I often find myself overwhelmed and overstimulated but totally unable to articulate what is overwhelming and overstimulating me.
They say 90% of your mind is subconscious, and I think that 90% if what we’re constantly polluting, ‘dispatching’ tasks to, and overworking:
If I ask you what you did on Saturday, you might first remember the most salient event of the day, maybe what you had for dinner and where you were. You can then follow the trail of time and place to build the events after and before that event to create a coherent story of your Saturday from waking up to going to sleep.
But say you had 5 hours of screen time on Saturday, maybe you saw 140 tiktok’s, 70 instagram posts, 50 tweets and 98 facebook posts. The chances are you can’t recall a single one of them.
So why can’t you remember any of that content? Not only because the posts have no relationship to the material aspects of your day but every post in a scroll is an atomised unit which has no relationship to the post above or below it. This gives us the intuitive feeling that the content we’re looking at is discarded and disappears as we scroll. The same way we can walk down a street past 12 cars of different make and model, and not have any recollection of which cars they were later.
But hold on, if I showed you one of those Tiktoks you’d seen on Saturday right now you’d very likely remember it and be able to confirm having ‘seen it’.
Conversely if I showed you a specific car of a specific make and model and asked if you walked past it on Saturday at an exact point in the street you’d have absolutely no idea.
The point here is even though you conscious mind flees with gay abandon from one post to the next and can’t string any of it together, everything you’ve seen is classified as salient (the algorithm knew it would be), its lingering, is being worked on in the background, like a tab that hasn’t closed. Your brain wants to consider it, absorb it, and build it into your working model of the universe, but it doesn’t have a connection to the present moment so to your conscious mind it’s effectively gone.
Unlike computers, which store memories as sequences of bits, human memory is stored as stories. Sequences of characters, places, times of day, and the relationships between them. One thing leads to another. The smell of a place connects to the person you were with, which connects to what was said, which connects to how you felt driving home. Memory in humans is not a filing cabinet. It is a web of causally and emotionally connected events, and we navigate it by following the threads.
Our modern behaviour is incompatible with this, we cannot see it and we aren’t set up for it. We are gorging on hundreds atomised units of stimulation, each of them pushing our buttons and seen worthy of memorisation, but none of them fitting into our lives in a coherent way. Content that is felt to be hyper-relevant, but to our day to day life in the 3D space and time of our world, has no relationship.
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