Thread by @CZEdwards

#TailorSnarkWars

MetaBattle: Self-perception & Cognition

I. Our own brains are out to get us
II. Dementia comes for us all
III. Narcissism is an underlying feature/bug of consciousness
IV. Try not look like a 40 year old vampire even if you are

This is gonna be a continuing series, because it’s complex. How we think about fashion is just one aspect of how we think and perceive. I’ve been working on this for a while.

It’s foundational to cognition.

Per usual, I’m just articulating what you already know.

Battle I: Your brain is out to get you

My day job is head candler, shrink, psych, meddler. My primary area of focus is PTSD; I’ve been 90%+ research for 15 years, I take very few clients, I don’t ever want to be in wide-aspect private practice again.

I know I’m a good researcher - methodical, precise, accurate, good with numbers, good at asking the right questions.

I don’t think I’m a good therapist, because I’m impatient, have a short attention span and I hate doing 101 over & over & over.

(I have never told a client to fuck off & get over themselves. I’m pretty sure my human socialization & training as a therapist is strong enough to keep it out of my voice & body language... but in the best interests of people not suffering, let’s not test it, okay?)

Your 4th shrink sends you to me after you’ve graduated out of their care. You and I can dig into the details of why the faint aroma of Old Spice plus the sight of tube socks worn pulled up puts you in panic mode, and how we can hack your brain into Not Doing That.

(Wait, you didn’t know you should graduate from therapists? Yep, about every 2-3 years. You should grow & a good therapist will move you on. The Freudians who kept people on the couch for decades? Grifters. That was a scam to pay for their kid’s tuition, the boat & summer place.)

I’m not the person you go to because you feel general anxiety or sleep poorly or get overwhelmed but can’t identify why. You’re better off with a therapist practicing in the wild because there’s a lot of training of your own brain you have to do in those early years of therapy.

And frankly, I suck at teaching that.
Intellectually, I realize that you’re a 1st grader when it comes to understanding what your brain is doing & need to learn to read Captain Underpants.
Still doesn’t change the fact that I’m teaching a graduate seminar on Regency toilet humor.

Also, you see one therapist every fortnight, while (were I in practice) I’d see 25 people having mostly the same problem every week. The relationship is asymmetrical, which makes it repetitive for me, boosts my impatience & makes me crankier than usual. (This? why we graduate.)

There are people who teach 1st grade for decades & are great at it. People who teach calculus and algebra I & II. And set theoreticians who have stopped doing arithmetic completely.

Same concept: I don’t teach elementary school, and I’m not great at HS level.

(It’s the worst customer service job ever - everyone returns a new iPhone that works 💯 if they’d just plug it in sometimes. But nobody does. They want new iPhones daily. That’s general practice therapy: nobody does homework & we can’t fail/fire a client who won’t work.)

Which is not to say I can’t give a 101 on Perception & how brains work. I can. Just don’t make me do it 25 times a week, with people who have had the class 6 times in the past 3 months & refuse to do the work because that would require acknowledging that they’re not perfect.

If you need this class again, please bookmark this thread. But be aware... teaching Remedial Self-Awareness makes me cranky and I am one cranky bitch anyway.

I will always ask if you did your homework, and if you didn’t, I’ll send you out to do it.

So...
Your brain lies to you all day long, from the moment you wake up until it puts you back in 8th grade algebra, with a giant erection, in front of the hottest person you’ve ever whacked off to, while you’re wearing the faded Under-Roos you outgrew in 3rd grade.

Your brain is a rat-fucking bastard & it hates you.

(Not literally. Brains don’t have intent; they’re not independent, but this is how it feels most of the time, so let’s use the metaphor.)

Consciousness requires a perception of triality (like duality, but 3), because you perceive that you are not your brain,

and you are not your body,

and your body is not your brain.

Consciousness requires this sensation of separation, or everything starts to break down.

(This used to be strict duality, but with the development of brain science, imaging & theory of mind, the triple nature of consciousness is becoming apparent. Watch this space; it’ll get interesting if we can keep the species alive long enough to get really good at psychology.)

