Category: How the mind works

Weird unrehearsed performance anxiety dream

This morning, I had a strange dream. What with attending a couple of recent song performances given by GodDaughter2, my subconscious somehow persuaded itself that I was also having to do some singing, in front of a similarly discerning audience. But of course I had no idea what I was supposed to be singing. Also, my singing is ridiculous, and it has been ever since my voice broke. Nobody sane would gather into an audience to hear it. Nevertheless, there I was, on a stage, waiting to perform, with three other actual singers, totally clueless. So far so ordinary. A classic unrehearsed performance anxiety nightmare.

At this point, however, a slightly more conscious layer of my subconscious deduced, in an actually quite relaxed manner, that this was an unrehearsed performance anxiety nightmare. At which point, it told me to look the audience straight in their eyes, and I said words to the following effect: “This performance may seem like it’s going to be a dream for you, but actually, it’s really a nightmare. My nightmare. And I’m not having it. I’m not going to do any performing, and I am not going to feel bad about this. I’m out of here.” And I was. I left the stage, and all those present just had to deal with it.

At this point it got strange. Instead of me waking up, the dream carried right on. The media decided to take an interest. There were TV crews interviewing the other performers, the ones who had actually been doing some rehearsing. What was that about? Who was that bloke? It was quite a drama. As it would be, if a performer made a speech like the one my subconscious and I had just made. I tried to hide behind a door in the room where all this media frenzy was unfolding, but the media spotted me and advanced towards me. Only then did I wake up.

What did this mean? What was my subconscious telling me? The usual unrehearsed performance anxiety nightmare seems to say: rehearse better. This revised version seemed to say: relax. But relax about what, exactly?

They say that if you have a weird dream, then if you just write it down, as best you can, or, if you are the picture-drawing sort, if you draw yourself a picture, then whatever message your brain was trying to get noticed in another part of itself is from then on regarded as having been noticed, and the weird dream does not return. What matters is not the accuracy and quality of what you write or draw. Simply making the effort is enough.

It feels to me like this was something to do with getting old. Getting old means that you just get less bothered about things generally, and unrehearsed performance anxiety nightmares in particular. Time was when you worried about such things. Now, you just bugger off out of there. If others object, that’s their problem.

Also, if you think this is a bizarre blog posting, … well, you know, ditto.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Jordan Peterson dating site?

For over a year now, I have been thinking that Jordan Peterson is a fascinating individual. When he did that Cathy Newman interview and got truly famous, I thought that this was a significant historical event. Among other things, I started thinking that he will raise the birth rate in the West, by urging its young citizens to be more ready to undertake the responsibilities of parenthood.

So, I found this comment, buried in lots of on-topic comments about this rather good interview of Jordan Peterson by Radio 3’s Philip Dodd, fascinating. Fascinating as in: proves me right. Right as in: a bit more right than before, not a lot but a bit.

Totally offtopic: is there a Jordan Peterson dating site for people who know about him?

Know about him as in: like him, agree with him, are fans of him. But despite being a bit badly expressed, this is surely a highly significant question. Well, I think so.

I just googled “jordan peterson dating site” and got some related stuff, but not any actual dating site. But that doesn’t prove there isn’t one, and in any case, if there now isn’t one, there soon will be.

I have just fixed for my Last Friday of the Month meeting on July 27th to be on the subject of Jordan Peterson. The speaker will be Tamiris Loureiro.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Selfie with hats

Indeed:

Taken by me in, I’m pretty sure, Earlham Street, which is one of the spokes that converges on Seven Dials.

The mirror is presumably there for people to see how potential purchases look on them. But my first thought when I saw the mirror was: Is that for encouraging people to take selfies? And I was happy to oblige.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The selfie hair pat

Yes, one of the more endearing things that lady photoers and their companions do just before photoing themselves is pat their hair:

Next time you see a lady taking selfies, watch out for this. Chances are she’ll oblige. It never makes any difference, but they almost always do it.

