Player One: What Is to Become of Us (20 page)

Grim Truth

You’re smarter than TV. So what?

Guck Wonder

The brain has always been poorly understood. Warriors on ancient battlefields must have wondered what the grey guck was that spilled out when they lopped off the top of someone’s skull. At least with a heart you could tell it was doing something useful. Maybe they saw the brain as filler material the gods used to fill skull cavities, the way pet food manufacturers bulk up tinned meat products with grains.

Humanalia

Things made by humans that exist only on earth and nowhere else in the universe. Examples include Teflon, NutraSweet, thalidomide, Paxil, and meaningfully sized chunks of element number 43, technetium.

Iddefodial Storage

The brain’s way of protecting itself from itself. To whit, if our subconscious is so wonderful, why do our bodies work so hard to keep it deeply buried?

Ikeasis

The desire in both daily and consumer life to cling to generically designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information. (See also Invariant Memory)

Indoor/Outdoor Voice

A very quick test one can use to understand the expressive world of people further along the autistic spectrum than others. People unable to modulate their voices to suit the environment are just that much further along. (See also Internal Voice Blindness; Preliterary Aural Bliss)

Inhibition Spectrum

From the centre to the right:

“normal” → shy → quiet → reclusive loner → scary loner → hermit → Unabomber

From the centre to the left:

“normal” → talkative → life of the party → no off button → rants → talks to self → madness

Instant Reincarnation

Most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for total radical change in their lives. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.

Internal Voice Blindness

The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue, a fact that undermines the conventional wisdom that one’s inner voice is one’s own. Witness the universal confusion when non-professionals hear recordings of their own voice. In fact, the tone of one’s inner voice is almost impossible to nail down.

Curiously, what artists commonly refer to as their muse — a seemingly external voice that guides them in their work — is actually a defective and/or amplified inner voice mechanism, a function regulated by the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes, which are responsible for speech and auditory processing.

Interruption-Driven Memory

We remember only the red traffic lights, never the green ones. The green ones keep us in the flow; the red ones interrupt and annoy us. Interruption: this accounts for the almost universal tendency of car drivers to be superstitious about stoplights.

Intraffinital Melancholy vs. Extraffinital Melancholy

Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely or to be lonely within a dead relationship?

Intravincular Familial Silence

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Invariant Memory

The process whereby the brain determines when looking at an animal whether it is a dog or a cat. There exists no perfect model of a cat or a dog, yet we can instantly tell which is which by rapidly moving up and down long lists of traits that define cat-ness and dog-ness. The brain’s ability to form invariant representations is the root of all intelligence. Some people refer to invariant memories as idealized Platonic forms or as generic forms.

Itness

The ability of one agent to create the perception of an object, person, or event as possessing “it” — for example, not wanting to be “it” in a game of tag — or even the ability of a dog owner to create instant itness when choosing a stick to be thrown for retrieval.

Karaokeal Amnesia

Most people don’t know the complete lyrics of almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)

Limbic Trading

The belief that the need for stories comes from deep within the brain’s limbic system — where memory and emotion percolate, and where stories are first processed before they are passed on to the left hemisphere, the home of intuition, imagination, and inspiration — and that storytelling is one limbic system’s way of communi-
cating with that of another person.

Limited Pool Romantic Theory

The belief that one can fall in love only a finite number of times, most commonly six.

Lyrical Putty

The lyrics one creates in one’s head in the absence of knowing a song’s real lyrics.

Malfactory Aversion

The ability to figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then to stop doing it.

Mallproof Realms

Realms where shopping never happens. For example,
Star Trek
characters never go shopping. Also, universes that wilfully exclude commerce.

Mechanics of Friends and Influence

The fact that people will like and respect you for no other
reason than that you give the illusion of remembering their names.

Me Goggles

The inability to accurately perceive ourselves as others do.

Memesphere

The realm of culturally tangible ideas.

Metaphor Blindness

An exceedingly common inability to understand metaphor, which often leads to avoidance of art forms, such as novels, where metaphor might be encountered. (See also Poetic Side Effects)

Metaphor Spectrum

Confusion in the noun centre of the brain that leads to schizophrenic or delusional thinking:

Napoleon was a general → Napoleon is great → I think I am great → I am Napoleon

Monophobia

Dislike of feeling like an individual.

Nanoexploitative Industry

Pretty much everything invented after the year 1900 is based on our knowledge of things that are incredibly tiny and processes that occur at atomic or subatomic levels.

Narrative Drive

The belief that a life without a story is a life not worth living — quite common, and ironically accompanied by the fact that most people cannot ascribe a story to their lives.

Negative Nonprocessing

The fact that the brain doesn’t process negatives. Try
not
thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel, the smell. Try — you can’t.

Next-Flight-Homers

People who click on the Internet but not in real life when they go to meet their hookup at an airport cocktail lounge; related to but not the same as Room-Getters — people who click both on the Internet and in real life.

Ninetenicillin

A pill that makes one feel as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred. A variation of Millennial Tristesse, a longing for the twentieth century.

