Sometimes I have reading cravings. Now, most of the time these are easy enough.
Like most of you, I go through phases. I will read mysteries of a certain type, for instance (cozies, or historical or sometimes – not often – procedurals) for months at a time, then suddenly be unable to face the idea of reading another one.
It is well known – because I was rather shocked and blogged about it – that I spent a considerable period of the beginning of the year reading regencies.
These sort of make sense. They’re usually diametrically opposed to whatever I’m writing at the moment, and the amount they’ll be memorable or absorbing is inversely proportional to my need for a vacation. I.e., if I’m reading a book whose title and author will be gone ten seconds after I set the book down, you can probably bet that I’m stressed and in need of, if not actually on vacation.
During the year from heck – six books due and homeschooling the younger kid – I read mostly Disney comics. (Stop laughing.)
All that is perfectly understandable.
But what do you call it when I start craving non fiction books of a particularly dry kind?
Well, it depends on the DRY book. For some reason biology manuals and dinosaur books are for me, personally, the equivalent of hot chicken soup and a nice warm bath for other people. If in addition to being extremely tired I’m also coming down with something, you’ll find me curled up in a corner reading books on the biology of some specialized marine life form, or the habits of the common ant. Yeah, there’s a reason. I became fascinated with that type of book at about eight, and spent many a happy childhood hour reading them. So they’re “cozy.”
But what about a sudden interest in… oh, revolutions. Or massacres? They’re no one’s definition of cozy. I also spent a whole year reading books about cults (I THINK I’m starting to get a glimmer on what that one is about.) Months reading about the history of chocolate. Months on the flu pandemic (back in 98, when it was hard to find stuff to read on line. I spent hours scouring all the bookstores I could get to.)
Then there’s the truly out of nowhere wild hares. It would make sense if you could say “oh, you stumbled on that book, liked it, and now are reading everything about that type of thing” but it’s not like that. It’s more I wake up in the middle of the night, and like someone would say “I feel like a crab patty” I go “what I could use RIGHT NOW is a good book on the building of medieval cathedrals” or “painters in Paris in the nineteenth century” or “medieval cities.”
All I can say is that after those years or months of reading on one subject, I’ll suddenly go completely cold on it. And then a few months or years later, an idea will come up for which that reading was essential.
Do the ideas come up because I read the books? Or as the craving set off by the nascent idea? Do ideas occur so deep in the subconscious that I don’t know they exist at all and they manifest themselves only as cravings?
I find that idea vaguely terrifying. It would seem to imply a life of the mind outside the mind, as it were. And yet it would fit the facts to an extent. Does anyone else get these non-physical cravings? What are your theories on the why of these?
According To Hoyt 
Yes, I get such cravings. But my theory was always just that I was weird, so that’s probably not real helpful to you ;)
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This is why “relevance” is a stupid concept in education. And maybe everywhere.
“New ideas” are really new connections. Fact A and Fact B are related, everyone knows that. Innovation comes from the realization that Fact A and Fact ZZ’ are connected, which hasn’t been noted before. The only person who can notice that is someone who knows both A and ZZ’, and ZZ’ very likely comes from a seemingly unrelated field or discipline. People who won’t study anything that isn’t “relevant” have no chance of ever learning ZZ’ and thus no chance of making the connection.
It seems to me that what the subconscious does for a living is to more or less randomly look for connections, testing whether this puzzle piece fits with that one. No? Pick up another. For most of us, that mostly involves whether or not a newly-noticed fact fits with getting fed, laid, or away from the saber-toothed tigers, but like any other human characteristic there’s a distribution. People whose subconscious processes include facts that aren’t relevant to dinner, sex, or predator avoidance are unusual, which is why scientists and writers are uncommon.
