It is a little cool, but my summer begins with my first swim in the very chilly Cook's Creek. Last nights swim was a bit of a shock, but this morning after a longish run in the hills me and my hot pup Milton splashed around until our bones began to crack from the cold.
Whenever I take him running in a new place I leave a long rope on him. It gives me an extra moment to grab him, should we run into anything untoward (like the skunk that pasted us last week). Milton isn't terribly obedient; he is, however, fairly reasonable. Our interests largely overlap.
I noticed this morning something about the processes of information. Picture this: You are running down a steep, narrow, wooded path. It is mostly stones jutting this way and that, green and blue-grey with moss and lichen. The soil is damp, and the small logs here and there are slippery. A large, red-brown, and joyful dog runs ahead of you, dragging behind him an eight foot long yellow rope which drifts side to side and occasionally under your feet as you run.
Your footing is very particular, and a fall would be pretty painful. Yet your brain negotiates the whole complex exercise smoothly, despite very different foot falls being required every running step.
What complicates things is the rope. If I step on the rope I will suddenly yank Milton's neck, which I do not want to do; if I hesitate, I would likely twist an ankle and fall. Unfortunately, the rope is necessary at this stage of Milton's "training", especially in those woods.
While running I recognized three rather distinct and surprisingly non-influencing lines of mental activity. By this I mean that the first two did not effect each other and the third, though a product of the first two, took a while to come to any action:
1) running down the rocky path requires snap experience- and coordination-based judgments that also tap into a feedback loop regarding the body's strength and performance. These tiny adjustments seem to use primarily the eyes, the conforming of the feet on the uneven ground, an awareness of general inertia, and an awareness of general ability to meet each feature of the path safely.
2) tracking the rope and not wanting to land land on it made no difference whatsoever whether or not I landed on it. I was running quite fast, for me anyway, and clearly the judgments about what my feet should do and what I should do were insulated from each other. A safe step trumped skipping the rope.
3) lastly, the awareness of these two processes not only operating, but of their each having an independent time sense. And then there is the recursive aspect of being aware of being aware, etc etc.
Normally, we assume that time is relatively uniform, at least subjectively speaking. Anyone reading this blog probably has some idea of Einstein's frames of reference in his Special Relativity (i.e. time elapses at different rates for different observers of a given event). Interesting to think, then, that within our own brains are very different rates of time.
Think of summer. I can hold these two thoughts simultaneaously: it seems like a long time ago that we had graduation/I can't believe it is almost July, summer is evaporating. Or, when each day seems so long and the weeks shoot by. Time is not uniform even for ourselves.
Fortunately, someone is working on it:
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?
Here's a link to the rest.
Whenever I take him running in a new place I leave a long rope on him. It gives me an extra moment to grab him, should we run into anything untoward (like the skunk that pasted us last week). Milton isn't terribly obedient; he is, however, fairly reasonable. Our interests largely overlap.
I noticed this morning something about the processes of information. Picture this: You are running down a steep, narrow, wooded path. It is mostly stones jutting this way and that, green and blue-grey with moss and lichen. The soil is damp, and the small logs here and there are slippery. A large, red-brown, and joyful dog runs ahead of you, dragging behind him an eight foot long yellow rope which drifts side to side and occasionally under your feet as you run.
Your footing is very particular, and a fall would be pretty painful. Yet your brain negotiates the whole complex exercise smoothly, despite very different foot falls being required every running step.
What complicates things is the rope. If I step on the rope I will suddenly yank Milton's neck, which I do not want to do; if I hesitate, I would likely twist an ankle and fall. Unfortunately, the rope is necessary at this stage of Milton's "training", especially in those woods.
While running I recognized three rather distinct and surprisingly non-influencing lines of mental activity. By this I mean that the first two did not effect each other and the third, though a product of the first two, took a while to come to any action:
1) running down the rocky path requires snap experience- and coordination-based judgments that also tap into a feedback loop regarding the body's strength and performance. These tiny adjustments seem to use primarily the eyes, the conforming of the feet on the uneven ground, an awareness of general inertia, and an awareness of general ability to meet each feature of the path safely.
2) tracking the rope and not wanting to land land on it made no difference whatsoever whether or not I landed on it. I was running quite fast, for me anyway, and clearly the judgments about what my feet should do and what I should do were insulated from each other. A safe step trumped skipping the rope.
3) lastly, the awareness of these two processes not only operating, but of their each having an independent time sense. And then there is the recursive aspect of being aware of being aware, etc etc.
Normally, we assume that time is relatively uniform, at least subjectively speaking. Anyone reading this blog probably has some idea of Einstein's frames of reference in his Special Relativity (i.e. time elapses at different rates for different observers of a given event). Interesting to think, then, that within our own brains are very different rates of time.
Think of summer. I can hold these two thoughts simultaneaously: it seems like a long time ago that we had graduation/I can't believe it is almost July, summer is evaporating. Or, when each day seems so long and the weeks shoot by. Time is not uniform even for ourselves.
Fortunately, someone is working on it:
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?
Here's a link to the rest.
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