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Rescued from an August, 2018 Twitter thread, with some cleanup and elaboration. These originally appeared under the hashtag, TailorSnarkWars and were an outgrowth of talking about fashion as a lens for politics. It was a series, and this was the first thread.
This is a continuing series, because it's complex. How we think about fashion is just one aspect of how we think and perceive. I've been working on this for a while.
It's foundational to cognition.
Per usual, I'm just articulating what you already know.
Battle I: Your brain is out to get you
My day job is head candler, shrink, psych, meddler. My primary area of focus is PTSD; I've been 90%+ research for 15 years, I take very few clients, I don't ever want to be in wide-aspect private practice again. I know I'm a good researcher - methodical, precise, accurate, good with numbers, good at asking the right questions. I don't think I'm a good therapist, because I'm impatient, I have a short attention span and I hate doing/teaching 101 level therapy over and over and over.
(I have never told a client to fuck off and get over themselves. I'm pretty sure my human socialization and training as a therapist is strong enough to keep it out of my voice and body language... but in the best interests of people not suffering, let's not test it, okay?)
Your fourth shrink sends you to me after you've graduated out of their care. You and I can dig into the details of why the faint aroma of Old Spice plus the sight of tube socks worn pulled up puts you in panic mode, and how we can hack your brain into Not Doing That.
Wait, you didn't know you should graduate from therapists? Yep, about every 2-3 years. You should grow & a good therapist will move you on. The Freudians who kept people on the couch for decades? They’re grifters. It’s a scam to pay for their kid's tuition, the boat and their summer place.
I'm not the person you go to because you feel general anxiety or sleep poorly or get overwhelmed but can't identify why. You're better off with a therapist practicing in the wild because there's a lot of training of your own brain you have to do in those early years of therapy.
And frankly, I suck at teaching that.
Intellectually, I realize that people who are new to therapy are starting as a first grader when it comes to understanding what their brain is doing, and they need to learn to read using Captain Underpants and phonics workbooks.
And that doesn’t change the fact that I'm teaching a graduate seminar on Regency toilet humor. I’m not good at teaching the basics.
Also, you see one therapist every fortnight, while, were l in practice, I'd see 25 people having mostly the same cluster of similar problems every week. This is actually a problem in all healthcare, and it’s the root of what causes doctors and NPs and PAs to become dismissive and hostile to common problems. The provider’s brain classifies all conversations about diet in the same file, rather than filing each conversation with each patient, which means when you, who have never talked about, say, your diet with them, will get all of their frustrations with the three dozen people they’ve had the conversations with — even if all of those thirty-six people were ALSO first time conversations. It’s a brain quirk, it has to be fought with training, and even training and regular reminders are not sufficient, especially when a provider is overworked. And to be honest, most of the providers I’ve had as clients are totally unaware they do it, and are horrified when they realize that they are doing what I’ve been talking about.
Unfortunately, that aspect, amongst others of the provider-client relationship is asymmetrical, which makes it repetitive for me, boosts my impatience & makes me crankier than usual. (This is another reason why we should graduate clients because it’s better for everyone to get fresh perspectives.)
There are people who teach first grade for decades and are great at it. People who teach calculus and algebra I & II. And set theoreticians who have stopped doing arithmetic completely.
It’s the same concept: I don't teach elementary school, and I'm not great at HS level.
In a lot of ways, early therapy is a lot like the worst customer service job ever - everyone returns a new iPhone that works 100% if they'd just plug it in sometimes. But nobody does. They want new iPhones daily. That's general practice therapy: nobody does homework and we can't fail/fire a client who won't work.)
Which is not to say I can't give a 101 on Perception & how brains work. I can.
Just don't make me do it 25 times a week, with people who have had the class 6 times in the past 3 months & refuse to do the work because that would require acknowledging the problem.
If you need this class again, please bookmark this thread. Be aware... teaching Remedial Self-Awareness makes me cranky and I am one cranky bitch anyway. I will always ask if you did your homework, and if you didn't, I'll send you out to do it.
So...
Your brain lies to you all day long, from the moment you wake up until it puts you back in 8th grade algebra, with a giant erection, in front of the hottest person you've ever whacked off to, while you're wearing the faded Under-Roos you outgrew in 3rd grade.
Your brain is a rat-fucking bastard & it hates you.
(Not literally. Brains don't have intent; they're not independent, but this is how it feels most of the time. This is all metaphor, because we’re really still feeling our way through the dark room that is consciousness.)