The subconscious issues directives to the conscious mind that it look for new puzzle pieces to sort, but, again, that’s mostly related to the first three of the four categories (things to eat, things to fuck, things to run away from, and rocks). People who include “rocks” in the list of things to process are unusual, but they’re the ones who innovate. Your impulses are the unconscious equivalent of finding a piece of the puzzle that looks like it might be sky, and going hunting for pieces that might also be sky and therefore might fit. The process itself is perfectly normal. Applying it to medieval cathedral building instead of whether or not something is good to eat is not, but you already knew you were a couple of sigma off the norm, right? As are we all.
Regards,
Ric
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I’ll agree with you Ric. It is the subconscious in action. You haven’t spotted the nascent plot involving building a medieval cathedral, but your subconscious has, and is stocking up on information.
I do the same thing. I’ll suddenly go nuts on something non-fiction, and next thing you know I’ve got something on the go that involves it. Like that book on forklifts I’m working on…
Wayne
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What Ric said. Or if you don’t like “rocks” how about “Oooooo, sparkly!” Could be innovators/writers/imaginative types just have brains like a ferret on Pixy Stix. (Sarah seems to have gotten inhibited somewhere along the line to think of it as a craving for crab cakes. ;) I just read 5 articles on subjects ranging from marijuana studies to global warming to communications among deep-sea squid before I read this one. Definitely on the “Oooo, sparkly!” side of things. >:}~
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I’m nervous about “exploring the subconscious”. Sometimes it could be like enter a dragon’s cave uninvited. You’ll find treasures but also find dangers.
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On a related note, I’m pretty sure the term “subconscious” is out of vogue now, but there is a growing body of evidence in neurology that there is no such thing as rational thought or even free will.
The decisions we make, from who to marry, to what to have for lunch on any given day, are all the product of direct stimulus response and we only create the rational explanation AFTER the fact to explain to ourselves why we did the things we did.
And what’s sad, is that these instinctive urges are utterly arbitrary. You’re brain has not been ruminating on some problem alone and come up with an answer. Nope. It’s just responding to the last thing it heard or saw.
I do a variety of simple tests with my students, priming them with images or certain words. Now, I really want to believe in free will, but when the results always come back the same, it really surprises me.
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I wrote about hat poppicock in neurology in Classical values some time back. Politically motivated science sucks. Seriously. There is free will. Talk to some working neurologists sometime. The no-free-will thing is GIGO.
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When you can prime a class with an image or a word and have 90% of them answer identically on a question that produces at best 50% conformity without the primed word, it can’t be exactly be called “poppycock”
Again, I’m a fan of free will, but it’s also clear there are a lot of workings of the human brain we are just beginning to understand.
And if you have a link to the Classical Values post I’d love to read it.
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Well Travis, my question to anybody who thinks humans lack “free will” is “do you take credit for your accomplishments or not?”.
If we lack “free will”, then we can’t take “pride” in our accomplishment because “we didn’t really do anything, it was just outside forces that did it via us”.
Of course, if we lack “free will”, then the arguments for or against the idea are meaningless because we are just saying words that outside forcing are making us say.
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@Travis Lee Clark I note you said “90% of them answer identically on a question” but what about the other 10%? See _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ by Charles MacKay. Same mechanism used by Hitler, Lenin, religions, cults, populist movements, etc. Not a lack of “free will” but a willingness to embrace herd-beast mentality; a choice to forgo independent thought and maturity, and revert to the needy, greedy child with a parent figure supplying all one’s needs and excusing all bad behavior so long as it serves the parent figure’s desires. I.E. simple peer pressure to conform. Were your non-conforming 10% rebels? nerds who can’t read a social cue? geeks who analyze everything from 16 directions and move in a 17th? Were your 90% the “normal kids” who usually do **what they think will please the teacher?**
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Thank you Deann. Same point I was trying to make but more thorough. Of course, Robert says in a primitive tribe where everyone was like me, they’d all starve. “Where’s berries I told you to pick?” “You told me to pick them. I decided to hunt, instead.” “you can’t hunt, you’re nearsighted.” “Ah, that shows you. I caught this!” “THAT is your toe.” “Ah! Bet it’s tasty boiled.”
