The Hominid Stimulant

The Hominid Stimulant 

Guide me to Adulthood 

"How could anyone possibly achieve that focus?", I asked myself rhetorically, as I watched him glued to his laptop, immersed in the labyrinthine world of Politics, Opinions and Mathematics. For someone whose primary pastime was being in a brown study, attempting to understand the anatomy of focus, he seemed like an enticing subject. 

"How do you do it?", I asked him. "Do what?", he answered with a smirk. "Forget the world around you when you do something." Never got a satisfactory answer from him but dissecting his responses to the things people said and did, online and in real life, made my understanding of his mental plane more diaphanous. Explicating the roots of focus, as I eventually came to realize, couldn't be an isolated study if it had to be of any worth. So, it made sense to observe his approach to problems, one might consider unrelated to the cynosure, in addition to those that were obvious. 

The subject's existence encased a thought model that balanced mine pretty well, primarily why understanding and deconstructing it made complete sense. Call it a "subconscious project", if you will. 

The extremities of our thought models went through an enervating cycle of clashing and settling, one point-of-contention (POC) after another. The incentive to proceed was binary, ergo, strong. When the intellectual incentives failed as fuels, emotions provided the skeleton. It was probably the dissimilitude in our styles of communication rather than ideological differences that made the project pesky, more often than not. Middling compromise and patience, being two important means to the end, assuaged communication issues. Not all contretemps added value. Some were pure noise ; some, cases of two people with different childhoods and upbringing, flabbergasted seeing the bizarreness of each other's ways of life, letting off steam (mind you, lots of it). Maturity helped pick out arguments that held weightage. We had a latent system of mutual conditioning. I was conditioned to be, say, more rational; he, more empathetic. 

Equilibrium post contretemps was the prize. POCs that were treated with sound reasoning, logic and rationality resulted in stronger equilibrium; the issue was never brought up again. Both parties, he and I, put forth our views on the matter, hoping for them to sound rational, sustainable, logical and practical, in a style of communication that was mutually acceptable. An impulsive or aggressive argument would automatically be rejected (the receiving end would naturally become less receptive to alternate opinions). The final agreement was based on future good. The practice, initially, very high maintenance, became instinctive and easier over time. I was conditioned to not say things that were based on my assumption of something rather than what they factually were. It felt like I'd started to think differently. (Success!)

A major part of this project was to "un-learn" the thought models I grew up on and was conditioned to blindly follow because externalities appeared to allow easy room for them. These thought models were mostly fallacious because they were inflexible. Un-learning had side-effects. Agitation being one of them. For a while after I started to feel the effects of un-learning, I was agitated because answers to why and how I fell for entirely irrational (extreme) models (/theories/arguments) in the first place (earlier, in life) made little or no sense. They were attached with questionable biases. (Questionable biases, fed to us by social constructs or extremely religious people.)

Thanks to the abovementioned subject, now, every time I'm asked for opinions on matters that elicit extreme emotion, I ask myself,

"Why am I so passionately against or for it?"

"Why is anyone so passionately against or for it?"

I question the matter using the model I was conditioned to use and sometimes use against the subject himself. It's become a tool to know when to trust his or anyone else's opinions and when to not. Also a tool to beat his argument using a construct he understands best (the only one he follows). 

The new thought model endowed my brain with not just rationality but a good sense of what matters, what doesn't, what's worth lending ears to and what isn't, as a consequence of it, which brings us to the initial theme of the post. Focus. ("The Attic Theory of the Brain", How to *pick* matters that deserve only simplistic treatment. )

Thanks, A.