We humans have some body parts that no longer have any function. You can think of the appendix, wisdom teeth and muscles in the ears we no longer can use. I guess nature has not found a reason, or the time to loose these parts or functions, while we slowly evolve. There are no big problems with these leftover parts, their main function seems to be to remind us that we once looked and functioned differently.

I did a quick search on the net and found the usual examples of “human vestigiality”, but they mentioned no part of the brain that was leftover and had no longer a function. Certain reflexes like the hiccup and some grasp reflexes are behavioral, and are partially controlled by the brain, these reflexes serve no longer any useful function. I found in my short search no mention of specific parts of the brain that are useless or can harm you if not removed.

If you look into how our brain works and is made, you will learn quickly that some parts are older, we share them with reptilians that lived millions of years ago. During the evolution new parts where attached to the older parts till we ended up with the brain we have now.

In the poem I chose for today I use the amygdala as a specific part of the brain. The amygdala plays an important role in our life but it is not our so called reptilian/primal brain or basal ganglia. This primal part of our brain is the starting point of our automatic behaviours like eating, fleeing and fighting.

You can read bookshelves filled with books about this topic but I will take some poetic freedom in giving an explanation for the poem I wrote on Day 1022.

The night, when I am gone

a visual, engulfs from amygdala

an ancient fear, felt abandoned

I think that some parts of our brain should be removed, if possible, like we do with an infected appendix. These parts wake us up at night with fears and sweat for no reason. They make you angry and fearful at the same time and why can I not decide myself when it is time to eat, I do it anyway around six in the evening.

A big part of our time we are pestered by these prehistorical drives and emotions. We spend a lot of time combating the negative side effects of these primal behaviors. We do yoga, consult psychiatrists and talk over and over with friends about the same fears we can’t explain. We are now so used to rationalize our fears and angst, our more evolved parts of the brain seem to thrive in that behavior, but it seems a little unnecessary. Fear and angst are good if they have a reason, but if they just arrive and react like a lizard reacts to a footstep by fleeing, we could do without them.

Maybe one day, far into the future, we can go to the doctor and ask for a Vulcan-nization of the brain.

 

Are you ever surprised by how you behave when you meet new people or enter a room with strangers. I can predict how I will behave when I meet my buddies from the Marine core or the elderly neighbor from across the street, but sometimes I open a door and surprise myself by my behavior.

A lone house, when I turn the corner

the chimney smokes, a sign of life

is it a stranger that I will meet?

or will it be me?

This is the poem that spoke to me today, it is from Day 1010.

I think that most animals that are higher on the evolutionary ladder, and display a more complicated social behavior, feel unconsciously what the structure of a new group is. With structure I mean simply: who “plays” what role. You have the alpha’s, the followers, the thinkers, the silent ones and so forth. Most groups consist of these different kind of characters. The nice thing is that someone who is silent in one group can be the alpha in an other group, your role can change depending on the group you are in.

I once did Kendo, I was a beginner and when I was in a group of more experienced players I new my place and was silent and listened. Then I moved to a tiny place in Norway where no one ever heard of Kendo. So when I taught it there I was the alpha and people listened to me.

This is what I meant in the beginning, and with the poem. We all have our place in the group, it can change within the group and if you go to another group you have to see and find out what you role is.

And when are you ever yourself, you might ask? I think your always yourself, no matter what role you play in the group. There are off course times that you or someone else forces a role upon the group, thinking that you are that “role”. Most people don’t like that kind of disharmony, a group with to many alpha’s or silent ones will dissolve eventually.

I try, even if it is impossible, to maintain my naivety. I am afraid to settle in a comfortable place in my mind, and steer my life from there. At the least, I try to feign naivety so that the world treats me like I am naive.

I still remember the times that I learned new things, and that I thought: how can I have lived before, without knowing this. The scary thing is, it doesn’t happen any more, or at least, less frequent. Why is this scary you might wonder, because there must be more things to learn. Not finding these new things to learn can mean that I have settled down in my mind, so to speak, or that I am looking at the wrong places. Like for example: the same places.

