I have a mental weakness – a cognitive issue – that I have just figured out consciously has cost me a lot of progress over the years.
It’s the fact that when I am learning something, if I hit a spot where things don’t make sense to me, my mind just plain crashes.
Does not compute. Please resolve issue before continuing. Shutting down now.
This indicates that my usual way of learning things is to fit everything into a larger picture as I go, sort of like building the bridge as you’re crossing it.
That would explain my power of recall. That’s a very powerful way to learn things. It ensures that everything I learn is integrated with everything else over time and so to recall any single thing, I just have to follow the connections and boom, there it is.
But it has its flaws and they become evident when I hit something that does not fit. Everything screeches to the halt and I feel lost and helpless. I just plain can’t set the conflict aside and keep learning.
I evidently have a one track mind. It’s a very BIG track, but there’s still just the one.
This has cost me a lot in the past in at least three occasions :
- That linguistics class. Once we got to that sentence diagramming thing that nobody could explain to me, I was fucked. Everything after that built on it, so the whole rest of the course was a loss to me, Hence my failing the course. Shame.
- Trying to learn French online and/or from an app. This cognitive loophole is the reason none of these “natural language learning” bullshit apps work for me. The kind where they just give you the quiz and assume this will activate your language acquisition center that acquired your native language when you were a wee tot and you will learn the new language super well. I know this works for most people – before the apps there were French immersion classes and crash learning weekend seminars and such. But that’s not gonna cut it for me. If I get it wrong and don’t know why, I can’t go forward till I get the answer.
- The worst one : learning music theory. When it comes to learning to read and write music, I hit that ol’ brick wall at keys. Keys make no god damned sense to me. Why not put everything in C? Why have this bullshit system where I am supposed to just know that in this piece, that D is actually a D#. Why not just write it as D# then? And because i makes no sense to me, my mind refuses to learn it, and so something I very much want to know and understand is lost to me.
And God, does that piss me off. I can live without understanding that hardcore linguistics and I hold out hope that somewhere there are books that actually explain how French works so I can learn it, but there’s no hope for my learning music unless someone can explain what the deal with keys is in a way that makes sense to me.
And that seems unlikely.
Maybe this kind of cognitive blind spot can be overcome. But I doubt it. This is something that operates on a very deep level of my cognition, so I would practically need an entirely new brain to change it.
Now about that book about French….
More after the break.
Holy crap, structure!
Everything in the above the line portion of today’s blog entry came to me more or less as you see it. It just popped into my head almost fully formed. All I needed to do was add the very bit of phrasing and resolution to the words.
And that’s pretty exciting for a lazy creative like myself. To me, one of the most exhilarating aspects of my creative process is when things pop into my head in a super concentrated form like that. So concentrated that the real work of the project is in the slow unpacking of this hyper dense idea-stuff so that I can translate it into actual words.
It’s like putting together a model kit as you unbox it. You have no idea what the heck it’s going to look like when you are done. But it sure is fun to find out.
As you can probably tell, this is hardly my first encounter with this kind of improbably well structured spontaneous creation on my part.
Way back before this blog and the Million Word Year (finished in 11 months) project that preceded it, I would occasionally do what I will call wordletting exercises.
They were simple. Just open a new text file and start typing. Type whatever pops into your head. Give yourself as little time to think about it as possible. Just write and write, stream of consciousness style, until you were all out of words.
Sounds easy enough. But the oddest thing would happen. Despite my deliberate attempts to keep things as free-flowing as possible, order and structure appeared.
I would start off with weird sentence fragment, immediately move into a sort of imagistic blank poetry mode, then the sentences would turn into fully formed paragraphs and then, if I was able to keep going, entire stories would pop out.
This blew my mind. For once, I was the person saying, “People aren’t supposed to be able to do that. ” Write an entire story, with proper structure and a beginning, middle, and end and all the rest, on the fly, without stopping to think about anything?
That’s pretty impressive for an Earthling human being.
No wonder I have gotten away with turning in my first drafts all my life.
My first drafts are pretty fucking amazing.
Now if I could only slow down enough to do a second draft….
Oh well. Maybe that’s just not in the cards for the likes of me.
It might not be the muse I wanted, but it’s a damn good one anyhow!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.