Learning by analogy

I think almost completely in terms of analogies.  Maybe you all have noticed.  I use them all of the time on the blog to explain things.  My mind naturally focuses on the relationships between things rather than the characteristics of the things themselves.  It's how my information is stored in my head, which means that I experience the world differently from people who don't do this.  Different things are obvious to me that aren't so obvious to others.  An analogy (again!) would be a bookshelf.  If you organize it alphabetically by author, you'll focus on that, if you organize it on subject matter, you'll focus on that, and if you organize it by color... the bookshelf will be more aesthetically pleasing.

When I encounter something new, I immediately start spinning through the universe of possible analogies to it, like a safecracker hunting for the right combination, or a picklock feeling for something similar enough to fit, at least in all of the ways that are important (functionally).  I'm one of those annoying people who are always talking about how similar music is to mathematics.  And now that I've been taking calculus courses in my spare time, I think of everything in terms of limits.

I don't know when I started doing this, but I learn this way almost exclusively.  Anything else is the equivalent of recreating the wheel.  What it means as a practical matter is that I either pick up on things extremely quickly, or I'm a complete idiot -- a very flat learning curve, punctuated by sharp inclines.  I am particularly horrible at following directions.  When I eventually do learn something, it's basically because I have finally cycled through enough possible analogies to have hit on the right combination.

This one aspect of my personality has probably affected my life and personality more than any other one trait, even probably more than my sociopathic tendencies.  In fact, it's sort of odd that I have never mentioned it before, I guess because I thought that it didn't have anything to do with sociopathy so why write about it here.  But now I sort of wonder if this type of thinking is more common amongst the sociopathic population than the empathic population.  Perhaps, for instance, because sociopaths are naturally obsessed with power and manipulation, the relationships between things take on a prominence and focus in the same way that there are allegedly many more words for snow among Inuit tribes?

Sociopaths in news: Anonymous

A reader sent me this article featuring Barrett Brown, one of the faces of anonymous. It's an interesting portrait of the man and the organization.  I saw some things that suggested sociopath to me, but it's so difficult to know what is really going on in someone else's head.  Under the teaser: "From a tiny Uptown apartment he's organizing a worldwide collective of hackers that brought down HBGary and helped overthrow the government of Tunisia."


Finally, there is the inscrutable topic itself. Anonymous is sometimes referred to in the mainstream media as a group or a collective—the Christian Science Monitor went with “a shadowy circle of activists”—but Anonymous, per se, doesn’t exist. It has no hierarchy, no leadership. So even though Bloomberg and others have called Brown a spokesman for the group (which, again, isn’t a group at all), Brown denies having any position within Anonymous. 

“Anonymous is a process more than it is a thing,” Brown tells Isikoff. “I can’t speak on behalf of Anonymous, because there’s no one who can authorize me to do that.”

When he explains Anonymous to a newbie, Brown relishes the inevitable confusion and will toggle between sincerity and irony to heighten it. Until you’ve spent some time with him, it’s hard to know what to believe. When you’ve gotten to know him better, it’s even harder. 

“You have to remember,” Brown says, reclining in the green lawn chair, one arm slung over its back, a cigarette dangling between his fingers, “we’re the Freemasons. Only, we’ve got a sense of humor. You have to wield power with a sense of humor. Otherwise you become the FBI.” Here Brown is half-kidding. 

***

Brown wrote the following in an essay titled “Anonymous, Australia, and the Inevitable Fall of the Nation-State”:

“Having taken a long interest in the subculture from which Anonymous is derived and the new communicative structures that make it possible, I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”

***

As Brown paces and recounts some of the highlights he’s amassed in just 29 years, it’s tempting to brand him as a fabulist. He’ll begin an anecdote with “I once had to jump out of a moving cab in Dar es Salaam.” But then he mentions that he went to Preston Hollow Elementary School with George W. Bush’s twin daughters. My mother taught the Bush twins at Preston Hollow. I tell him this, and he remembers my mother.

“I was the poet laureate of Preston Hollow!” he says. 

***

Later that night, I call my mother, who taught him art. “Do you remember a kid named Barrett Brown from Preston Hollow?”

“Barrett Brown? Oh, my God,” she says, instantly recalling an elementary student she taught more than 20 years ago. “I don’t remember them all. But I remember him. Yes, he was the poet laureate. I don’t have it anymore, but I kept that poem for years.”

Having now had several corroborative conversations like the one with my mother, I am forced to conclude that most of what Brown says is accurate—if not believable. 

I also like this part (it reminds me of my own shockingly flat learning curve, as manifest by things like my inability to figure out how to mail a package):

He wears the same outfit every day. He owns a dozen identical blue pin-striped oxford shirts. He wears only boots because he hasn’t bothered to learn to tie shoelaces properly. (When Nikki Loehr told me that being Brown’s girlfriend can be exhausting because she must work to keep him on track, citing as one example of Brown’s ADD-powered absent-mindedness his inability to “tie his own shoes,” I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t.)

