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“Terrorism,” “In…Sanity” - or - Just SNAFU???
Posted by Joseph Riggio on Friday, August 11, 2006Are we installing the fear of terrorism into our neurology? I’m proposing that we are setting ourselves up to “notice for” what we least want to be happening in the world - and as a result inadvertently setting up the perfect conditions for it to flourish.
Morning!
Of course I could be writing about "The Events of Yesterday!" ... as it seems a significant portion of the blogosphere is doing today. But - since they are I won't.
What I have been talking about has been directed to "NOTICING FOR" ... training the attention to "notice for" specific kinds of information in the environment. What we "notice for" ultimately becomes "trained" through repetition. We begin "noticing for" particular things over and over again - these become we could say, "the default patterns of attending."
What's interesting to me includes how we become "conditioned" to attend to the world in the particular ways that we do. Of course as we do we are also creating the world we are attending to in this way. Another way of stating this might be, as we attend to the world in a particular way, what we're attending to becomes reinforced and therefore more prevalent - in turn reinforcing our attending in the way we do. This recursive attending phenomena may actually be generating a much, much larger effect than we have given it credit for before now.
I mentioned the idea of adumbration a couple of days ago now - the idea that we can learn to notice for patterns that are emerging in such a way as to become able to make high-quality predictions based upon those patterns about where the system we're observing may be headed. I first came across this idea in Edward T. Hall's book, "Beyond Culture." I've included the idea of "adumbration" almost from the beginning of my developing the Mythogenic Self work as well, although my ideas about it have been evolving and changing over time (see MythoSelf Morphology 202, Re: Adumbration and Re: Re: Adumbration from the articles section on the MythoSelf.com site for some comments and examples) .
What's significant to me today as I continue to consider the idea of ADUMBRATION includes the way it tunes our attending forward. In other words one of the most significant aspects of "adumbration" or "adumbrating" has to do with how it focuses the attention forward in time. When you're focusing the attention forward you are setting a direction in the system as well. A forward directionality in the system organizes the perceptions in regard to what you'll be noticing for in relation to what you want to happening vs. what has happened or even what seems to be happening in the moment.
Cognitive scientists refer to this as "feed-forward perception", where the perceptions are pre-organized to notice for something specifically. Organizing the perceptions to notice for something specifically, i.e.: "feed-forward perception," can occur either with/by intention, or by default. Previous experience organizes feed-forward perception, e.g.: we expect to see/hear/feel what has been familiar for us in a given situation before. Another way to organize feed-forward perception would be deliberately and/or by intention - choosing to begin noticing for something specifically.
One of the things that begins to happen unfortunately is that feed-forward perception can be set up virtually instantaneously in response to trauma - or a traumatic event ... like those of yesterday. And, these feed-forward perceptions can be (and are) heightened when we are repeatedly exposed to the trauma or traumatizing data (think ... CNN, BBC ... every major media source playing and re-playing for us the data stream about "terrorism" ... along with all the associated sound-bites).
So there you have it ... not only is terrorism happening, but we're installing it into our neurology as well ... SNAFU!!!
Joseph Riggio
Princeton, NJ
