One day, I went to my friend’s desk around 11am.
After stopping by her cube for a while, not too long just till a decent time so I could whisk away for what.
I don’t know yet.
It was a normal day, no anguish for anything. I wasn’t hounded by any
I hurried to the vending machine.
I bought myself a coffee.
Then I started dissecting my choice.
At that time of life, I would deliberate for a while to have coffee or not and only when the urge crossed a threshold, I would then acquiesce and go for the act. And that day, I had no such coffee cravings. Then how did I act so definitively.
I recalled that my friend’s shirt had stripes of very light brown and brown. Which subconsciously triggered coffee in my brain and short-circuited the deliberation act and independently reached the conclusion and led the execution of getting a coffee with urgency.
Have you experienced such a bizarre thing, where your brain led you? Its not the case of I’m not going to have this Lays bag – may be few – Oh I did reach the end of it – but its Friday.
The brain’s got a mind of its own. Its outta control.
It’s the 7s or 11s where I as the CCO, Central commanding Officer lost the arbitration because of some technical glitch. Its important to keep checking on your brain just so you know what its up to.
I want to share some incidents when I have marveled at the brain’s capacity
One day while driving down the Sedona route, as I kept looking at the landscape, everything checked out like I remembered, but strangely I didn’t remember the vast nothingness in between the different monuments.
Our brain doesn’t like to store the wasteland.
Just yesterday I was looking at a schematic after a while. I tried to recall some shortcuts to descend into a hierarchy. Shift 4 , 7 no. I took the long route of clicking for options and selecting it and click the schematic open. After few minutes into the schematic foraging, I did a Shift V, Voila that’s the shortcut for descending into a hierarchy and then I hit a tab, which is to return to the starting point. I remembered that without even looking for it. That’s the power of pathways.
But for the brain, it wants to know you are serious, you could be the boy crying wolf just to see if your brain can do its functions are not.
Would it have been different, if I had coffee at 10 o clock and then went to my friend with a full stomach?
Why does brain do all this thinking? There is one theory that it is like a cloud that is self-organizing like any complex system.
Figure and Ground is another concept which can help us understand what we choose to remember.
This week I have been coming up against this brain barrier of registering new things.
First it was the book
Summertime Sleepers: Animals That Estivate
I should have remembered the title, to know what the book was about. On the coverpage hibernate in black is crossed out and Estivate was written in red. Even with these warnings, I was surprised to find that there are animals who do the smart thing of lazying out in the summer.
Then
In one page, lined up on the edge are some pots, in between those cactus pots are artichicks.. bring on your best imagination, but I didnt realise them, until I read about them in the lines beneath.
It takes a while to notice the changes. Its how our vision is processed that makes room for all the illusions. Pick your favorite.
This twitter thread on tech half-life shows how with our current tech reaching obsoletion and more researches joining the fray, there are always new things coming up.
Until recently, I thought all animals started from water and some of them moved onto the land. My third grader was telling me about Whale with legs which started as a land animal.
Lately I have started reading some physics discoveries because they are always finding something that bucks the trend.
Poetry is staying no far. Can humans sense magnetic fields? This is the diving point for The gravity inside of us.
A Scientist Who Delights in the Mundane is my favorite article of this week. Keep bumping into new things and enjoy learning them. Always be Learning.