The Borrowers Are Busy Here!

 

Have you ever had something disappear and searched for it everywhere only to have it magically reappear right where it was supposed to be?

Psychologists say that our brain is often the one that hides things. Our eyes are selective.  I know, as a person who is hard of hearing, that I had to retrain my brain not to hear all the sounds a hearing aid picks up, which our brain normally filters out. The same thing goes for eyes. Our brain decides what is important and ignores the rest.  If you search for something in a specific spot and it's even slightly out of place, your brain may not register it at all.  In effect, it becomes invisible. It may reappear later when you are in a different mental state and simply not looking so hard.

Right now, my little watercolour palette and my TV remote are both hiding from me.  We tend to say the Borrowers took things when they disappear like that.  The Borrowers are tiny wee folk who live in your walls or under your floorboards. This is much-loved folklore, and in 1952, Mary Norton even wrote a children's book about them. The Borrowers do not steal your belongings; they just borrow them and use them in their own homes. They tend to take little things that you shouldn't miss, but often do anyway. 

I do not know where my TV remote is.  It is always kept in the same area, and it's not there. It's not anywhere else in that room either. If it was just my selective eyes not seeing it, then my hubby should have been able to find it when he looked. We tore the furniture apart and vacuumed the crevices and dusted underneath. It's been a few days, and we have even looked in other rooms!  That TV remote is, indeed, missing. The paint palette is also not anywhere that I would expect, it to be, but maybe my studio is just in need of straightening out.

I had a little book I wanted to give someone. It disappeared months ago.  I looked through all the other items nearby.  I even asked my hubby to look through some of the stuff that he had put away.  It was simply gone. Then, this week, while dusting the exact spot where I had last seen it, that little book reappeared.  It is not like I have not dusted there a million times since it vanished. It had to be the Borrowers who took it, and finally decided to bring it back.  I do hope they return the TV remote a lot faster than that!

Did You See That?

Did you see that?

I probably didn't.

I'm always amazed at how other see things I don't notice. But then, I probably see things they don't notice either.

I've been in a car with three other people who discussed some of the houses we were passing. I was totally amazed that they could recall the previous colour or some bush that used to grow by the foundation or what, to me, were just random houses. If you showed me a picture of any of those homes, I would not have recognized them. I guess I don't pay as much attention to what's flowing by while I'm a passenger. There have been times when I'm sure if I was put out of the car on the way to Ottawa I would have to walk a long way before I recognized something that would even give me a clue as to which road we had taken that day. Apparently, I'm not absorbing my surroundings as well as I should be.

A bad accident happened right in front of us on the way home one day. I was looking out the side window at the time of the initial crash and didn't see what happened at all. When I looked forward there was a red truck in the air doing a Dukes of Hazard trick, and I clearly saw the danger of the tires and other stuff that were flying towards us out of the back of the truck. That whole scene was almost in slow motion and stayed with me quite a while.

The brain is an amazing organ but while it is bombarded with so much visual imagery every moment of every day, it simply cannot process it all. It tends to edit it and simplify the information.

I'm learning to draw so while I study what's in front of me, training myself to actually see that object or scene, I'm probably so absorbed in the process of trying to render it accurately that I might miss that you have just made a silly face at me or the dog has just stolen my sandwich.

Police will question multiple witnesses not just to verify that what they are hearing is the truth, but because each person probably saw something some of the others didn't even notice. I have come across an interesting video that gives you real insight into just what it is you see, or don't see. Go watch the video HERE. I'd be really interested in hearing your results.

 

The Human Microprocessor Isn't News to Me

Today I read an article in Yahoo News called 'Microcomputers' Live Inside the Human Brain.  I'm not sure why they think this is a new discovery.

As we all know that the brain is a very powerful computer, but what some people don't realize is that you don't always need to fuss over a problem to solve it.  Just like computers often run programs in the background, once the brain is fed the information and left to do it's own thing, it too can work on solving  problems in the background, while you go about doing other things.  It will present us with a solution when it's finished.

Take for instance the fact that earlier this week I was looking for my watercolour pencils and my journal. They should have been in my art bag, but they were not.  I sometimes take a smaller bag with me to a drop in group where I occasionally do artistic things. They were not in that bag either.  I asked at the drop in if anyone had found them, thinking perhaps I'd left them behind the previous week. I knew I had used them there at that time.  Still, there was  no sign of them, there either.  When I mentioned that I had checked both my bags others got into a conversation about all the bags they have too.....one for exercise, one for art, one for bowling, etc, and the conversation went off in all kinds of directions from there.

 I figured I'd either lost the art supplies, or they would show up eventually, and thought no more about them. Then, last night, just as I was about to fall asleep, my brain solved the problem.  When I had gone to the drop in the week before, I had another event to attend immediately afterwards, and I had taken a different bag containing things I needed for that.  It was one that I never take to the drop in so I had forgotten about it entirely.  But my brain had not forgotten, and though I was not actively looking for my art supplies, or even thinking about where they might be, the computer in my brain put two and two together, and presented me with the answer, when I least expected it.

I related this story to some friends this morning, and was immediately told about the time one of my friends took something apart, and had the devil of a time trying to put it back together again. He eventually gave up. But that night he had a dream about how to put it together, and that solved the problem.  The computer in his brain has worked it out for him and presented him with the answer.

I remembered years ago when I had been trying to learn how to do the afghan stitch.  It's a form of crochet you do on a very long needle.  All the stitches are gathered on this needle as if you were knitting instead of crocheting, and then they are worked off again until you are down to the usual one stitch.  I read the instructions and tried to do what they said. That didn't work. I read them again and tried to work the  instructions one at a time, and still it didn't work.  I figured there was something I just didn't understand, so I took the problem to my mother-in-law. She was well experienced in both knitting and crocheting and I thought she could just show me how it was done.  She had never heard of the afghan stitch, so she read the instructions and tried it herself. She couldn't do it either.  She asked me to leave the book with her so she could figure it out, and I did, but she eventually gave up and we were no further ahead.  Just like in the two cases above, I let go of the problem, but my brain apparently did not.  A few weeks later I had a dream, and when I woke up, I knew how to do that afghan stitch.  The computer in my head worked out the problem and found a way to teach me.

Sometimes when I'm working on my computer, it doesn't respond as quickly as I'd like. Then I tend to press a button, or several, or the same one several times. This only confuses my old computer, and makes it harder for it to sort out just what I'm after.  If I had been patient and left it alone, it would have finished the required task much more quickly.


Many of us have been told in the past that if we have a problem we cannot solve, we should walk away from it.  Often the solution will present itself.  That computer that sits on top of our shoulders can work on the problem with out you fussing over it.  Ask the question, leave it alone and often the answers will come.  You just have to be patient as sometimes, like with our electronic device,  it takes a while for the information to be processed. The little microprocessors are working even when the main brain is focused on other things.

Like I said, I'm not sure why they think this is a new discovery.  I figured it out long ago.