One of my girls is really fascinated with a game character called “Pou“. If you haven’t seen this game, it’s based around a weird brown trianglish character that you have to take care of like a Talking Tom game. It feels exactly like a cheap knock off of some more popular item you’d find on Alibaba.
My brain of course just binned it is “kids being kids”, and I really didn’t think too much about it past that. This same kid has also discovered that my phone has an unrestricted Amazon app, and in moments of great distraction (pretty much always) grabs my phone and orders random shit (that she watched me enough to figure out my password is actually the more terrifying part of this story).
So, I’m looking at an email notification for an order that’s been shipped and because I’m waiting on something that was a next day delivery that has been delayed for more than a week now I checked the email hoping against hope that it would finally arrive. Instead there’s a few other items… and this.
And in that moment, before I was even consciously aware of it, I exclaimed “Wait a minute, that’s shit!” I’m not sure if other people get this experience or not, but sometimes when I make a realization like this, I can feel the recalculation happen in real time, and it all comes rushing in at once. Usually this is represented in video form as a light bulb coming on (or like Scott Pilgrim’s gauge flicking over to “Gets It”).
I don’t know if it was the bulging eyes, or what exactly triggered the connection, but there it was, this concept that I’d run across a thousand times instantly transformed into something else entirely. All of my girls are absurdly sensitive, and she saw the screen, observed my reaction and instantly burst into peels of laughter. “Poop!”
Of course this makes perfect sense in context, she’s at the age of potty training and at the age where I’m encouraging her to take more control of her own daily routine independently of my input. And our family has REALLY slow small intestines so we only poop every couple of days (trust me, I’ve been through this a billion times with doctors, she’s fine, I’m fine, we’re all fine), so this makes potty training exceptionally difficult when it comes to pooping because there isn’t a way to induce the old gastroenteric reflex because we don’t really have one.
In retrospect, all of this context seems stunningly obvious.
One of the aspects of my processing that seems to be more unique than others is that it keeps temporal layering distinct. It appears that for the overwhelming majority of people (I’m assuming normal ventral bias of processing), temporality is purely used for sequential organization of “memory”. Old memories are easily replaced or updated by new ones in the stream as a function of the hippocampal stream processing. There’s not enough research yet on this, but I suspect this is an artifact of the ventral hippocampal CA2, which serves to sort of “normalize” prediction stability in humans.
In my brain temporality functions as an independent data point, rather than the staple/binding point in the CA1 (and maybe subiculum?). The effect of this is that when I process prior information, they don’t stack “on top” of each other, but rather “next” to each other. An example of this for Americans is the concept of “Red/Blue” for political affiliation seems timeless no matter how old they are, and we’ve actually kind of retconned this concept into our prior understanding and presentation of American politics.
But for me, my nascent political exposures was the Bill Clinton/Bob Dole and Al Gore/George Bush campaigns in 1996 and 2000, and NONE OF THAT SHIT EXISTED. Like the very first time I saw any hint of that Red/Blue thing was during the whole recount portion of the 2000 election, rather than the cycle itself. For most people, the red/blue thing seems perfectly natural, but I still to this day get a lot of cognitive dissonance from it because of my early exposure. This seamless re-writing of “memory” allows us to flexibly update our information in a metabolically efficient way, and my “over-information” brain has completely different priorities for metabolic efficiency than most ventral dominant brains.
All of that ramble to say, that “Pou” the weird Aliexpress knock off and “Poop, the game where you shower, brush the teeth, and feed a piece of shit” exist side by side for me. This is one of those things that I think helps me immensely when researching stuff like this, because it gives me a lot more context on how things change over time (δc/δt don’t know how to make the uppercase Delta). Part of the reason I apply such a hard recency bias to research is because of this, the error rate of older research in this field is far too high to be reliable (as a smell test, if it was right then the research would all be consistent with the most recent stuff anyway).
A few days ago, I posted a piece of work discussing how stimulation to the cerebellum effects temporal prediction as a whole, and here is a weird, tangential example of that effect in the real world.
Ultimately, the point of all this was to demonstrate how pervasive and invisible these processing mechanics are, and how changes in processing drive the differences in our understanding of the world. Nervous systems bias toward metabolically entrained processing paths allows us to dramatically reconfigure everything about our experience with information that is mostly “convenient” rather than “true”. It ignores the obvious and obsesses on the irrelevant because convenience is metabolically stable. And the profoundity of that manipulation toward convenience, where what we see literally changes before our eyes and erases all hints of what we used to know is both a powerful and frightful aspect that we will get to play with directly pretty soon.