Breaking Radio Silence

[sinanju]

So, my research minions tell me it's been 10 days since I last posted anything. Or, if you're reading this on GreatestJournal or InsaneJournal (new mirrors I've set up since the LiveJournal debacle tempest in a teacup), this is the inaugural post.

Anyhow...one of the things I love about my lovely and talented wife snippy is the discussions we have about esoteric things like communication and perceptual channels. Just this evening she's been reading and writing in various forums about communication on-line and off, and about community etiquette and how various ways of expressing oneself can come across in writing as opposed to in person. Are you "blunt" or are you a cyber-bully? If everyone else is telling you that you're a rude shithead, should you listen--or are they just overly sensitive hothouse flowers who need to butch up? Or maybe there's a little of both involved.

She's struggling to put some of her thoughts into words, and she was talking about it to me. And then she mentioned that she was thinking about it all kinesthetically. Which I had already noticed. That's how she does most of her thinking, whereas I'm mostly visual. Which led into a discussion of the visual versus auditory versus kinesthetic modes that people use when they think.

Which leads me to wonder about a friend who wrote in his blog recently about the internal voice we all have. He spent years in meditation learning to still that voice, to silence it. It's a fascinating entry and I urge people to read it. For one thing, I never thought about meditation as a means of silencing that voice permanently--I thought of it as spending the time you spent meditating silencing the voice. A respite, not an ongoing change in your conscious awareness.

I realize that it's possible to achieve insights via meditation--or in many other ways--that can profoundly alter your map of the world, your awareness, or your behavior. But that's not one I'd ever considered. I don't know if that's a failure of imagination on my part or simply that nothing I'd ever read on the subject by anyone else had ever suggested that aspect. But now I have it in my brain and I may have to explore it further.

For another, it makes me wonder how that kind of consciousness connects up with the three typical modes of thought described in NLP: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. It seems self-evident that if you've silenced your internal monologue, you're not thinking auditorially. Kinesthetically? Visually? I don't know. I'll have to ask, but I don't know that he'll be able to tell me. It may be something you can't describe but can only experience.

Comments

[aquamarcia.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to Chiron's blog article. I too find his notes on meditation fascinating.

You may want to consider reading the works of Daniel Dennett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett), particularly Consciousness Explained (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained). The book makes a strong argument against classic explanations for consciousness. One of my favorite bits is the discussion of an experiment which demonstrated that mental processes which initiate a physical action (like pressing a button when a light comes on) start some 300 milliseconds before the stimuli prompting the action is acknowledged at the conscious level.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

That (the 300 millisecond gap) comes as no surprise. Chiron, who is a martial artist as well as a long-time corrections officer and SWAT trainer, often talks about the fact that most (realistic) training is aimed at getting your conscious mind out of the loop. Things happen too fast in combat--especially if you're caught by surprise, in an ambush or self-defense situation--for you to depend on it.

You need to have your skills ingrained so that you react immediately. That automatic response will (one hopes) buy you enough time to consciously grasp the situation and start thinking about how to survive/escape/win.