July 29, 2007

• Perception, Boundaries, Annoyance, Preference, Comparisons

  Everything is a trap… unless it’s a test.  Of course, any general statement that begins, “Everything is…,” cannot be absolutely true… unless it is, but in this relativistic, finite, observable universe, nothing is absolute.  Beware of absolutes, and of absolution.  The only forgiveness that counts is one’s own.

  I told Greyfox this morning that I had blogged myself into a corner.  Here I am, floundering around, trying to get out of that corner and on with my story.  On Thursday, I posted a memoir segment about the first time my first husband dumped me.  Friday, in response to several comments expressing strong disapproval of the man, some of them using ad hominem fighting words, I did some explaining, “making apologies” in the old sense of that word, not expressing regret or sorrow, just attempting to explain the guy’s behavior in valid psychological and neurochemical terms without resorting to specious moralistic judgments. 

  Saturday, responding to comments on that, I indulged in one of the occasional semantical wordgames that give me some momentary satisfaction but don’t ever seem to adequately convey my meaning.  Today, faced with the choice between compounding the offense by addressing that issue, or ignoring the whole thing and getting on with my story, I opted not to choose, and decided just to ramble on with a metablog.

  The nature of perception has been an occasional topic of discussion recently here within my family and with a few online correspondents.  One well known fact about perception (known to those who study the subject, but largely unrecognized or not even considered by most people) is that we don’t see the actual things we are seeing (I will use “see” for perceive, but these ideas are valid for hearing, too, and sometimes for touch — and, FYI, I’m not addressing light waves, neural impulses, etc.).  What we see are the boundaries of things, the differences between things.  Shifts, for example, in the shading of a field of gray, can be so small and gradual that we won’t recognize any difference as it shifts.  Night can lighten gradually toward day and we may not see it changing, but suddenly something clicks and we recognize that it is different.  Charcoal is not the same as dove, but gray is gray.

  People who study these things have presented test subjects with various things to look at, and observed their eye movements.  If it’s a big circle, focus will move around its perimeter or jump from inside to outside.   Squares get the most attention at their corners, where the horizontal meets the vertical.  A broad field shading gradually from white on one edge to black on the opposite side will have the subjects’ eyes jumping back and forth from one extreme to the other, ignoring the middle.  I found an analogy to this trait of only “seeing” differences while working with PhotoShop recently.  A large image, 2048×1536 pixels, of simple objects with few divisions, is a much smaller file (less for our computers’ AI to see) than an image of smaller dimensions but with more edges and differences.

  So, what do we do, in our minds, as we perceive differences?  Usually, we compare.  Now I’m sliding away from perception into processing and thinking.  Much of this has to be hardwired survival stuff.  There are sound reasons for animals with a limited viable temperature range, for example, to compare a warm site for bedding down with a cold one, and to prefer the warmer one.  Likewise, that same animal, in a different time and place, may compare a hot sleeping site and a cooler one, and choose the cooler shade in preference to the hot sun.  Hot and cold; warm and cool; hot or cool; warm or cold:  the first pair are abstractions, absolutes, while the second pair represents the tolerable range between the extremes, and each of the last two pairs offers us an easy choice between extreme discomfort and a tolerable alternative. 

  But where, precisely, does warm shade over into cool?  We’ll have no difficulty distinguishing between hot and cold, but the question of whether something is warm or cool depends on fine distinctions and many variant factors.  How we perceive the temperature of a drink can depend on ambient temperature and whether the percipient has a fever or not.  The temperature of a warm drink would, if applied to air temperature, signify a hot day… or not, depending on the percipient’s acclimatization.  In New Mexico, when it is fifty degrees outside, people wear parkas.  In Alaska, fifty is t-shirt weather.  In cool Alaskan summer and warm Sunbelt winter, you can distinguish between the locals and the tourists by the clothes they wear:  differences, perceptible differences.

