Recovering from my damaged connectome...
Jun. 24th, 2019 12:50 pmI think my recent two-week visit with my mother to interface with her healthcare providers and provide physical carer support has seriously damaged my virtual connectome.
The physical connectome is the network of neurons in the brain that give rise to behavioral outcomes. It's generally just a "map of all the interconnectedness" of the parts of the brain, and my oldest child just recently got her pre-med degree in computational neurobiology, which is a study of the connectome intended to guide neurosurgeons in their task of healing the patient while doing the minimal damage necessary to the brain itself.
Creative people also have virtual connectomes: the patterns of thought we bring to our professional lives, the ones that we traverse over and over, looking for alternatives, places where we can improve, tasks we've left unfinished. While we can offload some of this into some sort of GTD/ORG system, even if it's just on paper, we have to keep a lot of it active in our brains: it's how we arrange and re-arrange ideas until we've found a combination that's worth acting on, worth putting down and working out. (And you must act on them.)
My mother is 81 and recently had some fairly serious abdmominal surgery. I flew down the day before the surgery and spent the next two weeks with her, helping her recover and get strong enough so that she could take care of herself. She did fully recover and was capable by the time I left, but what this meant for me was that for twelve days, from 7:30am until 8:30pm, thirteen hours, with only a single one-hour break for lunch, I was by her side and in her presence, and since she's, y'know, Mom, subject to her routine as much to her physical needs.
Mom watches a lot of TV. A lot of ugly, boring, ordinary, middlebrow television: Good Morning America, The View, The Young & The Restless, Home and Garden TV Marathons, The Batchelorette, local news, national news, and lots of cop shows.
I watch television very deliberately. The last thing I watched was the Chernobyl miniseries, and I rewatched parts of it to admire Craig Mazin's masterful storytelling skills. I have that classic geek neurobiology in that I have mild ADHD. Being subjected to that much incessant, vapid, loud chatter made in impossible for me to think clearly at all.
On the flight down, I was alone with my thoughts and not much else for seven hours; I worked my way through 23 (!) different notes and ideas for one of my favorite projects, the regular expression engine I've been noodling with for the past year. Throughout the next twelve days, I got nothing else done. I couldn't even read with that television going.
What's worse is that, now that I've gotten home, I find the mental network of thoughts and ideas that held together my understanding of how regular expressions work has been painfully degraded. I literally have to start over from the very beginning paper and rebuild my understanding, hoping that as I do so fragments of the previous network still exist and will merge into a working mental model again.
This doesn't happen when I go camping. The peace and quiet of being out in the woods is refreshing, and I can sometimes sit with a pencil and paper and work out a few interesting ideas here and there, something that keeps the intellect alive and well.
Since my mother had undergone surgery, there were several follow-up visits during the week. Every place we went to had a television, tuned to something.
It didn't even seem to matter what. Nobody cared what was on, just that there was something on. It seemed that most people needed the placating noise of the telescreen, an assurance that the world they knew was full, and didn't need their help to fill it.
The physical connectome is the network of neurons in the brain that give rise to behavioral outcomes. It's generally just a "map of all the interconnectedness" of the parts of the brain, and my oldest child just recently got her pre-med degree in computational neurobiology, which is a study of the connectome intended to guide neurosurgeons in their task of healing the patient while doing the minimal damage necessary to the brain itself.
Creative people also have virtual connectomes: the patterns of thought we bring to our professional lives, the ones that we traverse over and over, looking for alternatives, places where we can improve, tasks we've left unfinished. While we can offload some of this into some sort of GTD/ORG system, even if it's just on paper, we have to keep a lot of it active in our brains: it's how we arrange and re-arrange ideas until we've found a combination that's worth acting on, worth putting down and working out. (And you must act on them.)
My mother is 81 and recently had some fairly serious abdmominal surgery. I flew down the day before the surgery and spent the next two weeks with her, helping her recover and get strong enough so that she could take care of herself. She did fully recover and was capable by the time I left, but what this meant for me was that for twelve days, from 7:30am until 8:30pm, thirteen hours, with only a single one-hour break for lunch, I was by her side and in her presence, and since she's, y'know, Mom, subject to her routine as much to her physical needs.
Mom watches a lot of TV. A lot of ugly, boring, ordinary, middlebrow television: Good Morning America, The View, The Young & The Restless, Home and Garden TV Marathons, The Batchelorette, local news, national news, and lots of cop shows.
I watch television very deliberately. The last thing I watched was the Chernobyl miniseries, and I rewatched parts of it to admire Craig Mazin's masterful storytelling skills. I have that classic geek neurobiology in that I have mild ADHD. Being subjected to that much incessant, vapid, loud chatter made in impossible for me to think clearly at all.
On the flight down, I was alone with my thoughts and not much else for seven hours; I worked my way through 23 (!) different notes and ideas for one of my favorite projects, the regular expression engine I've been noodling with for the past year. Throughout the next twelve days, I got nothing else done. I couldn't even read with that television going.
What's worse is that, now that I've gotten home, I find the mental network of thoughts and ideas that held together my understanding of how regular expressions work has been painfully degraded. I literally have to start over from the very beginning paper and rebuild my understanding, hoping that as I do so fragments of the previous network still exist and will merge into a working mental model again.
This doesn't happen when I go camping. The peace and quiet of being out in the woods is refreshing, and I can sometimes sit with a pencil and paper and work out a few interesting ideas here and there, something that keeps the intellect alive and well.
Since my mother had undergone surgery, there were several follow-up visits during the week. Every place we went to had a television, tuned to something.
It didn't even seem to matter what. Nobody cared what was on, just that there was something on. It seemed that most people needed the placating noise of the telescreen, an assurance that the world they knew was full, and didn't need their help to fill it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}