Consciousness requires a perception of triality (like duality, but 3), because you perceive that you are not your brain, and you are not your body, and your body is not your brain.
Consciousness requires this sensation of separation, or everything starts to break down.
This used to be strict duality, but with the development of brain science, imaging & theory of mind, the triune nature of consciousness is becoming apparent. Watch this space; it'll get interesting if we can keep the species alive long enough to get really good at psychology.
And your brain hates that the conscious "you-mind" has some control of the body & the brain isn't fully in the driver's seat. But your brain also knows it dies without "you" & dies without the "body", so it will do its best to keep all three of you alive... but it's resentful. Your brain is also not interested in working hard, so it'll keep you alive with the minimum effort it can put in.
This is basic evolution: not survival of fittest, but survival of barely adequate & slightly less broken.
Your brain is a hacker, on a long-term, iron-clad contract. It can't be fired, but it must produce something. So it writes code. It automates a ton of subroutines, then it lays on the floor and reads Wolverine/Thor hurt-comfort AU.
You can see how this might be a problem.
Especially if our hacker doesn't have a lot of enthusiasm for testing the subroutines or updating them.
A bunch of our subroutines started as Tucows freeware (old homo habilis software); it's got security holes everywhere & Russian keyloggers stealing passwords.
It's not even good enough for GitHub.
For the most part, however, this triality of mind-self/brain/body actually works in our favor. Mind over body is a handy trick when you're in acute pain. In short term, we can willpower our way out of some fairly nasty brain-level chemical shit, like panic. It just doesn't last.
The problem is our brains are fucking lazy and don't update shit that was built to run on a 1960s AIX mainframe (aka homo habilis). We're tooling along with far more processing power in our skulls, massive security holes in our network & the punchcard programming. We're a mess.
(Yes, I'm a GenX shrink; I was one of the first gen of computer literate geeks in neuropsych because until computing got powerful & cheap enough, neuropsych was at best theory & mostly bullshit. My simultaneous skill sets? BASIC and transcendental meditation in 3rd grade, HTML and Piaget's developmental theory in HS; SQL and behaviorism as an undergrad. Also, l've always dated geeks & married an R&D comp scientist. So yes, I use the metaphor of brain:hardware::cognition:software a lot. But it's a metaphor and it’s mostly useful as a frame, not as a description of the neurochemistry.)
Just as an example of the way your brain lies, let's take sight. You've got a giant fucking blind spot in the middle of your vision where your optic nerve connects to your retina. Everything comes into your head backwards and upside down because that's how lenses work.
The color of an object is actually everything except what you perceive (because it doesn't absorb the light it reflects which hits your retina). Images come through a red haze because you've got capillaries all through your eye, and your vision only updates the visual file about 3 times a second.
The rest of the time, both your brain & your eyes are busy winding the cat & frying the dishes. Not paying attention to anything — oh, and your brain edits out the fact that your eyes move a lot and don't focus except 3 times a second.
(This is why most auto collision reports contain the phrase "came out of nowhere". A FUCK of a lot can happen at 75 mph between those updates.)
Yet you see (if you do) the world in a functional way that lets you enjoy World of Warcraft, the MCU & twitter. You only notice the bullshit filters your eyes & brain erect when someone shows you a blue/black/white/gold dress or ...a rotating gif like this.
(Can you make the dancer reverse? Now put the dancer back. Now use a search engine and image search “dancer optical illusion gif” so that you get a whole page of them. Now try to get all of them spinning the same way.)
Hearing has a similar set of bullshit filters - Yanny vs Laurel. So does touch: cold things are NOT necessarily wet; hot things are NOT necessarily dry, but mostly, you will perceive cold as wet and hot as dry, to such a degree that cold-dry & hot-wet tend to trigger disgust/cognitive recoiling.
99% of the time, you're happier that your brain lies to you in its resentful, lazy way. The subroutines we have work.
When they're not challenged.
Which is why most people find people like me to be pains in the ass, because we insist that our perception of reality is bullshit.
That's lesson 1: Your brain lies to you to keep you alive, but that means your perception, and therefore your memory, is as reliable as a '75 Ford Pinto in July of 2018. People who can accept this are cognitively MUCH healthier than people who refuse it.
Here endeth metabattle I: your brain is out to get you.
Next time, metabattle II: Dementia comes for us all.