  It is natural to have preferences.  All mammals have preferences.  I have noticed that even tadpoles have preferences, but let’s keep it relatively simple.  Human preferences are complicated enough all by themselves.  Perhaps the one adjective most frequently applied to preferences is, “personal.”  I prefer to breathe clean air, but most of the domesticated primates on this planet tolerate polluted air to have what they perceive to be “advantages” or “comforts” of city life.  Many people even pay big bucks to pollute their personal air.  Around here, the cost of a carton of cigarettes is between fifty and sixty dollars now.  But here we are sliding out of the zone of preferences and into the area of addictions, another perceptible difference, but one that many people will try to deny because the word, “preference,” does not have the judgmental, pejorative connotation for them that “addiction” has.

  Ken Keyes reached me at a teachable time in my life with his advice to “upgrade addictions to preferences.”  It’s an ongoing process.  I still enjoy appreciative feedback on my work, but I’m no longer addicted to external validation.  I am a lot less economically insecure than I used to be, but occasionally I still get anxious when I think about the debts I owe.  Continually, I compare myself to how I have been and how I would prefer to be.  This works for me, works a whole lot more effectively in getting me to where I want to be than when I used to compare myself to other people.

  Of the many important life-altering lessons I learned from the junkies of Anchorage Family House, “comparing” is one of the most important.   Making  comparisons of better or worse, between oneself and another, regardless of on which side one placed oneself, was impermissible in that therapeutic community.  The community was 24/7 therapy for hardcore addicts, an alternative to incarceration.  It had been modeled on the highly controversial Synanon community, which was eventually disbanded, and on The Delancey Street Foundation, which is still growing and going strong.  Some readers may have noticed the Synanon Prayer in my left module.  It is there because I can relate to the aspirations it expresses, and because I feel I owe my life indirectly to Synanon and its radically confrontative brand of therapy.

  Rationalization, defensiveness, and denial were fundamental parts of the personality I had when I began spending a couple of hours each Thursday evening in a therapy group run, for social services and public safety workers, by Family House graduates.  My outlook on reality was so skewed that I now find it difficult to believe that I ever believed the things I then believed to be true.  Again and again as I have related my memories, I have referred to myself as insane, nuts, crazy.  It is true.  I was a hardcase, able to whip out an effective defense mechanism in an instant if my bent version of reality was threatened by an inconvenient truth.  There are innumerable known defense mechanisms, and probably at least as many undiscovered ones, but, by definition, none of them is healthy.  A defense mechanism is psychopathology and, by definition, pathology is unhealthy.  Anyone who believes it is healthy to deny the truth and fearfully guard an elaborate fantasy is sick and has chosen that belief in order to rationalize and deny his own sickness.

  Now, in my roundabout way, I have come around to covering “annoyance,” the last of the five words I put up there in my title so I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to say here.  I get annoyed when someone refers to a “healthy defense mechanism,” or a “positive addiction,” or some other semantically paradoxical, logical impossibility.  Then I get annoyed with myself for getting annoyed.  Eventually, I get around to forgiving myself and everyone else.  After that, I usually spend some more time thinking about and discussing psychopathology.  I know there is a lot of sickness in the world.  I also know that in the strictest sense it is not possible to draw a line and say that some of it is physical and some of it is mental.  There is too much interaction between body and mind for such delineations to be invariably valid.

  Everyone unconsciously affects his or her brain chemistry through thoughts and feelings.  Some of us consciously affect our brain chemistry, too.  Brain chemistry that is the result of genetics, nutrition, injury, infection, etc., affects our thoughts and feelings.  If it wasn’t such a complex web of interactions it would be correct to call it a feedback loop, but people call it that anyway.  I get annoyed at that sometimes, too.  It’s okay.  Annoyance is mild, and I always get over it easily and quickly.  Being annoyed is preferable to being enraged, terrified, alienated, defensive, depressed, coldly indifferent, or any of the other extreme emotional states I used to allow myself to dwell in.  I’m not addicted to annoyance.  I consider it a transitional state, a tenable position, a coolly warm alternative to the hot and cold pathologies I could be indulging.  Relatively speaking, being annoyed is actually pleasant and comfortable, for as long as it takes me to realize that that is where I’m at and get over it.

  

  • 7:59 pm
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