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“Free Will” is a philosophical question ulitmately, so let’s not get bogged down in semantics. What we are talking about is how does the mind work, and the evidence is growing that it is a kluldgy thing that works more on stimulus/response and trial and error than on rational thought.
We are not nearly as rational as we suppose.
As for book recommendations. Start with Steven Pinker and go from there.
And no, the 10% are not the free thinkers in their nearly identical uniforms of black t-shirts body piercings, buddy holly glasses and ironic scarves. It’s just as likely the kinesiology mook with the baseball cap on backwards. These things can be demonstrated across the political and cultural spectrum. We just don’t understand how we think.
Also, people on this thread are taking this too personally. I have already said elsewhere that I find what this says about free will is troubling, and that I find determinism a terrible philosophy, but this isn’t a fluke or a stunt.
And since we’ve violated Godwin’s rule, I guess the conversation is over, but what I am talking about has nothing to do with popular delusions and propaganda or popular thought, but affects every decision we make, big or small. Do we all have popular delusions over our choice of a poppy seed bagel over a donut? I don’t think so.
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Here’s a quote of what I said earlier in another part of this thread just to clarify:
“BTW I’m not advocating, just informing, and admitting I’m troubled by what can be tested. I’m very uncomfortable with the direction neurology is going. The belief in free will spawned a lot of good things and the political ramifications of determinism are always bad, but it is becoming clearer that our brains are black boxes we just don’t understand.”
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Next time you get the itch for a locked-room mystery, you might scratch it with my story “The Aristotelian.” I’ll appreciate any opinions you might want to share.
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Travis, happened I posted this on Sarah’s FB group yesterday: http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdiscovermagazine.com%2F2011%2Fsep%2F18-your-brain-knows-lot-more-than-you-realize&h=8AQF9LRCIAQFks_xsAdUbNATaeltltmSc_Cibml1Rp4fguw
On the “eliminates free will” thing, before you decide that, define “free will”. My experience with my philosophy friends is that it’s a hard go without postulating an extra-physical source of “will”.
Put another way, if you decide based on factors you aren’t aware of, how would you be able to tell that’s NOT free will?
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Thanks Charlie,
All good points.
BTW I’m not advocating, just informing, and admitting I’m troubled by what can be tested. I’m very uncomfortable with the direction neurology is going. The belief in free will spawned a lot of good things and the political ramifications of determinism are always bad, but it is becoming clearer that our brains are black boxes we just don’t understand. One of my favorite phenomenons is the rise of motor control activity in the brain BEFORE you actual decide to run, fight, or do whatever. There are two possible answers. One, you don’t really decide to do anything, your brain has already decided for you, you just get informed of the decision later. That has huge implications on the concept of free will, but the other option is just as loopy. From the perspective of the certain schools of quantum mechanics, time is just an illusion. Therefore you have free will, but that increase in motor activity before you decide is the effect and not the cause of the decision. It just happens to run backwards in time.
And that makes my head hurt.
More importantly….SARAH HAS A FB GROUP?!! Can I join?!!
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Analogy time.
Modern computer processors have “prefetching” capability. As the program runs the processor is looking ahead, using any free cycles to retrieve instructions to be executed later, and storing them in an internal memory that’s much faster than reading from the main store. Since much of what a computer does is switch from one instruction track to another, a modern processor may have as many as eight small, fast internal memories for prefetched instructions, so as it looks ahead the instructions it will use are always available in fast memory.
Your brain does the same thing. When clues to danger or other necessity for action start arriving, the brain “prefetches” the necessary routines and starts setting up. If you then decide to take action, you don’t have to wait for, e.g., your adrenal gland to spool up — all the subsystems are “hot”, just waiting for instructions from your cerebral cortex.
If the danger passes without action being necessary, you get the shakes. That’s the “action” subsystems standing down, going back to a normal state of readiness and having to get rid of a lot of lovely biochemicals in order to do that.
