And for Bandcamp Friday, Appalachia Borealis is a cool solo piano album inspired by birdsong.]]>
December 3.http://ranprieur.com/#d32c41d3ce348ec29a586752c94ef20c471cae562025-12-03T15:30:33Z
December 3. Continuing from Monday, it's unfair to say that I live life through a straw. A better way to say it is that perception can be narrow or wide, like a laser or like a floodlight. This has something to do with left brain and right brain, but until I can stick something in my actual brain, it's more helpful to just say that my attention defaults to narrow. An elite perceiver can switch easily between narrow and wide, and stay effortlessly in either one. I can get to wide focus but it takes an act of will, and a continuing effort of will to stay there. It's not like sliding into a groove, it's like holding up a weight. Lately I've been walking around practicing wide focus, being mentally aware of both sides of my peripheral vision at the same time. Some people who do this report an altered state of consciousness, but I haven't noticed anything except that it's easier to not bump into people.
I don't think there's anything wrong with me. An adequate society would have plenty of social roles for people who perform best with narrow focus and wide time. I say "role" and not "job", because in a job someone is making sure you're in a hurry so that they can make more money from your labor than they're paying you. That's what they mean by "time is money," and it's a recent invention. Medieval crafts and primitive flint knapping were done with narrow focus and no time pressure. These kinds of tasks have been replaced by mechanization. The soullessness of AI writing is not new. The same thing happened over a hundred years ago when physical items went from hand made to machine made. We live in a weird dystopia with miraculous devices and rampant "mental illness" which is what they call it when the way you are has no place in a society that's obsessed with perpetual increase.]]>
December 1.http://ranprieur.com/#bda0eba8a878eabc6200ff3b8417e410cdded0d92025-12-01T13:10:52Z
December 1. Today, psychology. From the Autistic Adults subreddit, Driving isn't a neutral task for everyone. For many autistic people, it's a high-stakes multitasking nightmare. I think autism will eventually be understood as multiple different conditions, because descriptions of what it's like to be autistic are all over the map, and often contradictory. For example, this thread, your favorite part of being autistic, includes both hyper-logic and hyper-empathy, both intellect and intuition, both sense of style and indifference to style. Even in the driving thread, there's a sub-thread about autistic people who love driving.
I haven't been diagnosed with anything, but it seems to me that neurotypicals have a mode I call "self-driving human". They can "zone out" or "stop thinking" and their body automatically does the right thing while their conscious mind can just sit back and watch. I've never done this. When I'm driving, I have to constantly pump out my attention: look at the white line, look at the speedometer, look at the mirror. If I zone out, I crash. Even in my own apartment, I need fully conscious attention to not bump into things. Even when I'm walking, I have to monitor and instruct my mechanics and posture or I get stiff and slouchy. I live life through a straw. Peak performance is not expansive but contractive, not tuning into some larger being, but tuning out everything but this one little move, which in total isolation, with unlimited time, can be done perfectly. This is the opposite of driving, and the opposite of how this society is tooled.]]>