I lost, for a while now

the innocents, from just opened eyes

it fell down somewhere, maybe when I turned.

This poem is the inspiration for today, I wrote it on Day986.

I think that settling down with what you know is part of growing up and getting older. Your muscles and back are slowly getting stiffer so why would your mind be any different. And like living an active life might delay your slow decay, so does having an active mind slow down the decay of your thoughts and mind.

And like playing with the kids when your older so is playing naive when you know it, helpful to stay younger.

Sometimes you forget that other people don’t think and see the world as you do. An example: the idea that people in different times and places had a variety of viewpoints on all kind of subjects told me that they could not all be right. This taught me that if I feel that an opinion creeps into my conciseness I should ask myself where it comes from. Is it the culture I live in, that agrees with this opinion? Am I obstinate? Is it the book that I am reading? No matter where your opinion comes from, it is an “answer” on a question that stands around that particular question with all the other answers. It is your perspective on that question that determines your answer.

Perspectivism is an legitimate philosophical topic and should not be confused with relativism. We all have different perspectives towards the world, and where and how you interpret the world depends on that. It is important however to know that not all perspectives or viewpoints are equal. A child of 12 and a pilot have both an idea of how to fly an air plane, but it is obvious that one of them is more “right”.

If people say that everybody has a right to their opinion and that you shouldn’t judge them on that, then you talk about relativism. People that support this kind of relativism often say that there is no truth, or that we cannot get there. The sad thing is that we humans often don’t want to accept that other people found a (scientific) truth, but because we don’t understand it we condemn the person that knows.

I don’t like to talk about current affairs but with the Covid epidemic going on and many people rejecting science we have a real-time example of this problem. Lets take America as an example: last year millions of people have gone to the doctor, they got there medical help and subscriptions, that they took without questioning. Because of all kinds of reason, suddenly a big part of these same people shifted there perspective and started questioning there doctors and science. Often the argument is that no one knows and that’s why they are also right, but it is pretty obvious that last years obedient patient knows less about viruses then the doctors they mistrust now.

The inspiration for today came from Day 969.

Perspective and change

a walk around in your mind

realism portrait.

The first word obviously got me going. The perspective of the doctor in the last example is years of schooling, experience and don’t forget an oath and probably a drive to help people that are in need. Compared to the people that deny science, they have an perspective on the disease that is further away from an scientific and curious angle and closer to the perspective of the snake oil salesman from yesteryear’s.

 

For some reason I often look at the first light, when the sun is still reflecting in the morning. It feels like the silence just after you wake up in an empty house and the moment you hear the first noises.

Day 964.

Early morning light

is framed by a closed window

reflecting my mind

In this poem from 2 years ago I tried to catch that moment, when I stand in front of the window and see the light outside breaking through the leafless trees. Sometimes I see a reflection of myself, looking through the window.

The silence of an empty house can be a fertile place for thoughts. If you learn how to recognize and “frame” these moments. You can benefit later, when the world is turned on again, from what you have caught in your frame and window. When you pick up that moment, you can see the reflection of your mind in it, as well as the thoughts it contains.

If you are honest to yourself and learn how look critically inside, you will notice that it is hard to find out which of your thoughts and idea’s are original, as in a 100% yours, and which are borrowed and/or partially compiled and plagiarised from someone else’s idea’s.

It is probably hard to find a genuine original idea inside yourself. Your thoughts and ideas are made out of many different parts. If you are lucky you might find an idea’s inside you that is made out of known parts but you arranged them in such a way that it becomes something unique. It’s like music, where you have a limited number of notes but an almost unlimited way of arranging them, and some of those arrangement are beautiful, but most of them just noise.

My idea of early morning light is quite cliché I think, as well as a window that frames the world, but maybe the combination that I made is more unique. I don’t know if that is the case. I Wil never read all that is written, so I will never know how original I am. My excuse is that I write this in the evening, after a day’s work and a house that makes all kinds of noises.

