Attention!

I was in a cafe today in Bath. It is Cafe Retro which is one of my favourite places to get a coffee or lunch when I am about town. I find it cheerful and unpretentious and the coffee is excellent. Coffee has been a great help to me these recent months. It helps me focus and clears away the confusion for a bit.
However, what struck me today was the hum of conversation in the place. Now, I have had some trouble with my brain of late, as you probably know. Some bits subsequently weren't working very well, causing me to feel a bit thick on occasion and to have trouble concentrating when there was a lot going on. A crowded place, with a lot of conversation has been a challenge to me, causing me to sometimes have to go and sit outside somewhere quiet whilst my brain cools down.

As an aside, I have had the last two weeks off as annual holiday.

Van in the mountains

We piled up the van with all manner of stuff and headed to a friend's farm in North Wales, where every year for the past, oh, maybe seven, he has cleaned out the barn and used it to host a private mini-festival. Everyone present is selected from friends and aquaintances and amongst those are a number of members of most excellent bands.  During the days, living was communal and if I picked up my guitar or banjo to play, often someone with a guitar would wander across to join in and ere long, a small session would be taking place.

Tents and vans appear in a freshly mowed field and we stayed from Thursday to Monday, helping where we could with preparations, clearing up and most importantly, haymaking. After all, it is a farm.

Children of the Revolution

So, the festivities and outdoor living carried on over the weekend and there was much singing, dancing and consuming of beer. 

Soundcheck in the now-clean barn.

Dogs roamed around with stolen sausages, children chased them laughing and not a care in the world was entertained for the whole time. It was a bohemian dream for a few days where pleasure, music and company dominated everyones' consciousness. I am chilled in a way I find hard to describe.

Party in the barn: Somewhere in this night, I got my brain back

And somewhere in that weekend, a switch seems to have been flicked in my brain. Something came back which I have previously lamented the  loss of. I feel complete again. More than complete in fact, if I articulate a feeling that is hard to explain. The experiences of the ghastly happening and subsequent recovery have left a mark which will stay with me forever. From the rudimentary consciousness of those first few weeks through the headaches and regaining of physical coordination and mental faculties, I have learned a tremendous amount which provides an almost endless supply of inspiration for curiosity. And gratitude. I met recently, before my malaise occurred, a survivor of a much more serious SAH and he was significantly different from his former self. I realise how much I have to be grateful for and shall never ever take my life, or my brain, for granted. It could do easily have been otherwise.

And so, as I was sitting in the cafe today, i remarked to myself how the hubbub of voices would have caused me a major "moment" a few weeks ago as my brain tried to make sense of it all at the same time.
But now, I find I can "float" on top of it all and "tune in" to individual conversations or voices. This is an improvement I welcome. But also, it gives me cause for thought.

Normally, where we direct our attention is not consciously under our control. Ok, we may sit writing an email in the office, or watching television, thinking we are concentrating, but if a man cam in wielding a knife or even wearing a silly hat, our attention would be drawn to him and away from the task in hand. This makes sense and is to be expected. However, it becomes clear that some process in our unconscious constantly monitors our surroundings and takes note of what to ascribe significance to and the relative weightings of pieces of information in our environment. And this is not visible to us, or even a process we are aware of.
Well, this has not been working in my brain for some months. All information is equally significant and my brain has been trying to process the whole lot simultaneously. This is obviously impossible and the attempts have caused me some distress. However, today, I sat in the cafe and realised that not only can I focus now and allow this repaired process to do its job, but that I am actually aware of its exixtence and of its operation. Where it was "below the waterline" before, now its workings are apparent to me.
And it is utterly fascinating!

Sitting listening to the hum of discussion, I note some voices demand attention more than others. Speech which is emphatic is more difficult to ignore. Emotional emphasis is flagged as more highly significant and more worthy of attention.
Some male voices are quite compelling. I cannot work out why, but a certain resonance or tone causes the attention to be drawn to it. Also, some bossy women seem more evident in the surroundings than before. I note that with the compelling or emotional voices, I am drawn to examine the content of the speech: With nagging voices, I am afraid the initial response is somewhat more visceral and less civilised.

To observe this process in action is utterly captivating. From a maelstrom of noise that would paralyse my consciousness for a period of time, now information is emerging and the process of extracting it and ascribing significance to it is becoming less of an effort and more unconscious. Unconscious and yet now transparent.