Homework: play with optical illusions. Compare & contrast with friends on color perception & description. Dig in and get comfortable with your brain telling functional lies.
This is a continuing series, because it's complex. How we think about fashion is just one aspect of how we think and perceive. I've been working on this for a while.
It's foundational to cognition.
Per usual, I'm just articulating what you already know.
Battle I: Your brain is out to get you
My day job is head candler, shrink, psych, meddler. My primary area of focus is PTSD; I've been 90%+ research for 15 years, I take very few clients, I don't ever want to be in wide-aspect private practice again. I know I'm a good researcher - methodical, precise, accurate, good with numbers, good at asking the right questions. I don't think I'm a good therapist, because I'm impatient, I have a short attention span and I hate doing/teaching 101 level therapy over and over and over.
(I have never told a client to fuck off and get over themselves. I'm pretty sure my human socialization and training as a therapist is strong enough to keep it out of my voice and body language... but in the best interests of people not suffering, let's not test it, okay?)
Your fourth shrink sends you to me after you've graduated out of their care. You and I can dig into the details of why the faint aroma of Old Spice plus the sight of tube socks worn pulled up puts you in panic mode, and how we can hack your brain into Not Doing That.
Wait, you didn't know you should graduate from therapists? Yep, about every 2-3 years. You should grow & a good therapist will move you on. The Freudians who kept people on the couch for decades? They’re grifters. It’s a scam to pay for their kid's tuition, the boat and their summer place.
I'm not the person you go to because you feel general anxiety or sleep poorly or get overwhelmed but can't identify why. You're better off with a therapist practicing in the wild because there's a lot of training of your own brain you have to do in those early years of therapy.
And frankly, I suck at teaching that.
Intellectually, I realize that people who are new to therapy are starting as a first grader when it comes to understanding what their brain is doing, and they need to learn to read using Captain Underpants and phonics workbooks.
And that doesn’t change the fact that I'm teaching a graduate seminar on Regency toilet humor. I’m not good at teaching the basics.
Also, you see one therapist every fortnight, while, were l in practice, I'd see 25 people having mostly the same cluster of similar problems every week. This is actually a problem in all healthcare, and it’s the root of what causes doctors and NPs and PAs to become dismissive and hostile to common problems. The provider’s brain classifies all conversations about diet in the same file, rather than filing each conversation with each patient, which means when you, who have never talked about, say, your diet with them, will get all of their frustrations with the three dozen people they’ve had the conversations with — even if all of those thirty-six people were ALSO first time conversations. It’s a brain quirk, it has to be fought with training, and even training and regular reminders are not sufficient, especially when a provider is overworked. And to be honest, most of the providers I’ve had as clients are totally unaware they do it, and are horrified when they realize that they are doing what I’ve been talking about.
Unfortunately, that aspect, amongst others of the provider-client relationship is asymmetrical, which makes it repetitive for me, boosts my impatience & makes me crankier than usual. (This is another reason why we should graduate clients because it’s better for everyone to get fresh perspectives.)
There are people who teach first grade for decades and are great at it. People who teach calculus and algebra I & II. And set theoreticians who have stopped doing arithmetic completely.
It’s the same concept: I don't teach elementary school, and I'm not great at HS level.
In a lot of ways, early therapy is a lot like the worst customer service job ever - everyone returns a new iPhone that works 100% if they'd just plug it in sometimes. But nobody does. They want new iPhones daily. That's general practice therapy: nobody does homework and we can't fail/fire a client who won't work.)
Which is not to say I can't give a 101 on Perception & how brains work. I can.
Just don't make me do it 25 times a week, with people who have had the class 6 times in the past 3 months & refuse to do the work because that would require acknowledging the problem.
If you need this class again, please bookmark this thread. Be aware... teaching Remedial Self-Awareness makes me cranky and I am one cranky bitch anyway. I will always ask if you did your homework, and if you didn't, I'll send you out to do it.
So...
Your brain lies to you all day long, from the moment you wake up until it puts you back in 8th grade algebra, with a giant erection, in front of the hottest person you've ever whacked off to, while you're wearing the faded Under-Roos you outgrew in 3rd grade.
Your brain is a rat-fucking bastard & it hates you.
(Not literally. Brains don't have intent; they're not independent, but this is how it feels most of the time. This is all metaphor, because we’re really still feeling our way through the dark room that is consciousness.)