Nonrotational Dreamlessness

The theory that dreams are largely a biological response to the planet’s rotation, so citizens of planets that do not rotate most likely do not dream.

Noun-Nouning

By repeating a noun twice, one invokes the noun’s generic form, its invariant-memory form. “No, I don’t want blue khakis with pleats. Just give me clean generic beige khaki-khakis.” Or, “Officer, I’ve tried to remember what kind of car the getaway car was but I can’t — it was just a car-car.”

Omniscience Fatigue

The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.

Omnislut

Mitochondrial Eve — the “universal mother” — a female who lived about 200,000 years ago, to whom all human beings are related via the mitochondrial DNA pathway. “Superdog,” a.k.a. Y-Chromosomal Adam, the universal father, lived 60,000 years ago.

Pathologography

A new strain of biographical writing that acknowledges the importance of performing forensic analysis of the subject’s physical and mental states. Biology is not destiny, but it can certainly open and close a few doors.

Permanent Halloween

The ultimate expression of individuality is to arrive at a point where one wears a Halloween costume every day of the year. Writes Louise Adler, “The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become. This is most obvious in people whom society no longer keeps in line; the eccentricity of the very rich or of castaways.”

Phantom Point

An object that exists but, when you really think about it, does not; for example, a corner or an edge. Also known as “virtual tangibles,” phantom points must be considered when contemplating theoretical geometry. For example, the head of a pin — a point that obviously exists and yet does not — is theoretically no different than the state of the universe before the Big Bang. It encompasses everything and nothing.

Poetic Side Effects

The result of looking at a water molecule and being able to predict rainbows, or inventing the motor vehicle and predicting that dogs will cheerfully stick their faces out into the oncoming wind.

Point Mesmerization

Deflection by dispersion. The manner in which a lion tamer controls a lion, keeping it mesmerized by holding a chair up to its face, legs first. The lion, unable to relinquish its instinctual and powerful ability to focus, stares at the ends of the chair legs, its eyes darting back and forth between the four of them to the exclusion of the larger picture.

Polydexterity

Handedness isn’t just about writing or throwing a ball. It can be applied to almost all body activities: winking, crossing the legs, guitar playing, sleeping on one’s side, and so forth. No person is ever universally monodextrous.

Pope Gregory’s Day-timer

Doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it certainly would have been interesting to see.

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome

The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-to-21 age range. “Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.”

The inability of teens to consider the consequences of risky action is due to the fact that their brain’s development is only 80 percent finished. The cortex matures from back to front, leaving connection and development of the frontal lobe incomplete until somewhere in the mid to late twenties. Not surprisingly, the frontal lobe is home to reasoning, planning, and judgement.

Post-human

Whatever it is that we become next.

Preliterary Aural Bliss

The notion that what you think of as your inner voice is actually a rather new “invention” created by the printed word, solitary reading, and a text-mediated daily environment. In the old days — say, a thousand years ago — people didn’t have an inner voice. Citizens inhabited a mental universe that had more to do with sound effects than speech. Words and voices might pass through your head, but it wasn’t necessarily
you
that was speaking. Maybe the king or the gods or something, but not you.

Proceleration

The acceleration of acceleration.

Propanolol

A beta blocker used by the military that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.

Proscenial Universe Theory

The notion that time simply provides a medium — an arena — within which emotions are able to play themselves out. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “Time is the element in which we exist. We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”

Proteinic Inevitability

The tendency for life-forming molecules to aggregate and create life the first moment they possibly can. So dedicated are they to this cause, recent research suggests that in the beginning stages of life on earth, small molecules acted as “molecular midwives,” assisting in the formation of life-creating polymers and appropriate selection of base pairs for the DNA double helix.

Pseudoalienation

The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”

Punning Syndrome

The medicalization of what was previously considered merely an annoying verbal tic displayed by a limited number of people. Punning is an almost inevitable side effect of connectopathies within the brain’s verbal nodes, somewhat akin to Tourette syndrome.

This leads to a larger discussion about the concept of spectrum behaviour: sliding scales of behaviour connected by clinical appearance and underlying caus-ation, ranging from mild clinical deficits to severe disorder. Psychiatric disorders understood along spectrums include autism, paranoia, obsessive compulsion, anxiety, and conditions that result from congenital malformations, brain damage, and aging. There are many more, however, and each category itself can be broken down into more specific spectrums.

Quantum-DNA Link Theory

The belief that DNA is not just a blueprint or recipe for life, but that the physical DNA molecule acts as a quantum-level transmitter or homing device communicating with other life-forming molecules in the universe — similar molecules that act as blueprints for other sentient beings that are aware of space and time and the role of themselves within it. This theory presupposes that countless sentient beings exist throughout the universe, and that life is the universe’s raison d’être. It is a lot to believe in, but ultimately this line of thought resonates with swaths of belief systems, from “the Buddhist concept of Indra’s net, Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the noosphere, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, to Hegel’s Absolute idealism, Satori in Zen, and to some traditional pantheist beliefs. It is also reminiscent of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.” Thank you, Wikipedia.