Processing a Mind Field

There are high-information days filled with an onslaught of new data to be calibrated in your mental schemes. The brain requires sleep to encode the memories, and upon waking, some sense-making rids the clutter into an improved cohesion. But there is the night before where fluttering images, events, ideas, and experiences fragment your focus.

With scattered attentions, but an eager need for clarity, you surrender to the impressions you've accumulated and allow their buzzing presence to dim and illuminate in uneven patterns across your mind.

So this is a temporary problem, with the answer contingent on time to reveal a full picture to you. What's notable about human processing speed is the implication that meaning generates when the wheels of subconscious spin to produce insights, narratives, and themes.

It's common wisdom intuited easily by tracking the development of our own thoughts and their rate of change. But if contrasting varieties of information are taken in, with a rich tapestry of unrelated cognitive imprints, false connections can bleed into one another.

Some artistic memory synthesis can be a harmless delight. Inventive liberties cause reflections to suit our needs and aid us in landing new jumping-off points. One thing that can be said of fantasy is when it isn't offering escapism, it's busy providing inspiration for what's conceivably attainable.

And then we have all these voices, language content external to our own. When a hundred talking heads and disembodied avatars disrupt the chain of our own verbal thread, we see its character influenced by a vibrant ecosystem of personalities.

The social element to meaning-making shouldn't be framed as corrupting. There is potential for self-authorship to be overridden by insecure submission, but foundational substances will best render themselves to the shading of outside suggestions. The sharpening of the blade.

If the honing rod is harder than the blade, the edge of the knife will chip away. This is why it's important to assess the compatibility of the ecosystem you inhabit, and migrate accordingly if need be. This is not to say you should submit yourself to an echo chamber. Compatibility has nothing to do with monochromatic philosophies or high degrees of agreeableness. Instead, momentum can hinge on the friction of stark contrasts.

But people don't intuit this to be true, because it's par for the course to have a strained relationship with destructive egoists. When they're not busy sniping your sentiments, they're signing their refutations with death notes. We've clung to collectivist identities to protect ourselves from psychic terrorism at the expense of being autonomous.

This outcome needn't define the conditions of a community. Excessive boundaries have been drawn with little effect on the improvement of our standards. They are deceptively self-righteous prohibitions constructed with flimsy materials impersonating morals. Mental clunking frames innocent expressions as hostile deeds based on their proximity to perceived threats. Phantoms of ill-fated encounters in the past haunt exchanges we have in the future, and get you treated like a corpse.

These are high-information days.