Consciousness requires a perception of triality (like duality, but 3), because you perceive that you are not your brain, and you are not your body, and your body is not your brain.
Consciousness requires this sensation of separation, or everything starts to break down.
This used to be strict duality, but with the development of brain science, imaging & theory of mind, the triune nature of consciousness is becoming apparent. Watch this space; it'll get interesting if we can keep the species alive long enough to get really good at psychology.
And your brain hates that the conscious "you-mind" has some control of the body & the brain isn't fully in the driver's seat. But your brain also knows it dies without "you" & dies without the "body", so it will do its best to keep all three of you alive... but it's resentful. Your brain is also not interested in working hard, so it'll keep you alive with the minimum effort it can put in.
This is basic evolution: not survival of fittest, but survival of barely adequate & slightly less broken.
Your brain is a hacker, on a long-term, iron-clad contract. It can't be fired, but it must produce something. So it writes code. It automates a ton of subroutines, then it lays on the floor and reads Wolverine/Thor hurt-comfort AU.
You can see how this might be a problem.
Especially if our hacker doesn't have a lot of enthusiasm for testing the subroutines or updating them.
A bunch of our subroutines started as Tucows freeware (old homo habilis software); it's got security holes everywhere & Russian keyloggers stealing passwords.
It's not even good enough for GitHub.
For the most part, however, this triality of mind-self/brain/body actually works in our favor. Mind over body is a handy trick when you're in acute pain. In short term, we can willpower our way out of some fairly nasty brain-level chemical shit, like panic. It just doesn't last.
The problem is our brains are fucking lazy and don't update shit that was built to run on a 1960s AIX mainframe (aka homo habilis). We're tooling along with far more processing power in our skulls, massive security holes in our network & the punchcard programming. We're a mess.
(Yes, I'm a GenX shrink; I was one of the first gen of computer literate geeks in neuropsych because until computing got powerful & cheap enough, neuropsych was at best theory & mostly bullshit. My simultaneous skill sets? BASIC and transcendental meditation in 3rd grade, HTML and Piaget's developmental theory in HS; SQL and behaviorism as an undergrad. Also, l've always dated geeks & married an R&D comp scientist. So yes, I use the metaphor of brain:hardware::cognition:software a lot. But it's a metaphor and it’s mostly useful as a frame, not as a description of the neurochemistry.)
Just as an example of the way your brain lies, let's take sight. You've got a giant fucking blind spot in the middle of your vision where your optic nerve connects to your retina. Everything comes into your head backwards and upside down because that's how lenses work.
The color of an object is actually everything except what you perceive (because it doesn't absorb the light it reflects which hits your retina). Images come through a red haze because you've got capillaries all through your eye, and your vision only updates the visual file about 3 times a second.
The rest of the time, both your brain & your eyes are busy winding the cat & frying the dishes. Not paying attention to anything — oh, and your brain edits out the fact that your eyes move a lot and don't focus except 3 times a second.
(This is why most auto collision reports contain the phrase "came out of nowhere". A FUCK of a lot can happen at 75 mph between those updates.)
Yet you see (if you do) the world in a functional way that lets you enjoy World of Warcraft, the MCU & twitter. You only notice the bullshit filters your eyes & brain erect when someone shows you a blue/black/white/gold dress or ...a rotating gif like this.
(Can you make the dancer reverse? Now put the dancer back. Now use a search engine and image search “dancer optical illusion gif” so that you get a whole page of them. Now try to get all of them spinning the same way.)
Hearing has a similar set of bullshit filters - Yanny vs Laurel. So does touch: cold things are NOT necessarily wet; hot things are NOT necessarily dry, but mostly, you will perceive cold as wet and hot as dry, to such a degree that cold-dry & hot-wet tend to trigger disgust/cognitive recoiling.
99% of the time, you're happier that your brain lies to you in its resentful, lazy way. The subroutines we have work.
When they're not challenged.
Which is why most people find people like me to be pains in the ass, because we insist that our perception of reality is bullshit.
That's lesson 1: Your brain lies to you to keep you alive, but that means your perception, and therefore your memory, is as reliable as a '75 Ford Pinto in July of 2018. People who can accept this are cognitively MUCH healthier than people who refuse it.
Here endeth metabattle I: your brain is out to get you.
Next time, metabattle II: Dementia comes for us all.
Homework: play with optical illusions. Compare & contrast with friends on color perception & description. Dig in and get comfortable with your brain telling functional lies.
