Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Soul searching

A reader asks: "How is it that sociopaths can 'see' someone's soul or see people as they truly are? How come the rest of society doesn't see the person for who they really are?" My response:
That is such a good question. I feel that you probably only notice the sociopath's ability to see because it is such an unusual perspective, everybody else's perceptive abilities are so familiar to you that they have become emotional background noise (Von Restorff effect?). As a thought experiment, stop and listen to all of the noise around you. Try to identify the source of all the noise you hear, whether street noise, other people, television, radio, automobile noises, wind, etc. You never pay attention to this noise, never even notice it is there most of the time because you are so used to it. You only notice things that are out of the ordinary.

I think a similar thing happens with empaths reading people. You are probably very used to other empaths seeing things about you that you never told them, e.g. when people see your face and realize that you are sad, when people don't stand too close to you because they realize you need your personal space, when people don't either scream at you or whisper at you. With all these behaviors, other empaths are seeing parts of who you truly are and acting accordingly.

Sociopaths see things that you never told them too, just not always the same things a typical empath would see. First, sociopaths have a very different focus, different expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and everyone else are doing emotional sleight of hand meant to distract the average observer from certain harsh truths, e.g. you no longer love your spouse, or hate your boss, or are having an affair, or can't stand your children, the sociopath remains undistracted. It's like telling a joke to a kid with autism -- your attempts at subterfuge will simply not always have the same effects on a sociopath as they have on empaths. Second, sociopaths are students of human interactions, closely studying others so they can pick up on the right social cues to blend in, imitate normal behavior, etc. The truth is that the more you pay attention to something, the more aware you will be. I am a musician, and I can listen to a recording and tell exactly what is going on, who is playing what, even the way the music was mixed in the studio. You could learn that too, if you practiced as much as a musician does.

I think this is what you are referring to when you say that sociopaths seem to be able to see a person's soul or see people as they truly are. Or maybe it is more of an extraordinary bias in which you honestly don't expect a sociopath to understand anything, so when they do they seem very clever? I don't actually know, these are just my guesses.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Narcissists in the news: Paul Frampton

In the NY Times Magazine, headlined "The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble," a hilarious profile of a raging narcissist getting "catfished" into being a drug mule and stuck in an Argentinian prison. It is one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in the past year or two, maybe. Great pacing! Worth reading in its entirety! But just in case you're lazy, here are the selections that scream narcissist to me:

  • Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.
  • Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.
  • “I’m a bit of a celebrity in here,” Frampton said.
  • Frampton closed our interview half-seriously, half-impishly, with another kind of calculation: “I’ve co-authored with three Nobel laureates. Only 11 theoretical physicists have done that. Six out of those 11 have won Nobel Prizes themselves. Following this logic, I have a 55 percent chance of getting the Nobel.”
  • Shortly after his divorce, Frampton, then 64, expressed concern about finding a wife between the ages of 18 and 35, which Frampton understood to be the period when women are most fertile. . . . “He told me to look her up on the Internet,” Dixon recalled. “I thought he was out of his mind, and I told him that. ‘You’re not talking to the real girl. Why would a young woman like that be interested in an old guy like you?’ But he really believed that he had a pretty young woman who wanted to marry him.” When I later asked Frampton what made him think that Milani was interested, he replied, “Well, I have been accused of having a huge ego.”
  • “There could be retribution. I could be assassinated.”
  • Frampton is prone to seeing himself as the center of the action whatever the milieu. When he was growing up in Worcestershire, England, in what he describes as a “lower-middle-class family,” his mother encouraged him to report his stellar grades to all the neighbors, a practice that may have led the young Frampton to confuse worldly laurels with love. 
  • In what a fellow physicist described as a “very vain, very inappropriate” talk delivered on the 80th birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, Frampton veered into autobiography, recounting how his ability to multiply numbers in his head at 4 led him to see himself as “cleverer than Newton.” This line became a refrain throughout the talk. Interspersed with the calculations and hypotheses were his Oxford grades, which, he said, showed that he, like Newton, was in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Frampton insists that he was merely joking and that his sense of humor was misinterpreted as self-regard. Yet in many of my conversations with him, he seemed to cling to the idea of his own exceptionalism. During our first meeting, when I asked him what attracted him to Milani, he said, “Not to offend present company,” referring to me and the representative from the penitentiary service, “but, to start with, she’s in the top 1 percentile of how women look.”
  • When I asked Frampton if he had slept in, he said he spent half the night on the Internet, reading through all the latest discoveries in his field, checking to see what his “competitors” had been working on, and beginning to answer the thousands of e-mails he received. He reported that he had more citations than ever.
  • "This sounds a bit egomaniacal, but to understand dark energy, I think we have to be open-minded about Einstein’s general relativity."







