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 As I sat
the other night blogging, writing brief posts in between paying bills
and correcting student essays, with a baseball game on the potable TV
with the sound turned down and the legendary lost King Crimson album
on the speakers, Norma Yvone wanted to have a conversation. Fine. As
a progressive male, I fully accept the desirability of regular and open
communication between partners in a relationship. The problem was she
expected me to stop doing the other things in order to devote my undivided
attention to our conversation.
“You can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. When you
try to do so many things at once you end up doing all of them badly. That’s
why you do such a bad job vacuuming while you watch sports on TV.”
Be that as it may, I am utterly certain that my brain works BETTER when
it is working on several, or even many, things at once. Concentrating
on just one thing may work fine for the Dalai Lama, but in the real world
it is not behavior geared to survival.
Since reading John Lilly’s seminal
1967 paper “Programming
and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer” in college I have been
interested in analogies between computers and the human brain. Whatever
version of system software I am currently using, it was designed for multi-processing.
On the surface, I am fully aware of my surroundings and capable of seemingly
intelligent interaction with other people. But this occupies only
a small percentage of my available processing power.
Part of my mind, for example, is at all times thinking about my next
meal. It may be planning it, or imagining it, or actively lobbying
for pursuing it. Another part is thinking about why no food is
colored blue, and if it is true that an experiment proved that if you
give people perfectly healthy food in unusual or unexpected colors they will get sick.
While driving, I get my best ideas for blogging. I have narrowly
avoided many accidents as I try to just notes on the backs of envelopes
or the margins of periodicals with one hand and half an eye on the road. But
part of my mind, perhaps due to my felonious past, is always scanning
the horizon for cops (and not just when driving, this is a sixth
sense one never loses). Another part is continually composing and
erasing justifications and explanations to be used in case of an accident
that (hopefully) never happens. On the theory that if it DOES happen
you better have your story ready because in all the excitement you’ll
never be able to improvise.
In that vein, a substantial part of my brain, which in fact I would
seriously like to reduce, is constantly thinking of snappy comebacks
and rapier-like repartee to be used in conversations that have already
taken
place. Things I SHOULD have said. Conversely, I would like to increase
that portion of my brain working on making and accumulating money. Some
people’s brains seem to do this almost exclusively.
Not to mention Sex. If I am not playing some stupid mental game
like “The ten hottest babes in the Supermarket…” then at least some part
of my brain is thinking about sex with women I know, sex with women I
don’t know, sex with fictional women from literature, etc.
And
this entire phantasmagoric mental cacography has a soundtrack, composed
mostly of classic rock and industrial house imperfectly remembered and
mushed together as if by a demented DJ high on some psychedelic downer.
So don’t tell me to do one thing at a time, Norma Yvone. Now
please go over one more time everything you just said, I’m not sure I
really understand. Of course, I was LISTENING. I just need to hear
it again to decide what I really think…
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