I have been contemplating my near pathological inability to multitask and its deeper implications today, and thought I would share.

Because it goes a lot deeper than being bad at mundane chores that require a little multitasking. My hyper focus oriendted mind is what makes me miss most of the world, as counterintuitive as that might seem.

To start off, we have to remember that by default, I am entirely focused on the world in my head. That is my base mode. It’s the sort of capacity one develops during the hours and hours of stultifying boredom I had to endure in school.

They made no attempts to challenge me.

This inner focus zealously guards its monopoly on my mental resources, and usually only allots the absolute bare minimum amount of attention to any but the most absording and stimulating of tasks, and that’s pretty much everything except things like reading or playing a video game or writing.

Even watching TV is not stimulating enough for me any more, and if I can do it at all, it is only while I am eating and preferably also with friends.

It hurts to say that, because TV raised me. I feel so disloyal!

Oh, there’s one other thing that can hold my attention : good conversation. Like the conversations I have with my friends.

Other than that, everything I do, I do on a severe austerity basis. And even then, I sometimes end up very confused because those hungry inner processes of my mind have just dumped my working memory and it’s like I just woke up.

That’s fucked up, man.

Anyhow, the way this connects with my lack of multitasking is that it does not leave any mental CPU cycles for noticing things. My active conscious window into the world is alway very tightly focused on whatever it is I am doing, and so if something changes in my environment, I won’t notice unless it is very attention-grabbing.

And even then, maybe not. I walked right past a house fire without noticing once. People could not believe it. How could I miss a HOUSE BEING ON FIRE?

I got a lot going on in my head, okay?

And it’s also a defense against the world. The world stays out there. I stay in here. In my mind, things can be as quiet and predictable and cerebral as I want.

It’s out there that I find unpleasant.

Now if this inner focus was just some kind of absentminded professor lovable quirk, then it would be no big deal. Like my mother says, I’m her little dreamer, walking around with my head in the clouds all the time.

But it goes further than that because the human mind needs sensory input. That’s why people risk losing their minds when they go into a sensory deprivation tank. Without sensory stimulation, vital parts of the mind go numb, or worse, the brain generates random signals just to keep them alive.

That’s where hallucinations would come in. Luckily. I don’t have those. Much.

This lack of stimulus effect expresses itself in me as numbness to the world. Why? Because like a prisoner in solitary confinement, my environment never changes.

And one of the basic facts of neurology is that repeated stimuli are muted by our nervous system. That’s more or less the entire basis for getting used to things.

So I live in a very unreal world. The sensory stimulation I get from my environment as I sit in front of this goddamned computer is effectively zero. I have come as close as is humanly possible to being just a brain on the Internet.

Which is a freaky thought.

The only significant sensory inputs I get are from the computer itself. Audio and visual, and none of it as richly stimulating as even a very boring real thing.

It’s all mental stimulation. All the time, every day. And while I like to think I have a strong and well-developed mind, the rest of me is starving to death.

It’s a trap I have fallen into due to my anxiety and depression. I isolate myself from the world in other to avoid stirring up my adrenaline and hence my anxiety. But that’s a very severe cure that is most likely worse than the disease.

As a result of this isolation, I have become accustomed to very low physical stimulation levels, and therefore even quite mild stimuli can seem like too much to me.

And then, bing goes that goddamned anxiety and I am freaking out over nothing.

Another problem with this deep inner focus is that I never get the active sensory feedback I need in order to become less of a klutz. People are supposed to learn how to navigate their world and do what needs to be done by doing it, more or less, and I have isolated myself from that kind of learning both because of anxiety and because my depression, playing tapes from my childhood, tell me I can’t do anything except make things worse by trying so I should never try to learn new skills.

Hence, I am a maladroit extaordinaire. All it would have taken was one adult with the patience and tenacity to make me try something over and over again until I got it right in order to build my confidence in myself, but between my stubbornness and their apathy, it never happened.

And at this rate, it never will. Le sigh.

But the most worrying thing about this deep inner focus and the thick walls between me and reality that it supports is that it cuts me off from emotional inputs as well.

There are people who love me and care about me a lot and I don’t feel it. I know it and I beleive it, but I don’t feel it. At all.

I am just too numb. I want to feel it, I crave the warmth of human contact in all forms, but there is a thick callous between me and the world that was designed to help me cope with loneliness by tuning out the lack of signal that causes it.

But the cost was far too high. It’s so very cold in this heart of mine. The sunlight never makes it through. I am a strange and frozen beast that knows no mate.

I can think. I am very good at thinking. If it can be done by speaking and/or thinking, I am your man.

But it all comes from a cold dark place where I am all alone, forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.