The premiss of my poem was that the silence in the morning can produce, or frame as I call it, good ideas. This framing is important because it represents the idea that those thoughts you have with a clear mind in the morning are not yet polluted by the daily noises and distractions. The reflection symbolises this idea to, the light is a reflection of the clarity in your mind and the thoughts caught in the frame are a reflection of your mind…

“Thoughts like silhouettes” is the line that caught my eye whilst looking for a poem for tonight. This one I wrote the 31^st of October 2018, Day 952.

A dream like walk home

dark roads an almost clear sky

thoughts like silhouettes.

A silhouette is formed when the object you look at is in contrast with something in the background. Normally this object you look at is covered in darkness and appears black because of this. So if you use this definition then thoughts that are silhouettes appear as black but maybe only because they are covered in darkness.

So your thoughts can appear dark but its not necessary that they are, and they only appears as dark because something bright shines behind it. Is this just another way of telling you that there is light at the end of the tunnel? Something we call in Dutch a “dooddoener”. You could translate it as: a lame cliche or a banality. I think it can mean something more. Your thoughts can be covered in darkness and altered this way. It can appear to be covered in darkness because the memory of a bright past or a bright future you hope for shines in the distance towards you contrasting your current state. You see your current state as a silhouette against those expectations and memories, and as a silhouette you are covered in a veil of darkness and cant see yourself and the real word clearly.

Another way of looking at it, is what we do now. I see the three words and see “a silhouette” of its appearance, but I cant see what meaning is hiding under its cloak of darkness. I think we all have had the experience that you ”feel” what you want to say but you can’t find the word for it. As if you see the answer in front of you like a animal does that knows no words. At most you can point and wave without these words or go off on a ramble hoping you find a way to tell what you see and mean.

And what about the “light source” behind the silhouette, that makes it a silhouette. What shines us in the face when we cant get out of our words and only see the silhouette of what we want to say. Is it the glaring fact that we are fallible creatures? A reminder that we still have to learn things and lack our own light to shine in the darkness?

I don’t know if looking to the world with the help of metaphors is useful, maybe it helps us to find a way out of the maze of our mind. With our thoughts we try to interpret our inner world of wordless emotions and sensations and somewhere in our mind these thoughts get converted to the words we have access to. Everybody through the ages that writes about “what’s happening” has tried to translate these inner movements to words that others can understand and relate to. There have been successes, they even came close, seen from certain perspectives, but I think it will be a playground for many years to come.

 

When I look in a mirror I know that I see myself. I know that I see myself, because I looked at myself in the mirror before. But I just realized that I have seen my girlfriend more than myself, time-wise. I couldn’t help it but if I look in the mirror to myself for 5 minutes a day, in a month that will be around 2.5 hours and in my 48 years around 1500 hours or 60 day’s. And five minutes is not much for some but do you really stare at yourself and consciously take in what you see? I maybe do that 5 minutes a month, I definitely see my colleagues more than that in a month, just to see what there faces are telling me, something I never do when I talk to myself.

So we are no stranger to ourselves, face wise. But if I and my girlfriend rob a bank and the police sketch artist ask me to describe the two thieves, I would have a harder time describing myself than my girlfriend I think…something I would like to try out one day, the describing myself, not the robbing a bank… This is all funny, but seriously, I have a hard time looking at myself and get some kind of information out of that, compared to what I get when I look at someone else that I just met. I don’t know if I give away some kind of mental disorder on my part but I think we all see the difference between a serious face, or a face of someone who has seen a lot or a naive face. I can go on but the point is that I don’t see myself like that. One of the reasons is off course that I have only seen myself for the first time when I was to young to realize this fact. I also have a strong opinion about myself, and what my face should portray to first time visitors. My girlfriends face, or that of my mother, have also less secrets than before, and what it tells me now has also changed over the years. But in our daily communication our faces are still a big part of that back and forth, words only tell half the story. It is that part that I miss when I look in the mirror, that active communication with myself. I only have my own thoughts without the help of my face.