So, now there is another set of questions to occupy the curiosity: What are the criteria upon which our minds base their decisions of where to direct the spotlight of attention to?

These are questions I probably won't find answers to but out of a near-catastrophe, I have had the opportunity to examine some of the intricate functions of the human brain at first hand, as an observer. As a self-regarding mechanism, the brain does give us some wonderfully interesting insights into our own humanity.

So, next time you are in a pub, a restaurant, anywhere with a lot of enthusiastically interacting people, I urge you to just pause a moment to listen in to the whole, and then individual components of the verbal melee. And become aware of the incredible amount of work your brain is doing without you having to worry about it. It really is very impressive.

I am back! :-)

As a postscript, I would like to say thank you to those who have encouraged me to see the positive in all of my recent experiences. Your insistence that I be patient and that I was still compos mentis has been appreciated greatly. Thank you all.

Incuriosity

George Bush reputedly has an IQ of 120. This is not dim by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it is quite a bit higher than average. But people who met him were struck by his incurious nature. I believe his speechwriter David Frum once remarked something along those lines.

Personally, I cannot comment on the former president's intelligence or lack of since I have no knowledge other than that reported to me via the flawed and unreliable news media.
But it does make me think about something that has been niggling away at me for a long time: Some people have an insatiable, driving curiosity and some, though obviously intelligent, do not.

I was moved to put fingers to keyboard over this idea by a conversation I attempted to have with someone who was obviously bright, but seemed to have no spark about them at all. The conversation I attempted to have stemmed from some research that I found fascinating enough to delve deeper into. I had mistakenly believed, given the background of the person I was talking to that he might find it mildly interesting. So I volunteered what I thought might be seeds of an interesting discourse.

The article said that neanderthals tended to be ambush hunters as their spears were not designed for throwing but more for thrusting. It went on to further say that most adult neanderthal skeletons that had been found showed many trauma injuries such as broken and re-set bones.

When positing the reason for this, one orthopaedic expert said that the only analogue in the modern world for such a pattern of injury is a rodeo rider. Hence it is likely that the standard neanderthal approach to hunting was most likely to jump out of a bush, jab a stout spear into a buffalo or similar, and to hold on for dear life until it collapsed from blood loss or sheer disbelief.

Now, to me, the thought of our muscular hero holding grimly around the neck of an irate ungulate, his brow set in firm determination his eyes pointing in different directions as hooves and horns battered and gored his formidable form, is mildly humorous to say the least. I find this line of thinking interesting and in my imagination and my research, feel therefore compelled to learn a little bit more about the assumptions and facts upon which it all rests.

Not so my companion. He merely replied, when I concluded my hopeful two-paragraph monologue, with "uh.. yeah..." and commented about how gloomy the weather is today.

Conversely, I read an article about how the organism toxoplasmosis gondii may be responsible for road deaths in countries where it is prevalent, as its reproductive cycle is usually concluded in a cat, after incubation in a rat. Hence, the rat is compelled by its parasite to engage in risky behaviours.
Since humans catch it too and have, in this respect similar physiology to a rat, it would seem likely that humans also exhibit risky behaviour. This was borne out by the graph showing correlation of road deaths per capita with incidence of T. Gondii infection.

When I mentioned this to a lady acquaintance at a dance, it sparked a look of intense curiosity and a series of very interesting questions which precipitated an hour's discussion. Now, I know this nasty little creature is quite fascinating, making it's way, as it does to the brain of its host and secreting chemicals that interefere with dopamine production, but who would have thought it would spark an evening's conversation with an absolute stranger?

So, why the difference in response? Why do some people wish to know more about things whereas others are happy to think about no more than that which is immediately pertinent to their lives?
Of course we know most human attributes vary with a standard distribution, but does curiosity? Can you learn curiosity or is there a set of genes for it? Ever since my astonishing conversation in a Cypriot supermarket, I have been dogged by this question.

Well, since we are all here, writing and reading material that nobody forces us to, I think I can safely make the assumption that our population here comprises more than the average number of curious souls. And for that I give praise and remark again to myself that time spent tapping on here is absolutely not time wasted.

And now I am off to see what is in the fridge as it feels like tea time. I wonder how my bread turned out.