It was hard to pick representative selections from the article that would lead me to armchair diagnose him with even a semblance of accuracy (even for armchair diagnosis).  He does seem like an interesting guy, though, and I think it is helpful sometimes for people to realize that not everyone thinks like them.  That some people do things just because.  Or for their vanity.  Or because they need much more stimulation than a normal life would provide.  And that they will do whatever it takes.  The caption to the photo of him reads, "'He demanded that this story mention he outgrew his Ayn Rand phase when he was 17. He said, 'If you don’t put that in there, I will personally DDoS the f--- out of you.'"

Starting over

I have been doing the same thing for around 3 years now.  That's my typical expiration date before I let things fall apart.  And that's really what it is for the most part.  I was talking to a friend about this.  I don't think it's self-destruction for the sake of self-destruction.  It's just abandoning my current life for something different, letting my life raft sink.

I thought of the analogy of an etch a sketch toy.  Let's say that you've spent about 3 years working on an etch a sketch drawing (it took you so long because you have a very flat learning curve).  Finally you get to the end, or maybe just as far as you would like to go on this particular design.  What do you do now?  You shake it up and start over.

You could keep it, maybe frame it and hang it up on the wall.  One time when I was in East Germany I actually visited someone's house where that's what they had done, essentially -- assembled puzzles, then varnished the top, put them in a frame, and hung them on the wall.  Not really the point of a puzzle, I thought.  The point is not to have a pretty picture of something to look at.  The point is the process of the puzzle, the enjoyment you get from cutting your teeth on some new game.  Same with the etch a sketch.  Same with life.  To me the point isn't to get to a certain point in my career or relationships or social circle or geography and just stick with it.  To me the point is the process: the planning, the initial steps, the reassessment, the further plotting, the execution, the tenacity, the fulcrum.  Often I don't even stick around to see the final product.  Sometimes I leave the puzzle half finished.  Once I am bored of sufficiently assured of my success (at least in my own mind), I am ready to move on and start over on something else.  

I know there is something coming up that could change my life drastically in about a year.  Otherwise I might be busy shaking things up right now.  But it's kind of weird timing, both close enough in my two year plan that it makes sense to keep doing what I am doing until then, and long enough away that I'm itching to get on with it.

Preattentive processing

This was an interesting article discussing the progression of recent research that focused first on fearlessness as an explanation for much of psychopath's behaviors, then to attentional deficiencies (psychopaths don't direct their attention to scary things as much as neurotypicals), and most recently deficits in pre-attentive processing. From the Huffington Post and the author of "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits":

Patrick Sylvers, of the University of Washington, working with Patricia Brennan and Scott Lilienfeld of Emory, suspected that psychopaths may suffer from a deficit in "preattentive processing" -- the constant, automatic scanning of one's surroundings that takes place outside of conscious awareness. Theoretically, if children lack this basic cognitive machinery, they would never learn to decode normal signs of danger, and without this acquired fear, they would fail to socialize into adults with conscience.
***
The scientists gave the boys a visual test that measures unconscious emotional processing. Specifically, they wanted to see if the test subjects, compared with normal boys of the same age, were slower to become aware of fearful faces that were flashed rapidly -- so rapidly that they were not registered by the conscious mind. If so, this would be evidence that the troubled boys are not automatically assimilating threatening cues in their world. They also flashed happy, disgusted and neutral faces for comparison.

The results, reported online in the journal Psychological Science, were clear and provocative. Indeed, they comprise the first evidence ever that kids with psychopathic traits have a significant deficiency in their automatic, unconscious processing of certain cues -- especially fear cues, but also cues for disgust. Fear and disgust are closely related in the primitive mind, and the findings suggest that these troubled kids have a fundamental impairment in recognizing -- "in the blink of an eye" -- any kind of social danger. So perhaps the childhood roots of Hannibal Lecter's murderous personality lay not in fearlessness itself, nor even in his conscious thought processes, but rather in his general social cluelessness.

I hadn't heard the term pre-attentive processing, so I looked at the Wikipedia article for it and wasn't surprised to see that it is also associated with those on the autism spectrum. Apart from that, I still am not quite sure why the lack of preattentive processing would cause attentional problems. Presumably it's because certain things never even show up on the sociopath's radar, so of course they would never consciously/attentively register them?

The subject area is ripe for exploration. If this is a primary causal factor in sociopathic behavior, can this be treated? For instance, the wiki article suggests that by consciously focusing on particular tasks, preattentive processing will improve for information related to those specific tasks. How do preattentive processing defects relate (if at all) to sociopath/autistic supersensitivities or the concept of hyperfocus? Is it like how paraplegic people have super strong arms to compensate for the lost use of their legs? And on a more personal level, could this explain why my learning curve is shaped like an exponential function instead of a gradual increase, i.e. extremely flat at the beginning then sloping steeply up?

As I've said before, I really relate to the attentional theories for sociopathy, I'm very curious to see where this new research leads us.

A quick word on the who wrote the blurb -- this is the guy who advocates in his book that people force more thoughts out of their subconscious and into the conscious mind, something that I have always done both naturally and explicitly. You almost wonder if this guy is not a sociopath himself, or at least has trained himself to see the world more sociopathically. By the way, if you're interested in becoming similarly more sociopathic, Amazon tells me there are a slew of reading options including (according to one reviewer): THE ART OF CHOOSING, THE INVISIBLE GORILLA, THE HIDDEN BRAIN, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, or MISTAKES WERE MADE (BUT NOT BY ME)

The abstract for the paper is here.