Cancerous Schemata and the One Track Mind
Though it rarely comes up, back in college I took quite a few cognitive psychology classes. In fact, I was only a couple classes short of being able to declare it as a major. On occasion, someone will say something like “man, I had this weird dream” and I’ll reply with “eh, dreams don’t mean anything; they are nothing more than a reorganization of memories that your brain places into a logical narrative during REM sleep”. These ejaculations, though, are few and far between. My studies do not often affect my interactions and conversations with others, but they do affect the way I perceive my life, others’ lives and world. Bored today, I started searching through other people’s blogs and read a few strangers’ words. It is amazing how many people suffer from what I refer to as “cancerous schemata”.
A schema is a cluster of memories in the brain that represent an object or an idea. Your eyes merely take in colors, but it is your brain that recognizes colors of a particular shape, size and location and invokes meaning from them. Along with this meaning comes an enormous flood of information related to the particular subject. For instance, say you look at a car. You suddenly know that a car has four wheels and either two or four doors. It has a hood, windows, an engine and a gas tank. You can drive it, park it, lock it and get tickets. You know that you sit on the forward left side and push a brake and gas pedal. There’s a radio, a rear view mirror, a trunk, a jack and a seat belt. They come in different types like SUV’s or sedans and they come from different countries like Germany and Japan. They usually cost between $12,000 and $70,000 and often reveal social class. The list of things you instantly know and can readily recite is simply unfathomable.
Now, along with the schema and it’s related information comes the schemata of the related information. You look at the car, but may also think about a road and everything a road is. You may think about gasoline and everything it is or you may think about the money to buy a car and everything it is. Like dominoes, information chains are triggered in your mind to lead you to the most useful information. The rest of brain and the experiences it holds may affect what you think about and the path or your stream of consciousness. A lawyer may look at a car and think mainly about traffic law while a scientist may think about the combustion process.
In college, I theorized that “one track mindedness” was the results of a particular schema growing to such a large size that nearly all objects and subjects triggered it. My example was my freshman year roommate who wouldn’t stop talking about being Jewish. Everything, and I mean everything, brought up in conversation with him somehow came back to being Jewish.
I think my theory still holds up, but I now would like to add the term “cancerous” to these overgrown schemata. Reading through random people’s blogs, I came upon a great number of people who couldn’t stop talking about a subject. Most notably, many people can’t shut the hell up about God. Taking a shit must somehow involve him for these people. I know it may sound strange, but there’s more to life than God. Additionally, a massive amount of partisan blogs exists where individuals take very strong stances on issues they know little about. They accept information that supports their belief and reject anything that does not support it. Apparently the schema of “conservatives are good” or “liberals are good” is so great that it influences all other information. These individuals have gotten to the point where a schema is so dominating that their brain cannot function properly and people snicker at them for having “J.C. on the tip of their tongue” or being a political freak.
Is there chemo for these cancerous schemata? I’m not sure. I suppose people can get tired of subjects once there is no more new information to collect. Additionally, a new schema could grow to rival the dominating one as well. Still, I know all sorts of people who continue to discuss the same old subjects for a lifetime (or at least as long as I’ve known them).
Then again, perhaps these huge schemata allow people to become dedicated to a subject. Is that why I’m a dilettante?
A schema is a cluster of memories in the brain that represent an object or an idea. Your eyes merely take in colors, but it is your brain that recognizes colors of a particular shape, size and location and invokes meaning from them. Along with this meaning comes an enormous flood of information related to the particular subject. For instance, say you look at a car. You suddenly know that a car has four wheels and either two or four doors. It has a hood, windows, an engine and a gas tank. You can drive it, park it, lock it and get tickets. You know that you sit on the forward left side and push a brake and gas pedal. There’s a radio, a rear view mirror, a trunk, a jack and a seat belt. They come in different types like SUV’s or sedans and they come from different countries like Germany and Japan. They usually cost between $12,000 and $70,000 and often reveal social class. The list of things you instantly know and can readily recite is simply unfathomable.
Now, along with the schema and it’s related information comes the schemata of the related information. You look at the car, but may also think about a road and everything a road is. You may think about gasoline and everything it is or you may think about the money to buy a car and everything it is. Like dominoes, information chains are triggered in your mind to lead you to the most useful information. The rest of brain and the experiences it holds may affect what you think about and the path or your stream of consciousness. A lawyer may look at a car and think mainly about traffic law while a scientist may think about the combustion process.
In college, I theorized that “one track mindedness” was the results of a particular schema growing to such a large size that nearly all objects and subjects triggered it. My example was my freshman year roommate who wouldn’t stop talking about being Jewish. Everything, and I mean everything, brought up in conversation with him somehow came back to being Jewish.
I think my theory still holds up, but I now would like to add the term “cancerous” to these overgrown schemata. Reading through random people’s blogs, I came upon a great number of people who couldn’t stop talking about a subject. Most notably, many people can’t shut the hell up about God. Taking a shit must somehow involve him for these people. I know it may sound strange, but there’s more to life than God. Additionally, a massive amount of partisan blogs exists where individuals take very strong stances on issues they know little about. They accept information that supports their belief and reject anything that does not support it. Apparently the schema of “conservatives are good” or “liberals are good” is so great that it influences all other information. These individuals have gotten to the point where a schema is so dominating that their brain cannot function properly and people snicker at them for having “J.C. on the tip of their tongue” or being a political freak.
Is there chemo for these cancerous schemata? I’m not sure. I suppose people can get tired of subjects once there is no more new information to collect. Additionally, a new schema could grow to rival the dominating one as well. Still, I know all sorts of people who continue to discuss the same old subjects for a lifetime (or at least as long as I’ve known them).
Then again, perhaps these huge schemata allow people to become dedicated to a subject. Is that why I’m a dilettante?
posted by American Dilettante at
4:30 PM
1 Comments:
Some would say that you have an obsession with social class. Not I, but some would say this!
By
mizerock, at 4:01 PM
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