Conventions of a Conventional Mind

Brain hacking with Gertrude Stein

My Middlebrow mind works, I think, in a pretty conventional way. I experience a constant and insistent internal monologue that leads me to believe that all of my mental functions are expressed with internal verbosity -- though this isn't quite right as it doesn't account for the involuntary functions or low latency decisions that my brain can make faster than it can find words to describe them.

Some people have no internal monologue. I can't imagine how they function, but they do. You can add a joke there, if you’d like. “Some people have no internal monologue. They become lawyers.” Or, “Some people have no internal monologue. They become insurance salespeople.” Or, “Some people have no internal monologue. They become substitute president.”

Some people have synesthesia, where they hear colors or smell sounds. I am also not sure how they function, but they do. They definitely have internal monologues, though. Their monologues say things like, “That smells yellow.”

My brain works like non-absurdist modernist literature, so I could be a character in Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, noting, analyzing and cataloguing everything. I think a lot about how I think or why I think what I am thinking. A friend who became a therapist has long favored this aphorism: "Don't believe everything you think."

This seems like good advice since, of course, we lie to ourselves. We are also using brains that are the products of evolution, built to survive in a state of nature that most of us no longer inhabit. When our brains invent threats in the night, imagining there is a sinister lurking presence (almost always slavering) in all of life's dark corners, that we are using brains trained on inputs like, "a pack of hyenas might eat you while you're sleeping."

For those of us who sleep in relative safety, these outputs are not always useful, though Stephen King and many imitators have turned them into major money. For many people, using brains formed to face and surmount threats that are no longer prevalent can lead to catastrophe. It creates problems in behavioral finance, for example, that make people into bad investors, as the instinct to follow the herd, for example, is probably more useful during a hurricane, where you follow your neighbors to safety, than it is during a stock market correction, where you follow them to realize losses.

So, if the conventional mind is not suited to our daily lives, what can we do? One option is to change our minds, which we can do by having new experiences and by thinking. One way to have new experiences and to think at the same time is to read and if you really want to supercharge this, read "difficult" things. But I have also found a fun way to read "difficult" things that isn't really that difficult.

It would be hacky of me to call this a hack, of course. But after those earlier internal monologue jokes, why should I worry? It’s a hack.

But, it pre-dates hacking and it rebels against the whole "mind as machine" notion. The hack is to read surrealist and absurdist texts, which are often not that difficult and short, and can reveal things about how we think, and about the world, in just a few words.

For example, a few days ago I found a little book of Gertrude Stein's writing about food, which are all excerpted from her longer work Tender Buttons, but are packaged up in small bites, like literary tapas.

She did not love Picasso’s portrait, but she loved Man Ray’s.

Here is something from that book: "An eye glass, what is an eye glass, it is water."

That's just one line in a few pages about mutton, but there’s a lot to it. We look at an eye glass, we wonder what it is, and it is water. It is clear, like water. It refracts and reflects light, like water. But, an eye glass holds its shape, which isn't like water at all. Except that, glass is a lot more like a liquid than it is a solid. It is not really "solid" in its atomic structure. Glass runs like a liquid, just very slowly. If you speed it up, you get the melting solids of Salvador Dali. If you let it run at its own pace, which would be measured in billions of years, you can just call it a solid and move on. 

But let’s not move on. You can only change your brain the way you change a muscle, which is by working it and because the brain gets used to being worked a certain way, you have to work it in different ways.

"Suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is," writes Stein, in a chapter about roast beef. It's just good, sometimes, to suppose there is a pigeon, without relying on nature or the internet to supply one.

At some point, I will tackle Stein's mammoth The Making of Americans. I have tried before and failed, though I feel in a better place for it now. I just have to finish Ulysses first (which is delightful, by the way, but also makes you want to reread Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...)

I'm picking Stein for this exercise, but Samuel Beckett works as well, as does Alfred Jarry and so many others. I do consider my mind to be relatively conventional, but there is no reason to leave it that way.

Let’s end with a little diet advice from Gertrude who says of salad: “It is a winning cake.” Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?