There are several types of anxiety disorders, but they fall into two main categories: either the prefetch mechanism is too sensitive, responding to invalid clues, or the accumulated clues (which should be processed in parallel and sent to higher-order neurons for decision) aren’t being passed along, so the decision never comes. Either way, the subsystems for action response are kept in readiness, but the decision to use them never comes, and that eventually causes problems.
And modern neurology doesn’t deny free will. It declares that the free/determined dichotomy is false.
Regards,
Ric
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Ok, well let me tell you about a test I and many of my colleagues have done many times.
This is not scientific, but it can be done in a scientific double blind method and has been verified many, many times.
I do a simpler version of this test just to demonstrate to my students that they are unknowingly impacted by visual stimuli.
I come into class and just power up the projectors. Right of the bat they have a blank blue screen, but I can fake any blank empty screen with any color I choose. I do not mention the screen or draw any attention to it. I merely power it up and put it up there. I have a projection visual “mute” button, so they don’t see me setting this up, all they see is the colored screen and I say nothing about it.
Then I distribute a small handout with survey questions on it. The questions are largely meaningless, usually about some task or sometimes a fictional person or hobbies, whatever.
I ask them to conclude the survey, then they hand it to the person to their left or right to grade, this is also meaningless. I then ask them if they feel warmly or coolly to the person/activity/interest on the questionaire. This is the only “real” part of the test.
Inevitably, they will answer with above 75% unanimity. Sometimes as high as 90%.
If the color is a warm color, they answer warm, if the color is a cool color, they answer cool.
It works everytime.
Again, no one’s attention is drawn deliberately to the solid color on screen. It’s just there. I say nothing about it. The questionnaire varies from time to time, so it’s not a factor. People are responding simply to the stimuli of their environment.
It’s eerie, but it works, ALL the time.
The fact that so many of us are so easily primed is very troubling and strange.
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Good heavens. Of course you can be primed. Unless you’re forwarned. This is a transitory effect and it doesn’t prove the lack of free will, anymore than the 25% proves free will. It’s a parlor trick, Travis, for crying out loud. The no-free-will thing seems to be part of a current that wishes to make the individual irrelevant. Remember how well that worked in the USSR? Yeah, they’re now trying to come in another way. Think, man, think. This is part of a series of books I read recently about “scientific” proof of how anything bad we do is not our fault, we’re born that way. Oh, please! Yeah, humans are designed for group conformity by evolution. This helped them survive when they were just little bands in the wilderness. But conformity and things that aid conformity don’t mean no free will. And thank G-d there’s always cross grained outliers …
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Sarah, If this is a parlor trick then every choice we make is a parlor trick, because these kind of patterns are being found in nearly every area where human choice is a factor from mild crap like this to voting patterns and religious belief.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Preference from everything to your breakfast cereal to your future spouse choices are being influenced this way.
Now that doesn’t mean that free will isn’t real, but it does mean that whatever we call free will just isn’t a rational process, in the way that philosophers of the 18th C. imagined it. It’s more trial and error with a lot of noise thrown in, and knowing that is really important to understanding human thought.
We tend to think of the mind as this rational disembodied entity that only engages the brain when it has to. Rather it’s the other way around. The mind is just the frothy stuff that boils to the top, but there is this deep roiling cauldron below and lot the stew that gets kicked up to the surface that we are so convinced came to the top because we willed it there, just popped up by random.
So this isn’t an attack on free will, as much as it is an attack on our illusion or control. If we know this about ourselves, and only after we know this about ourselves, can we start to really think rationally.
I also think the opposition to this research is political in a way, but not in the way you think.
In the end, the psychologists and psychiatrists who oppose evolutionary neuro-psychology don’t hate it because it undermines free will, they hate it because it can be tested and it works, and it’s 180 degrees different from their crap theories which conveniently can’t be tested.