And your brain hates that the conscious “you-mind” has some control of the body & the brain isn’t fully in the driver’s seat. But your brain also knows it dies without “you” & dies without the “body”, so it will do its best to keep all three of you alive... but it’s resentful.

So your brain is mostly out to sabotage “you” while ensuring none of you die. Your brain is also not interested in working hard, so it’ll keep you alive with minimum effort.

This is basic evolution: not survival of fittest, but survival of barely adequate & slightly less broken.

Your brain is a hacker, on a long-term, iron-clad contract. It can’t be fired, but it must produce something.

So it writes code.

It automates a ton of subroutines, then it lays on the floor and reads Wolverine/Thor hurt-comfort AU.

You can see how this might be a problem.

Especially if our hacker doesn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for testing the subroutines or updating them.

A bunch of this shit started as Tucows freeware; it’s got security holes everywhere & Russian keyloggers stealing passwords.

It’s not even Github good.

For the most part, however, this triality of mind-self/brain/body actually works in our favor. Mind over body is a handy trick when you’re in acute pain. In short term, we can willpower our way out of some fairly nasty brain-level chemical shit, like panic. It just doesn’t last.

The problem is our brains are fucking lazy & don’t update shit that was built to run on a 1960s AIX mainframe (aka homo erectus). We’re tooling along with far more processing power in our skulls, massive security holes in our network & the punchcard programming. We’re a mess.

(Yes, I’m a GenX shrink; I was one of the first gen of computer literate geeks in neuropsych because until computing got powerful & cheap enough, neuropsych was at best theory & mostly bullshit. My simultaneous skill sets? BASIC & transcendental meditation in 3rd grade...

...HTML & Piaget’s developmental theory in HS; SQL & behaviorism as an undergrad. Also, I’ve always dated geeks & married an R&D comp scientist. So yes, I use the metaphor of brain:hardware::cognition:software a lot. It’s a metaphor.)

Just as an example of the way your brain lies, let’s take sight. You’ve got a giant fucking blind spot in the middle of your vision where your optic nerve connects to your retina. Everything comes into your head backwards & upside down because that’s how lenses work.

The color of an object is actually everything except what you perceive (because it doesn’t absorb the light it reflects which hits your retina).Images come through a red haze b/c you’ve got capillaries all through your eye & it only updates the visual file about 3 times a second.

The rest of the time, both your brain & your eyes are busy winding the cat & frying the dishes. Not paying attention to anything — oh, and your brain edits out the fact that your eyes move a lot and don’t focus except 3 times a second.

(This is why most auto accident reports contain the phrase “came out of nowhere”. A FUCK of a lot can happen at 75 mph between those updates.)

Yet you see (if you do) the world in a functional way that lets you enjoy World of Warcraft, the MCU & twitter. You only notice the bullshit filters your eyes & brain erect when someone shows you a blue/black/white/gold dress or ...

...a rotating gif like this. (Can you make xer reverse? Now put xer back. Now google dancer optical illusion gif, go to image search, and see if you can get all of them spinning the same way.)

Hearing has a similar set of bullshit filters - Yanny vs Laurel. So does touch: cold things are NOT wet; hot things are NOT dry, but mostly, you will perceive cold as wet and hot as dry, to such a degree that cold-dry & hot-wet tend to trigger disgust/cognitive recoiling.

99% of the time, you’re happier that your brain lies to you in its resentful, lazy way. The subroutines we have work.
When they’re not challenged.

Which is why most people find people like me to be pains in the ass, because we insist that our perception of reality is bullshit.

That’s lesson 1: Your brain wants to fuck you up. It lies to you to keep you alive, but that means your perception, & therefore your memory, is as reliable as a ‘75 Ford Pinto in July of 2018. People who can accept this are cognitively MUCH healthier than people who refuse it.

Here endeth metabattle I: your brain is out to get you.

Next time, metabattle II: Dementia comes for us all.

Homework: play with optical illusions. Compare & contrast w/ friends on color perception & description. Dig in & get comfortable with your brain telling functional lies.