which I’ve already written about in this blog, on Friday, finished it by Saturday morning, and have been checking the library website every few hours to see if the next book was ready to be picked up.
Now, I’m writing this with an exaggerated dramatic flair. I’m not becoming truly obsessive. For the most part my life is the same, but yet I feel like there’s been some quantum shift in the way my mind is wired. Certain things I’m able to do a lot easier than before. I’m sure part of it is simply related to my abrupt change in lifestyle and location. Part of it is the hyped-up excitement of getting knocked out of my rut. But something still feels different.
A friend of mine in L.A. mentioned something like this recently. She just started taking a certain medication, I think it was typically used for epilepsy victims to correct these minor perception problems she was dealing with. It’s hard to explain and not really relevant exactly what. The point is that one day recently she discovered that, for the first time in over a decade, she felt like there was a part of her brain—part of the perceptive and artistic sphere—that she has lost sight of over a decade ago. She felt like some missing equipment has been reinstalled, and she was excited by how she was using it in her new job.
There are two other examples I can think of for myself:
- I’d studied piano my entire childhood, from age eight to eighteen, and then stopped abruptly when I went to college. For four years I hardly touched the piano once. Then after college I sat down to it again, and I saw music entirely differently! Instead of reading individual, isolated notes on a page that had to be memorized individually, I suddenly saw key and chord and scale progressions, linked and repeating themes and patterns! You would think after four years of no practice I would be in worse shape (and my finger dexterity indeed was worse for the lack of practice) by my sightreading and theory took a quantum jump forward.
- I had studied mathematics heavily in high school, I majored in Math in college, and my graduate work was in Statistics. Somewhere in the first year of graduate school my brain totally switched gears in how it approached Mathematics. No longer was I dependent on “grinding through equations” or following boring, mechanical, rote patterns to solve problems. I didn’t even see numbers anymore. Instead I saw past the equations and numbers, to what was behind them. They were like ghosts or shadows. The point is: I solved problems by developing an intuitive feeling for where the numbers and equations were going. Even today, if I’m doing arithmetic like estimating some financial number like taxes or tips or the number of days til Christmas, I don’t add or multiply. I start with this strange gut feeling for what the answer feels like. I start with some estimate that I draw from the ether, and then like Michelangelo chipping the marble away from the eventual statue, I start figuring out approximation techniques to better chip away at a more accurate answer.
Now before you get the impression that I’m bragging about how superior my brain keeps getting, I’ll tell you that it goes both ways. I’ve read stories and essays that I had written as a high school kid, and I barely recognize the author because his work is far superior to what I could write today. Much of my pure creative talent has been replaced with clever facility with manipulating tools and techniques to “short-cut” my way to good results. I miss 20-year-old-me. I wish I could find him, embrace him, sit in a garden and ponder the meaning of life with him. But mostly he’s gone. He exists in a different temporal slice of “that which is me”.
Damn, it sure is strange being a temporal being. (Or more specifically, being self-aware about it.)
Anyone have some similar anecdotes? Write a comment.