I took those two photos at Piccadilly Circus yesterday afternoon. I like the scaffolding. Not good enough to be worth photoing in its own right, but a nice background to those hair-patters.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Conjecture and refutation

One of my favourite public sculptures in London goes by the official name of Assembly. This, or perhaps it should be “these”, stand outside of the Woolwich Arsenal, on the south side of the river, downstream of the centre of London.

I photoed these militaristic characters a while back. Here is how they look, in their local context:

I did a posting (LINK TO THE OLD BLOG) here about them.

Here is one of the photos I showed in that posting:

That’s actually the inside of the head of one of these men, but your eye is telling you that this is a regular head, rather than any sort of concaveness. Yet concaveness is what it is. Your brain insists on telling you it’s a regular head, and you can’t successfully tell it any different.

Here’s another of these head-shaped holes, and this time it is a lot easier to see what is really going on, because there is a bit of context. Also present is a spider’s web, visibly flat, which couldn’t be if the head was sticking out like a regular head.

And now here is another photo which makes everything clear, by turning the head entirely black:

No chance, therefore, for the brain to misinterpret what’s going on.

The reason I was reminded of these sorts of optically illusional images is that I am currently reading this book, which is about how the brain in particular sees things, and in general makes sense of things. This was recommended by Alastair James, commenting on this earlier posting.

The point being that it isn’t just the brain that “makes” all this sense. The process of “making” sense takes place at all levels within the brain/nervous system. Your retina, for instance, is already prejudiced, so to speak, in how it looks at things.

Put it this way. The phrase that has kept on rattling around in my head while I’ve been reading this book is the title of another book, by Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. We don’t just passively soak up information, and then only a bit later “make” sense of it. Our sense organs are all the time imposing intelligent guesses upon what we are experiencing.

That summary probably isn’t that good. But I’ve only on page 40 and I’ve been finding it pretty hard going.

The last photo above reminds me of the picture in this Samizdata posting that I did a year ago.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Maybe not such a smart idea

I was attracted to Nick Bryant’s Twitter Feed by this Tweet, which someone on my Twitter Feed had flagged up. And that got me looking at other Nick Bryant Tweets.

In one of these, Bryant alludes admiringly to this quote:

“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

Which Bryant calls “smart”. And it does sound quite smart.

But think about this a bit more. What this says is that in every room with several people in it, one of them shouldn’t be there.

If everyone followed this advice, social life would collapse. The smartest person in each room would keep leaving, and then the second-smartest, and so on. And the leavers would be frantically searching for rooms with smarter people in them. But the smartest people in those rooms would also have to leave, and eventually they’d be the smartest. And so on. Madness.

Here’s my plan. If you like the company you are in, stick around. If you really are the smartest person there, there’s still plenty you can learn if you have a mind to. And if you are actually teaching everyone else, well, what’s so wrong with that?

The truth is that most people are smart about some things and stupid about a lot of other things. Which means that actually, the “smartest person” notion is inherently flawed.

The idea of the above quote is that we should always be learning things from others. But you can usually learn something from anyone, no matter how much smarter you may be compared to them, or think that you are.

Further thought: If you are in a room where you think you are the smartest person, and that everyone else is stupider than you, well, maybe you should get out of there and spare these people your company.

I have in mind the meeting I hosted last night, where everyone was smart, or so it seemed to me. About whatever each of us was smart about.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photos of Oscar

My friends in Brittany have a new cat: Oscar. (He replaces this cat.)

I, of course, took many photos. I like these ones:

And I like this one best of all:

Oscar has reached the stage in life where he is still a kitten in his behaviour, but not any longer in his appearance. Sort of a cat teenager.

Oscar has a very short attention span, and is currently programmed to check out everything he sees, like some obsessively exploratory robot. He sees a lot and he keeps on seeing something else.

