Mind & Brain (Psychology)

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

This is a common delusion about stuttering. I thought it had by now been established beyond reasonable doubt that stuttering is caused by a physically malfunctioning part of the oesophagus/ sound box/ whatever. As is routine with things for which there is no known (or practical) cure, stutterers are assumed to be psychologically-damaged in some way.

However it is true there are a number of ways to ameliorate the condition. Singing, for example, is rarely affected. 'Interrupting the brain patterns/flow' is another technique taught to stutterers. Or 'Relax and start again' as we speech therapists put it.

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

I am presently watching a bailiff negotiating with a female football agent over a debt of £200,000 she owes a Premiership footballer. He (the bailiff) has quite a severe stammer. This would appear to be a handicap in verbal negotiations but maybe not in this case. The party of the other part hasn't much choice but to wait patiently while her options are outlined on account of the stutterer just having clamped her car on the driveway.

More generally, a stutter is both bad (it severely diminishes the sense of menace that is part and parcel of the bailiff's armoury) but also good (it forces the plaintiff into a 'human' relationship with the bailiff, something not often achieved).

I did wonder, pace Pete, whether he was employing his brain to vary the stutter--that would be most advantageous--but I don't think he can. Though he might stop referring to 'two hundred and fifteen thousand pounds and seventy-nine pence' quite so often.

[Pete Jones]

Questions...

?? Mind ?? -- The ability to watch a television show or movie in any fictional genre and forget that these are actors, that there's a camera crew and various people present, and that none of it is real. All the while you are engrossed, despite the knowledge.

?? Brain ?? -- When you notice some flaw of writing or editing and are forced to remember that there are camera crews etc etc and that none of it is real.

Vice versa?

[Mick Harper]

This is not bad at all. I can't watch anything on stage because I cannot rid my brain of the knowledge these are British thesps who could no more win a War of the Roses than I could. Stick the same production on the telly and my brain says, 'Pay attention, sunshine, this is how it was.'

Clearly we award our brain a permanent pass to experience events on our behalf, no questions asked. But every now and again our mind cuts in to register we're witnessing a simulacrum. The average viewer says to the lady wife, "I wish they wouldn't cast black actors as Plantagenet princelings, it's most off-putting." "You mustn't upset yourself, dear, remember what the doctor said." And returns sullenly to enjoy the action.

The AE-ist reaches for his notepad and scribbles 'Discuss woke at RSC on AEL. Change wife/doctor.'

[Mick Harper]

So, we have established that the brain rejects all new, complex ideas by reflexive action but the question that now arises is what the brain does with the information. Rejecting it is not the same as not having it.

In this respect, the brain is different from a computer rejecting unfamiliar code. (Is that a fair comparison?)

[Mick Harper]

Did you notice something depressing about the Newcastle/ Villa game yesterday? No, you didn't, which is depressing.

Some club colours are, of their nature, dull. Black and white stripes for example. Claret, for another. Nothing wrong with that. In itself. But when black-and-white stripes play claret, you get twenty dull (visually) people kicking a ball about. Your brain finds it difficult to register ten men going manfully at a different set of ten men despite your mind knowing they are. (Or it may be the other way round.)

So take another look and you will find out why you were so unaccountably out of sorts watching it despite it being quite an entertaining match.

[Mick Harper]

A quite different example occurred on the same day. The AFL Championship game was played in Denver (who played in day-glo orange shirts). Their opponents, the New England Patriots, were in all white--usually the brightest of all combinations against an emerald green background.

Not when it started snowing and the pitch turned into a white morass. The Denver quarterback could see his guys to throw the ball to but not the Patriot ghosts who intercepted his last throw and won the game.

[Mick Harper]

Did you know that multitasking is impossible? The brain just doesn't work that way. I'm sure there are all kinds of arrangements when you are doing one thing in a setting normally associated with something else. Or doing one thing interspersed with doing another thing. Or--and I think this what they mostly mean--doing something enjoyable when you are pretending to do something unenjoyable.

The way I have come to this conclusion is by watching telly. I frequently find myself woolgathering while ostensibly watching something of great interest and with seemingly rapt attention. But here's my trick. I never watch anything 'live', always on some kind of tape delay. So I press the dubry a few times, watch it again and discover I have not taken in a single thing.

The same is true of all live media--classroom lectures, the cinema, the theatre, people just talking to you. Most spend their lives missing significant stuff and with no recourse. It's not only lost forever, you don't know what it was. You don't even know you've missed anything half the time. And that's before you take 'careful ignoral' into the equation--the bits your brain deliberately turns off because it's too important.

Not me, bub. I don't go in for any of the above.