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| Image: Instagram @1947PartTwo |
It was 1991.
And our school had a silver jubilee celebration.
Many students had prepared their performances for this mega day.
And many more students had prepared their performances...
...ahmmm! in their imagination!
(side note: as children and perhaps as humans, in our imaginary world, we create lots of fiction
...where we outperform or do something heroic and get lots of applause, or a photo-frame-notice by the one we want to impress).
I was quite prolific in these imaginations.
Anyways,I distinctly remember one of the leading student figures (a senior).
He was to dance with his group.
He was wearing a super-pristine white shirt, black pant, and a bouncy hair-do
(hmm! he had bouncy hair anyways, but he had done something to augment it that evening).
And he was carrying a very attractive thing in his shirt pocket.
Woah!!! It was a pocket disco light.
You can imagine....a pocket disco light in 1991???!!!...that was super-sonic-woah!!!!
That !!!
...that was the attraction of the evening.
Everyone kept noticing and talking about it.
And this sort of "noticing or detecting something unique",
or what neuroscience calls "salience detection network in brain", was so so so hyperactive that day.
And i could list several instances of so many of fellow students,
who would bring stuff in school over the years,
and we would get raptly frozen thinking about it for days.
Well! It turns out that this salience detection network plays out in various ways in later life....and even to this day.
One of the jobs of this salience detection network is to scan,
for various kinds of threats in the environment.
A story for another day,
as to how this then goes on a hyper drive/detecting threats where there are none (what science calls as false positives).
Or connecting too many dots and overfitting them for being a threat. And sometimes this is over done.
We experience concern-fatigue or crisis-fatigue (((like many persons are facing in the current pandemic))).
And then we sort of have various coping strategies.
One of the coping strategies is called "deflect".
Deflecting it to all sorts of consumption or activities...binge eating, or content binging or simply blabbering to self or others,
or what Psychologist Freud called immersing oneself into forms of expression or art.
(((side note: these immersions when goes under the reflection knife, won't remain deflections...; also the fact that human life has so so so many different incompleted or unmet needs of self and others,
it could become overwhelming for an unpracticing and unreflection human being))).
But it seems that,
when there is adequate scanning for immediate threats done to a certain degree,
this network then turns on in some weird ways.
It could be easy to understand the following.
The salience detection would scan for sensory inputs and qualify whether something is familiar or not.
Once it is familiar (1/2/3/4), it would have a certain pre-defined reactions or response (habits/bias driven or paved).
Once it is unfamiliar (5/6/7/8), it would get into a quick risk detection mode.
Once the risk is negligible to manageable (avoidable for time being),
it would scan for "interesting" elements in them or go back to forms of "deflections".
(((side note: there are further nuance to this but for another day)))
Oh No!!!
We have come too far.
This chain of thought leads to some interesting places.
But that for another day.
For now, let's go back to connecting it to the salience detection network.
So, we saw in the earlier chain, that there is this way which we handle the "familiar".
Our daily life involves various interactions with people, things, situations and experiences.
The weird or wicked about "familiar" is that sometimes there is indeed the coming across of the "familiar".
But sometimes we self-deceive.
We overfit the unfamiliar or misfit the unfamiliar as "familiar".
Or because we are too exhausted or lazy or uncreative or helpless or hopeless,
we deal with the "unfamiliar" with the strategies of dealing with the "familiar".
This has the potential to land us in exponentially high challenges in the future.
And this is even more inflammable in current times...
...with the pace and scale of changes,
and the potential for a lot of existential threats looming over humanity in the next decade.
So, what can one do?
What can one do to strike a balance between the "familiar" and "unfamiliar"?
What can one learn from in order to understand the "familiar" a bit better?
There are different ways.
Let's look at some of them.
I remember watching a Bruce Lee movie in 2002.
A bunch of newbies had joined to get trained from a master.
Newbies being newbies, they erred!!!
And the punishment???!!!
Well...cleaning the entire campus!!!
But that's not all.
Cleaning it with a toothbrush!!!!
The central idea was to use "chore".
Use the rabbit-hole of a daily chore to deeply know and align one's deeper self (thinking, feeling, saying, doing).
Another short incidence!
I guess this was 1997.
I was watching Indian Musical Reality Show "Sa Re Ga Ma".
In Indian Classical music, there is a particular render called "harkat" in music.
When the singer riffs on the original song in a slightly different manner.
I was listening to Sonu Nigam sing a famous song, but with a harkat this time.
And I noticed him doing this many times over the years.
And other singers too later on.
This was perhaps my first introduction to "improvisation".
This is what Harvard Psychology Prof Ellen Langer calls "actively noticing the new" or "active micro-tweakiing".
Pick up anything you do throughout the day.
Especially the ones that come out of your habit or bias.
(((side note: biases are to mind what habits are to behavior))).
Combing hair, buttoning the shirt, reaching out for coffee, or walking....anything !!!
Absolutely anything!!!!
And just try to do them slightly differently.
You can simply switch between slow-fast way of doing it.
Or moving in a different direction or ways.
If you are able to develop this as a practice over time,
doing this would strengthen the muscles of "awareness", "focus",
"re-relating to the chore" and if you are lucky then you would emerge with lots and lots of insights over time.
This is what Swami Sukhobodananda calls the "adbhuta rasa" (the art of awe or wonderment).
To be able to hold what we have known for long or doing for long.
And seeing the unobvious within the obvious.
Many many many sages and scientists have followed these simple techniques but with rigor and sincerity.
Not only that,
over time one develops a better relationship with their "doing" or "action", and better self-created strategies for engagement at work and interactions.
We are seeing the dark sides of not doing these.
Being played out in the intense "polarization" or "fights" across the world.
This is what Canadian Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke calls the inability to draw a distinction between "salience detection" and "relevance realization".
Unfortunately we have "over-flexed" and "over-strengthened" our muscle for detecting and reacting to "hyper-normal stimuli"...and that's why we find ourselves being sucked into "unending scrolling down on social media feeds", or "content binging" or "getting fooled or awayed by sensational journalism or activism", or "repetitive bad forms of argumentations" and more.
His point being that unless we go down the path of self-awareness based inquiry into our thinking and speech and action,
we would fall for these hyper-normal stimuli coming from all directions.
And would not be able to map them for "relevance" (deeper purpose or meaning).
Finally, this is what we believe the most revered innovation teacher, Clayton Christensen, meant.
When he was referring to getting caught in the organizational "bureaucracy".
Where individuals and teams lose sight of their daily SOP or chores or assumptions.
And do not question or inquire deeply about them
And soon we find, a start-up comes along.
Who have questioned these assumptions.
And have built something on it.
Our habits and biases have become an overused, sort of "un-maintenanced or unassessed car" of our existence.
They are taking us places.
But, not the ones where we want to be mostly
(hmmm!!! sometimes they do, but we do not realize the deeper significance until later or late)
Chores (driven by habits and biases) are a great laboratory.
Chores require archaeology like approach.
Chores pay more.
Sometimes being "gold mines" or better still sometimes being "enlightenment mines".