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Ric,
The idea that the brain is merely preparing, or pre-loading instructions for a possible or even probable decision was one theory early on in the testing process, but there are ways to screen for this. It turns out not to be true. Which is even more disconcerting. The “preloaded” option isn’t generalized to a variety of actions or even a narrow subset of related actions like flight or fight. It appears to be specifically targeted to one action and one action only, the one we always end up doing. It’s difficult to tell this but it can be determined in narrow cases by accurate brain scans.
If the brain is pre-loading based only on the probability of the outcome of a decision then the human mind is even more amazing than we have ever imagined because it is predicting the outcome of the decision with 100% accuracy. Talk about spooky action at a distance! How does it know?!
Applying occam’s razor, the more likely conclusion is that the narrowly defined ramp up is causing the decision, rather than just predicting it perfectly every time.
However, there are those who believe that the ramp up is the effect and the decision is the cause and that we can’t tell this because we only see time in one direction. But to argue that you have to be able to understant Quantum Mechanics and that makes my head hurt.
This evolutionary neurology is not BS people. It’s real. It is as troubling to the field of human thought and psychology as Quantum Mechanics was to Physics in the 30s. It’s weird and counter-intuitive and doesn’t make much sense, but like QM, it can be tested, and the results are pretty stunning.
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Back in grad school and before, I used to make a habit to go into the stacks at a library, look for an area I knew nothing about, and start looking at books. Often found myself reading a book or three on some completely unexpected topic.
Now, there’s Wikipedia.
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I’ve always known that decisions come to me from somewhere vague. Sub-conscious is an OK definition of that vague place. But, rationalization of those decisions also happens.
I like the idea of Ric Locke that ideas come from discovering the link between A and ZZ, and I agree with it. One of my friends (a retired professor) reminds me fairly frequently, that one of the reasons he like visiting with me, is that I don’t look at things the same as most other folks. One time, he was telling me about a discussion he and a group of men were having, where the discussion continued for 3 hours. When I commented on the same subject, he told me that nobody in that group had made a similar comment. i.e., Fact A related to fact ZZ.
Travis Lee Clark wrote “And what’s sad, is that these instinctive urges are utterly arbitrary. You’re brain has not been ruminating on some problem alone and come up with an answer. Nope. It’s just responding to the last thing it heard or saw.”
I disagree. When I worked for a living, I frequently spent hours looking for solutions to problems, and most of the time a solution presented itself out of the blue (so to speak) while I was doing something else. YMMV.
Marty
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Once you set aside the insistence on linear time, discard sequentiality (or, if you like, causality) and look at non-linear time, at simultaneity, the whole “free will” thing becomes very problematic. Stipulate that the subconscious mind eschews causality and the whole idea of “prefetching” becomes semantic.
So mebbe your subconscious is reaching back to tell you, “I will need this so stock up on it now.”
Do I believe in non-causal reality? No, but I believe that my lack of belief is a reflection of a character defect resultant of my immersion in a causal culture. I accept quite readily that my perception of Reality is not necessarily Reality.
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Time may or may not be linear, but I guarantee one thing: Whether or not you believe in entropy, entropy believes in you :-)
Regards,
Ric
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My memory is like an attic. Forever disgorging things I barely remember hearing about, reading about, studying. And not one of those tidy type attics, either. This one has an unsorted, poorly packed lifetime of “stuff” just tossing in randomly.
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“Now that doesn’t mean that free will isn’t real, but it does mean that whatever we call free will just isn’t a rational process, in the way that philosophers of the 18th C. imagined it.”
Right there is your problem; you are equating free will with rationality. Very little humans do is really rational, so why would you expect free will to be any different?
And yes you can use subliminal messaging to influence peoples decisions like you described, Hitler did it, Coca-Cola and many other companies did it; that’s why they outlawed it in TV advertising. But saying subliminal messaging works so I have my doubts about free will is liking saying I just ran a marathon, so I don’t own a car. There really is almost no correlation between the two.
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Travis, you making a categorical error. What you describe has nothing to do with free will but common sensory responses.
http://m-francis.livejournal.com/201223.html
JJB
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“You’re making”. Mea culpa.
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