So, for instance, you click your fingers at him to initiate some sociability, and he sees that, and runs towards you, but then, while still on his way towards you, he sees something else behind you, and carries right on towards that, after only the most perfunctory acknowledgement of your fingers, in which he has already lost interest several tenths of a second earlier. Or he has simply forgotten why he is in motion, and he just carries on. Very strange.

But as he calms down, he will presumably start to treat people more in the way they like to be treated. When I took an afternoon nap, he also fancied a nap and had his on top of me. But, had there been a more satisfactory household appliance, like a warm fire, he might well have preferred that to curl up next to that. It didn’t seem personal, just a matter of comfort.

But I still liked him. Cats are just so likeable, whether they are actually being likeable, in their own minds, or not. All they have to be is non-objectionable and not too scared to check you out.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The internet is no longer a nice place

I remember when the internet was nice. My part of it, the blogosphere, was nice, anyway. Every blogger, no matter what he thought about things, was a comrade. Every commenter, ditto. In those magic few years from about 2001 until about 2008 at the latest, when a whole generation of people the world over found themselves short of cash, the internet was a nicer, more trusting place than it is now. Since then, less and less. Now, the internet is not to be trusted further than it can be spat, and it can’t be spat at all, can it?

Which is why, when I go on holiday and leave my flat unattended, I tend not to broadcast the fact on this blog, by posting postings which are clearly from this or that holiday location.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: broadcast? This blog, a broadcast? Well, no, not to regular humans. But to all those cash-strapped desperadoes out there, it is a potential opportunity.

I don’t know if there are any internet creatures who spend their time working out, from blog postings and social media postings, that this or that person has left his home unattended, and then selling lists of such trusting persons on to people who might be able to do something bad about that, but this is not a chance I now care to take. I prefer only to be telling you about photo-expeditions after I am back home.

Also, as you get older, you get more easily scared. The less you have left to lose, the more you fear losing it. This may not make calculational sense, but does make evolutionary sense. The young need to be willing to take risks, to be willing to bet everything for the sake of their gene pool. The old have less to offer in such dramas. Or something. What do I know? Anyway, whatever the reason, we oldies get more timid as we grow older.

So yes, I was on holiday last week, in Brittany, and then yesterday, on the way home from there, I was in Paris, as I yesterday reported once I had got home.

I took enough photos while in France to last me a month of blogging, and I expect about the next week of postings here to be about nothing else. Here is just one photo from my travels:

That was my first view, again, this time around, of Quimper Cathedral, seen through the rather sunglassesy front window of my hosts’ car, on what was already quite a dreary afternoon, the day after I arrived, Sunday April 29th. Quimper Cathedral – to be more exact, one of its towers – was responsible for the timing of this visit. I’ll tell you more about that in a later posting.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A missed opportunity

I really like this photo I took, a couple of years ago; of a poster featuring the Wheel with its top sliced off; and behind it the actual top of the actual Wheel

However, another version of this photo might have been even better. If I had gone closer to the poster, and put the top of the actual Wheel right on top of the poster, that might have been truly impressive.

But I distinctly remember thinking at the time that what with the road being full of traffic, this might have meant a long wait waiting for a gap, and what with me already having had a long day and wanting to get home, so I said to myself: I’ll come back later.

But by the time I did come back later, the poster had gone.

If you see a photo, take the photo: Immediately.

One of the categories I have assigned to this posting is: How the mind works. But this was more a case of: How my mind didn’t work.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

When rain looks like snow

Some days ago, on a day when the weather was undecided about whether to be sunny weather or rainy weather, and was switching between both, I caught site of a roof near to my home. Later, I could not decide which of the four photos I took to show here, so here are all of them:

As to why I show them, well, see my title, above.

Usually; you want your camera to show what is really going on. But this time, I enjoy its confusion. If I did not tell you that this was wetness on those tiles, reflecting the sun, you would surely reckon that whiteness to be snow, or frost.

The human eye knows what it sees, so at the time I knew at once what this was. My camera merely saw what it saw.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog