We do a lot of work convincing ourselves that we are smart, that we know a great deal, that others should perceive us as intelligent, and it’s all an elaborate farce. In truth, what we actually do most is to convince ourselves that we don’t know, are not equipped to know certain parcels of cognitive real estate. This describes a conflict, perhaps the most basic of human conundrums.
We do this to ourselves, tugging psyche in opposing directions. We don’t question it, assuming it to be a given, and in so doing we cut ourselves off from banquets of reality, whole realms of understanding that could be ours to savor but that are declared off-limits to our quest for knowledge.
How do I know this? I observe. I watch myself and others actuate this silly mechanism again and again and yet again, denying ourselves sweeping vistas of vision. You and me and him and her and they. All pronouns apply. Intelligent though we might be, every one of us succumbs to this stupidity.
How did I come upon this fact? I watched. I figured it out. To wit:
Any action that I determine to take will foment a fusillade of thoughts that tend to sabotage intention. If I want to add 564 and 783, my brain pops up with, “Girls aren’t good at arithmetic.” If I try to remember the name of the man I met at church last Sunday, my brain snaps to the reminder that I’m getting old and am sure to be getting forgetful. If I fumble a dinner plate, it would be super if I could just sweep it out of the air, but I must wait until my brain gets finished disputing my ability to make the catch and sends a signal to my hand to grab it.
There is a magic moment that exists between the plate falling and the brain’s conscious decision to do something about it. Cognitive function just isn’t fast enough. The plate hits the floor. The autonomic nervous system, however, is perfectly capable of stepping into that magic moment, telling the hand to reach for the plate, even as it is falling, and in the same fluid instant, plucking it from the inevitability of destruction. I don’t understand scientifically how this works, but I know it has saved many a dish in my kitchen. Surprisingly, even as most other functions are slowing, I am still catching Corelle as it hurtles to oblivion.
Understanding this to be a verifiable phenomenon, I have been motivated to study and utilize it in my own behavior. I have never been good at names and faces. Since I am indeed a visual learner with language skills verifiably intact, this deficit presents a puzzler. Observing my thought process led me to an interesting discovery. When presented with a human face, my first response, the one that clogged the magic dish catching moment, was the thought, “I can’t remember faces.” In every instance, I was wasting the magic moment wherein I might have effortlessly linked the name and the face. Based on this observation, I formulated an hypothesis: The lag time that exists between autonomic perception and purposeful cognitive response is predictable and can be put to use to improve memory and performance.
Since 2007 I have been watching way too much cable news trying to parse American culture. I have watched hundreds of talking heads pontificate for way too many hours. No notes. Just watched and listened. Usually when a face would flash on the screen it was several seconds before the name and mojo of the speaker would appear onscreen. I decided to utilize my magic moments and see what would happen. Internalizing Nike, I told myself, “Just do it”. When a face appeared, I refrained from telling myself “you can’t”; I just spoke the name. The amazing result was that I did know those people’s names and faces and could match them up amazingly well for a geek with a suspected learning disability.
The next thing to do was to examine my learning process both past and present. From the time I could prattle letters and numbers, I was convinced that only a limited amount of information could be stored inside my little blonde pigtailed noggin. I guarded my ROM’s capacity, refusing to memorize what I regarded as extraneous. What possible use could be found for adding numbers, or worse still, multiplying them? I would never have learned my times tables had a savvy teacher not taken away my library privileges until the deed was accomplished. The problem was so bad that it was only in the seventh grade at boarding school that I began sneaking down into the first grade classroom during the wee hours and using baby flash cards to memorize addition and subtraction facts by flashlight.
My parents were complicit in this farce. Mommy told me from the start that girls weren’t good at arithmetic, so I shouldn’t fret over it. When I asked my dad for help with addition facts, he showed me his all-time-best method for counting on my fingers. Starting with the larger numeral he said to then digit count up through the second number to achieve the sum. I employed that method until I invented a unique process for counting up visualized dots, unique to every numeral. The number one had one dot at its base. The number two had two dots, one at each end of its base. Each number sported its commensurate number of dots positioned for ready visualization, the larger ones distributed in domino patterns.
All this functioned marginally, earning me B’s but denying me the A’s I wanted. I had created a monster–a big ugly secret. Guarding that secret became a knot of anxiety centered in my gut. It moved in and took over my way of seeing the world of performance, like a cancer eating ability to sing, play an instrument, speak before an audience, and of course doing arithmetic spontaneously in the presence of others. While as a child soloist I had sung before large audiences, I abdicated that spotlight and became one of a gaggle of choir sopranos. I had once played the piano with remarkable dexterity and expression, but eventually gave up solo recitals altogether.
While arithmetic was ever my bane, conceptual mathematics tantalized me with its beautiful mysteries. During the early grades, I spent time on the potty tearing up squares of toilet paper into ever diminishing progressions that approached but never achieved zero. I marveled at the fact that each unit alternated between being a square and being a rectangle. There was surely some truth lurking in the diminishing and alternating shapes. It was like standing between two mirrors and trying to count the images that replicated to infinity. In the second grade I discovered the fun of walking to school using every available hypotenuse, odd since I had not yet met Pythagoras.
Then came Algebra, and I fell in love. Algebra was letters–friendly letters. Numbers were involved, but peripherally. I was the duck; Algebra was the water. An elegant proof could bring tears to my eyes. It was time to make those A’s, but of course I got tangled up in the under-drawers of my arithmetic anxiety. It slowed me down and added a boat-load of fear to the mix. I was stuck in the purgatory of being a pretty-good math student. One day my teacher provided a life-changing insight, removing the pressure of performance. He put an equation on the board and announced, “No one will be able to do this, but I’m letting you people try it just for fun”. Silence. All the straight A students sat pondering as I walked to the board and chalked the entire solution. The teacher smiled and said, “I always suspected there might be more to you.” So I accepted myself as retarded at arithmetic but promising at mathematics.
That quandary haunted me through thirty-five years of a BS degree, and a career, though admittedly checkered, in engineering. I was a rip roaring CAD jock and inventor, but never if somebody was watching. Now it’s all over, and I am free to investigate the weirdness. I have learned not to believe people when they say “You can’t do that,” “What will people think?” “But you’re only a girl.” and the absolute worst, “You’re just a little old lady.” I have learned to use those magic moments. My job is to “just do it” and to pass that winning algorithm on to my progeny along with my still functioning set of Corelle.
Could it be that all of us start out as bloomin’ geniuses but are selectively dissuaded from flowering into our promise? What if Mozart had been told at the outset that musically he was not all that special? What if Einstein had suspected that he was not the brightest? True he wasn’t super slick in advanced math and had to get help from his old professor detailing his insights on relativity, but that didn’t stop him. He caught a lot of flak from the learning establishment, advancing only to “clerk” in a Swiss patent office, where he took his flying leap into immortality. He wallowed in the art of the thought experiment, spending most of his waking hours adrift in their possibilities. Perhaps Albert wasn’t the smartest, but he never fell into the rotten habit of asking, “What if I can’t?”
morethanenoughtruth 