2811 Half Speed.

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For some people advice like this may seem ridiculously obvious. The reality is that for some people it isn’t. When I was young I used to get extremely frustrated with other children because I thought they were always being obtuse, or acting stupid, to annoy me. Eventually my mother sat me down and explained that they weren’t trying to be stupid, they were just incapable of understanding things as fast as I was. It wasn’t malice, it was a difference in ability. Recently the subject of the inner monologue and other similar concepts have come to the fore, which are all examples of the various ways human brains adapt to life. I hear my thoughts as a clear running monologue almost all the time. Sometimes I can silence it now that I’m older, but most of my thinking takes place in this kind of verbal framework that I hear in my mind’s ear. I also can clearly visualize things as imaged projected in my mind space. It’s very clear when I close my eyes, but I can also hold images in a sort of otherspace while having my eyes open. Generally the visual space hovers in front of and above my eyeline, but as the situation requires it can move around all the space around my body so it doesn’t interfere with what I’m doing. My memories tend to be third person, especially when I was younger. Now that I’m older some of my memories have switched to first person. My oldest memories were always in first person but the middle years tended to be third. I have very strong spacial memory. If I walk through a store one time, and my mind isn’t distracted or hindered by something, I can recall the location of at least 75% of what I’ve seen. A useful skill for working in a video store, or retail. Even now I can remember the last 5 or 6 layouts of my old jobs even though I have functionally no need of that information.
It’s strange to me trying to understand how other people navigate life without these tools I simply came with. I can’t teach someone how to have an internal monologue. I can barely even conceive of a life where you simply do things without thinking. I can react instinctively as situations require, but it’s not my default setting and the idea that it is for some people astounds me. I also understand what it’s like not to understand things, but there’s a point at which I have trouble understanding how someone lives with an extremely hindered intellect.
For Reggie and Thomas this is a situation where it may simply be impossible to convey this lesson. Reggie’s plans tend to be extremely vague in the long term and extremely reactionary in the short term, which is why he is accident prone. His mind is basically always ahead of itself and catching up with what he’s doing all the time. When given a framework to exist within he’s very competent though. He may have the potential to break out of his current paradigm, but he’ll need to adjust his methods for interacting with the world.

Anyway I guess we’ll see how this plays out over time. For now I wish you a pleasant Wednesday and hope to see you on Friday. Until then, Oooo-oooo-Oooo!

17 Comments

I think the phrase is something like “People don’t know what they don’t know.” I work with glasses and it’s amazing to see people who can’t see and don’t realize it, or alternatively, they CAN see without realizing it, like they don’t realize there is a big magnifier in the bottom of their glasses that makes everything bigger when they look down. I think, ultimately, that most of our operations are automatic, because if we had to think about breakthing and digesting and all of that, we’d never have brain power to do anything else. And there’s just different levels of automation for different people. I too think things through…excessively, I suspect. And it’s exhausting. It also means that if you throw me an unexpected curveball, my already-tired brain just shuts down. So I think there is also an advantage to being able to just take things as they come on an instinctual level–those people often seem happier, with less worry of the future, and they get more joy out of “right now,” like eating a juicy burger or something simple. Well, happier until their lack of forethought bites them in the rear. I think maybe young people need to be taught these concepts more, and learn to understand what kind of people they are and how to compensate for their weaknesses. But that might be a hard thing to structure.

It’s like if you tripped over a rock, you could write a short story about it on the way down.

The cynical part of me says that the other kids weren’t trying to be stupid.
They were succeeding at it. ;)

Similarly: before you make a decision think about what decision you would make if you were smarter.
Its sound silly, but yea, “smarter you” is smarter than “you”.

This was sad to hear about:
If you like superheroes, + superheroes films:
the star of the film Batman Forever, and a star of the film, Top Gun [1980s], Val Kilmer, has passed on this week.

That’s sad. I really like him.
Happy Trails, Val.

Back before the internet, in the 80s, a movie could be something of a hidden gem. Over the course of several years I introduced three women (one after the other) to Top Secret!, to great acclaim.

And it turned out that I married the last one, who valued my sense of humor.

This might be, kind of related, to what Thomas i talking about- there is a quote, that some people say, was said by the Wild West lawman, Wyatt Earp.

Wyatt Earp supposedly said: “If you want to be good at gun-fighting, you have to learn to slow down in a hurry.”

I envy you that navigational ability. My dad had a mental map that meant that he could readily roam around rural back roads with a general idea of where he’d end up even if he hadn’t been there, because he knew where the surrounding roads were and could reasonably predict approximately where the current road was likely to come out. His favorite Sunday activity was driving around to explore new areas, and he was rarely lost doing it. By the time he’d been in this county 5 years, I think he genuinely knew more about the road network of the county than many people who’d lived here all their lives. It also meant he was rarely bothered by closed roads, because he’d just look for roads that seemed likely to connect to a parallel that let him get back in the direction he wanted. He made his own detours and he was right far more often than he was wrong. An epic level of spacial awareness even in larger locations.

I really wish I’d inherited it. I can simulate small fragments of it because I spent so much time with him that I at least learned a little of how the thought process works, but it doesn’t come easy or naturally for me. So I compensate by being the person that studies the map of the entire route intently, making particular effort to remember the exit numbers or other similar warnings and landmarks for where I want to be. I have been known to turn on Google maps when traveling to places that I only know one specific route to, just in case something unexpected occurs.

There’s also the factor that thinking things through is a skill that you improve at over time with practice, meaning of course people who never practice that skill are going to be complete crap at it, both in the accuracy of their predictions and how quickly they can actually analyze every detail.

I remember my teachers in elementary school trying to teach critical thinking (which is basically what is being discussed here) and utterly failing to even provide a comprehensible definition for what they are talking about, let alone providing exercises that actually help foster the skill. Now that I actually understand what they were talking about I realize I’d always done that naturally, and pretty much all of my hobbies have honed that talent into a skill that I am extremely good at.

Most people however, rarely, if ever, practice it, and when they are in a situation where practicing it would be both valuable and viable, the idea is so alien to them that when you try to suggest they try they fight you because they think you’re calling them stupid. I know a lot of people who are actually incredibly intelligent, when they bother to actually think in the first place, but you can’t tell them to think things through or they’ll get mad because instead of taking it advice they take it as an insult, which IMO makes them seem far more stupid than whatever mistake in reasoning they made in the first place.

Forgetting to think, or not being good at thinking yet, aren’t big deals as far as I’m concerned, but refusing to think in the first place out of spite is the dumbest possible thing I can imagine.

“So I’m supposed to GUESS what other people will do?” – Reggie

Yeah, from my understanding, that IS what people who are actually good at social interaction do. They get so good at it they stop needing the moment to think about it, and start instinctively understanding how those closest to them will react. Then they improve from there, getting good enough at it to instinctively understand how people in their culture would react. Which is the point where I would consider them to be good at social interaction.

Reggie is verbally impetuous. It can be a blessing half the time, and a curse the other half. But he can’t reliably tell which is which, not unlike many of us.

See, I’m reading Reggie’s understanding of Thomas’s suggestion as EXACTLY what Reggie says: he thinks that’s guessing. And to him guessing is a crap-shoot. To Reggie, the only reactions/actions he can be sure of are his own because people are unpredictable. He can’t plan or even consider every possibility because he’d never get anything done. To somebody like Thomas, people are extremely predictable to the point that he hardly has to take any time at all to make his considerations if he needs to move quickly.

That seems less like a difference in speed/approach/thinking and more a difference in social skill level. Thomas is exceptionally socially skilled, while Reggie is definitely not. If you’re socially skilled, you can make largely accurate estimates of behavior in reaction to yours pretty rapidly because you understand what triggers certain social cues. If you’re not? That feels like random guessing.

Reggie would have to dedicate a lot of active effort to understanding people and how they interact to get to the level of automatic social calculation Thomas is at and I’m really not sure he’d feel like the effort is worth it. All we can do is wait and see, I guess.

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