I don't know why, but lately I have been struggling to find the right words more than I have for a while, which comes through in my writing also. What happens is that my brain will throw up some random words on occasion, but far more common, is that it will give me words that sound or mean similar things, or words that are related to the topic - "adjacent" words to the one I actually want to use.
For instance, yesterday I had used "stake" instead of steak in a sentence, and then in another part, I had used "risk averse" when I meant risk-seeking. It doesn't matter that I know the difference, it is just the way my brain works. Well, I think it is the way all our brains work, but mine just can't filter quickly enough to capture it. The brain runs through lots of information it doesn't voice, mine voices a lot that wasn't intended.
It is embarrassing for me at times, despite me knowing that there is little I can do about it. When I write there in the place of their, or your instead of you're, it has nothing to do with grammatical inadequacy, but I feel the shame of getting it wrong, if it is pointed out to me, or I happen to catch it in review.
This is exacerbated by the way I write, since I am very much an "on-the-fly" writer, pushing out words as quickly as my poor typing skills will allow me - which isn't very fast. My brain used to race along at breakneck speeds, but since the stroke, in order to get it to go fast, it has to be manually put into gear and maintained, which makes it very energy intensive. And, if I don't do the manual work, it sits idling, doing close to nothing - and nothing of generative value.
It is a super power to be able to have a blank mind on command - but it is a super weakness to have to do all of the thought work manually, because the conscious mind in direction, is going to miss a huge amount of what the automated thinking is going to catch in the peripheries. I can focus my attention, but I miss everything else, including a lot of value that feeds into my consciousness to bring compounded value.
Sometimes I wish we would be able to swap minds for a bit, where we could experience what it was like to be for example, a genius level thinker like Einstein, or at the other end of the scale, like Forrest Gump. We can't imagine what it is like to have a brain that is not our own, but I do get some sense of having a changed brain, as my memory of how I was hasn't faded, but I know that I can no longer replicate those results. It is like I lived in my mind when I was a different person, remembering what they knew, but no longer able to be that person.
Multiple personality disorder?
It is definitely a disorder.
In some ways, I feel a bit like Al Bundy, reminiscing about my glory days as the quarterback of the high school football team - though my past was never very glory-filled. Which is even sadder!
It would be something if I was once a genius and now average, but going from average to worse, isn't as dramatic, but might be worse. I didn't have that much to lose to begin with.
At least I can sympathize with what idiots go through.
Though, they don't know they are idiots.
But, while I "feel the shame", I also know that it isn't actually my fault when I make the majority of these errors. One "fix" would be to slow down dramatically and read and re-read everything, but that completely changes my approach to writing, so I have chosen to bear with the mistakes and wear the feeling of inferiority, over getting things "right" more often.
Fuck it.
I can still hopefully inspire some interesting thoughts and have some valuable conversations with people, even if it isn't at the level I would hope I would be at. And, maybe one day there will be some Flowers for Algernon drug that will repair my brain and allow me to get my thinking back, or perhaps even more. I would love to be able to live as a genius for a little while, just to see what might change.
Would I use the power effectively?
It is definitely not a given, but just like suddenly becoming wealthy, we don't really know what we would do, until we have a chance to do it. A lot of people waste their wealth when they win the lottery - would we waste our brains too of gifted with genius?
Maybe we wouldn't be where we are as a society today, if we were all a little less stupid. Or perhaps it would help if we were all a little more.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