I see a stranger

my hairs rise and with my fear

i turn the mirror.

This poem from Day 928 was the inspiration for today’s writing.

It speaks for itself regarding the message I try to tell above. The only thing that I don’t mention is the fear that turns me away from looking to long at myself. For now I can only say that my face in the mirror is motionless and it’s scary to look at, because it comes to close to what I feel deep inside.. Maybe my face is telling me the truth after all.

If you believe the American/Hollywood culture there are such groups as Italian, Irish, Colombian, Japanese and many more American flavors. They’re portrait as quite distinct from your “normal” Americans. I get this fascination with focusing on the differences, but I hope that people understand that we are for 95% the same in our behavior, in similar situations. I don’t know if it is 95%, that’s a guess.

I am Dutch, and I have some ways of doing things that I have seen more among other people that lived around me in the Netherlands. They say that those are “typical” Dutch behaviors so I pay more attention to them and as a consequence of that attention, I see them more, ignoring the majority that lacks them. I do the same, but in reverse, here in Norway where I live now. They told me, and I read it in books that Norwegians are I some behaviors different than a typical Dutch person. I noticed that they are less organized and more individualistic at work. I worked in different places throughout the country and and I see the similarities. I think we really approach work and organizing differently but focusing on this, and blowing it out of proportion, I might have forgotten that there are many more things we do the same.

I have an anecdote regarding the Dutch and, in this case, the Norwegians. I thought that I came up with this idea but not so long ago I read it also in a book, so I think that “my idea” is somewhat of an exaggeration, but you never know. It goes like this: In the Netherlands we have to build dikes to keep out the water. The one thing that is unique about a dike compared is that everybody that lives behind the dike needs to take care of his or her part of the dike. If one fail’s, everybody is doomed. During the centuries we (the people living in the river delta where later the Netherlands was established) learned to work together and come up with systems to insure the safety of everybody. You can imagine that a thousand farmers in Norway can more or less do what they want at there farm without it effecting there neighbors to much. I think that this anecdote can explain how a behavior slowly grows and gets past on to each following generation. But, for the last 150 years or so you can put the people that take care of the “dike” systems in the Netherlands in a few buses. I have admired the dikes and waterworks in the Netherlands but I never put a shovel in the ground to help, the closest I came was electing the new boss of the departments that maintains it all. So at best I have some lingering “organizing” meme* in me.

The poem that inspired me today was from Day 922

perpendicular

my thoughts and the soil I left

high above I fly.

I read it and thought: my thoughts about my heritage and behavior are not based on a broader understanding of the country and culture I am from. My thoughts comprise at most the place of my footprint, they go “perpendicular” up and that’s my knowledge, and from there I “fly” away

* “According to Dawkins, “the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Dawkins

When I was young(er) I opened up the toys that I had, curious as I was for what was inside, and how it worked. Later in life I became “the toy”, and was curious how I worked, inside. When I was young I also had the habit of opening up other’s toys, and later their minds…not appreciated, in both cases, I can tell you.

I sometimes wonder if a character trait like curiosity is something you learn or inherit. I think that most of it is inherited, and if you are lucky that a trait like that, sticks its little head just above the rest of your traits and gets encouraged, it will blossom. It can also be suppressed by your surrounding and later, when you grow up, no one will ever know of it.

But can you learn to be curious? If you can, then no one has ever found out how you do that. Imagine if more people where curious and wondered: why do I have this specific opinion and not another? Would the world not be a better other place?

I think that a lot of people have at least a little bit of curiosity left in them from there childhood. Maybe the soil is not so barren that a little rain could sprout some lingering seeds. But there is a big change that the barren soil has a big foundation and walls build on it, that keeps the outside world at bay, and the gathered believes safely inside. I guess we first need a jackhammer.

The haiku that inspired my little writing of today was from Day 883.

I spread my fingers

trying to touch entirety

its hidden rhythm.