Have ya’ll stumbled across the relatively recent rotation of the sciense-tisserie that suggests a mere 5% (or less) of our brain activity is controlled by our conscious mind? When I first read that neuroscienticians were referring to the other 95% of our thinking as “spontaneous fluctuations” my first thought was they had called our thinking “spontaneous flatulations” which tells you right off where my mind lives most of the time. (The older I get, the more of these spontaneous flatulations I emit.)
To be honest, I was pretty impressed with a statistic as high as five percent. I can cruise through the vast majority of my day on auto-pilot no problem. Sleep—check. Poop and pee—check. Well, I suppose I have to think about it sometimes, but most of the time I just sorta go with the flow. When it comes to cooking breakfast, I have to briefly think about the menu, but after that, it’s mostly autopilot.
Getting around from place to place is mostly walking for me. I don’t have to think about that. But let’s face it. I probably think about what I’m doing more when I walk than when I drive. Anyone who has been driving for longer than my teenage son, knows they propel a deadly, massive object around without thinking about it beyond what music they want to listen to while mindlessly threatening everyone else who is mindlessly propelling their own deadly, massive object around town.
It’s all muscle memory. Cook. Clean. Drive. Shop. Listen. Encourage. Nod. Turn. Cough. We do all of this stuff pretty much according to the same schedule for so long, our minds just click into the same old groove and off we go. No conscious thought necessary. For the most part we establish these grooves intentionally just for that purpose, so we don’t have to think.
Most of the time, I walk the same routes from place to place. That’s on purpose. I’ve walked them so many times that I could have a stroke and still end up wherever I was headed before my body collapsed. That leaves me with one less thing I need to think about. You know, so I can think about more important things. Things I enjoy thinking about like the stories I’m working on or the Dallas Cowboys.
Current news? Global events? Important elections? Well, I have patterns established to interpret all that stuff for me already. So I don’t have to think about it. Insert global event, run established algorithm, output pre-programmed response. Muscle memory. These pre-established algorithms are called prejudices. And there is a reason we all have them. The last thing we can afford to do is go around using our conscious mind to address every little thing or task we encounter. No one has the mental bandwidth for that. Instead, we think, say, and therefore do all the things we’ve trained ourselves (or have been trained by others) to think, say, and therefore do. It saves us so much time and energy, right?
Problem is, as helpful as prejudices (and all forms of muscle memory) can be, they aren’t perfect. And when it comes to rewriting a mental script (a book I’m reading calls them social liturgies), we run into an additional problem—the so called “thinking thingism.” In other words, it’s a problem if we all pretend reality is “I think, therefore I am” when in reality none of us really do much conscious thinking at all. “If I gut react, therefore I am” is closer to the truth.
It turns out, we can’t think ourselves into different behavioral patterns, you know, without putting in all the hard work of altering our behavior. But as soon as you go down that path you run into ancient things like virtues. And then you’re all like, “Bwahhh? I thought we gave up on these archaic practices decades ago. I mean chastity? Temperance? Prudence? Fortitude for goodness sake! I don’t even know what half of these words mean. (Admit it, you were about to google at least one of them.)
I mean, the gut wants what the gut wants, right? No point in trying to control it. We gave up on all those virtues because we could never really master them anyway. Slavery is still a thing, right? Virtues didn’t seem to get rid of alcoholism, adultery or any of the rest. Best not to try. After all, we know what’s good for us and what isn’t. I can quit anytime I want. I just don’t want to.
So…to summarize, my prejudicial gut has been established over years of compulsive behavior and social liturgies causing me to scratch my head as to why I have such bad habits despite reading all the right books about what to believe and what to do.
Muscle memory. I do stuff because I’ve been trained to do stuff, not because I think about doing it. I know, I know. Thinking about this stuff makes my brain hurt too. But I figure since I do such little conscious thinking, I might as well spend that precious conscious thinking time thinking more about what I do than about what I think (since thinking appears to be as effective in changing our behavior as most men are at changing a diaper).
If we can identify one non-beneficial or even false social liturgy at a time and then restructure our behavior patterns to reenforce a better one… well, then we’ll be cooking with spontaneous flatulations.
From the Desk of DMB
Another good week at the desk. Man, I actually made myself cry today. It was a mother/son moment. Those can get to me at my current stage of life. For a couple of weeks, I think I was so stressed about the style and format of the book that I found it hard to focus on the actually narrative. I’m sure those sections will need more work when I come back around during the first rewrite. But these last couple of weeks, I feel more comfortable with the story. I think I’ve figured out how it is generally going to go from here until the end. Four to five more chapters, and we’ll be done. I’ve been having fun with little bits of foreshadowing. So far, I think most of it is still pretty subtle, not yet to the point where most readers will be aware of it. Over the next few weeks, I plan on bringing it out to the point to where observant, slow readers will be catching on. So hopefully, by the time the end happens only a small percentage of readers will be taken totally by surprise. This isn’t supposed to be that kind of story. Rather it should be one that makes you nod at the end and then want to go back over how all the pieces fit together for a solid hour or two now that you have the full picture. Then you wake up thinking about the book the next day. That’s what I’m shooting for anyway.
If you want to start reading the Lost DMB Files…
[Click here for an introduction by Jim Buckner]
[Start with the introduction to the series.]
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