Sunday, March 10, 2013

Deconstructing performances

Photo by Gavin Whitner.

I grew up in a family of musicians and we would regularly go see all sorts of musical and dramatic performances. Always on the trips back home we would deconstruct whatever it was that we had just seen or heard, a particularly powerful performance or a flubbed line. We had been trained to see things with a critical eye and this was our opportunity to participate ourselves in the performance and show off for each other. I used to love giving some insight that would elicit praise and agreement from my parents and siblings. I was proud to have discriminating taste. But I also enjoyed hearing others' opinions. They were teaching me to look for things I wouldn't have otherwise seen, listen for things I wouldn't otherwise have heard. Once I became a performer myself, these sessions were doubly interesting to me because they would validate my own performance choices, or point out areas for improvement -- pricking my pride and feeding the flame of my ambition. And that's what made any of these performances interesting to me -- my own engagement with them during, but especially being able to savor them after.

It's funny, I have always had the impulse to "dish" with people after things. That's one of the few truly worthwhile things about having at least a few friends who are gossipy fishwives.

In my relationships I always have this moment of "big reveal," where I feel like it is suddenly ok to rehash all initial encounters, at the time fraught with uncertainty and intrigue, and give the backstories and internal monologues that were hidden at the time ("I was so worried when you found out about X, but luckily I had the idea to play it off as Y"). I love to brag about things -- how I seduced them, or marked them as a target long before I was even on their radar. The actual dance steps of a relationship are an ok distraction for me, but the true pleasure is getting to deconstruct it all with the person months or years later.

Last night, coming home from a performance with someone I am currently engaged with, I realized the parallel between my childhood performance critiques and my adult relationship rehashings -- I am performing in relationships. I guess everybody does, but my main interest is not just to acquire the other person, but to perform the process beautifully. Without the promise of having an audience (even of only one or two), I don't think I would care to engage.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Conversation with a friend

Friend: You think much of yourself.

M.E.
: I think about myself a lot, if that's what you mean...

Friday, March 8, 2013

Imagining the future


I was reading an article about how humans are different because we have ability to imagine possible futures, allowing us to plan.

I liked this. I love to imagine futures. I like feeling like I am living one of an infinite number of parallel universes, diverging at each point in time. I also like it because it helps me to understand some of the ramifications of the things I am doing in the present that I otherwise might not understand. Deciding what to wear, I imagine in my head what the future me would look like in a few minutes if I put particular clothes on. Deciding whether I should or should not eat something, I imagine my future self in 10 minutes and if my stomach would be upset or not. Those are the main practical ones.

The eating one is interesting because I had to learn it, and really only relatively recently. The foods that make me sick don't taste bad to me. They don't taste rotten. (That's why rotten things taste bad to us, right? Evolutionarily evolved to not want to eat things like human feces because they're so bad for us?) So I would keep eating them and get sick. That happened enough times (thousands) that eventually I had enough. Now before I eat something I first try to imagine my future self, would my future self get sick? And it's weird, when I in my imagination my future self gets nauseated, my present self also feels nauseated. (Side note, this is also how I managed to fully fund my retirement -- I imagine my future self enjoying the money and my present self feels the pleasure.)

I also sometimes do this with morally implicated choices. I was raised religious, so I was taught to judge things by a particular standard, even nuanced things -- same as learning to be able to judge musical things by a certain standard. But it's hard to perform and judge yourself at the same time. That's why my music teachers always had me record myself and then listen to it later. And I've never quite learned to judge moral things in the moment either. But I can later realize, maybe days, weeks, or years later that I have done something "wrong". Now if it's something or someone I care about, I will imagine my future self looking back at what my present self is doing and judging things as wrong or right. Not often, though. Not nearly as often as I do the eating thing. Maybe thousands of moral "mistakes" later, I will get pretty good at doing that too?
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