my mind is not absent: it's busy!

[gusl]

Today, I've been quite absent-minded. This is correlated with me being happy and full of ideas. Maybe this makes my left brain hyperactive. A few hours ago, I lost a glove inside my living room within a span of 2 minutes. I *knew* I had put it down somewhere moments before, but couldn't figure out where, which really pissed me off. My brain is running several threads, my hands are switching tasks often, and my attention, being overloaded with other thoughts, can't keep up with what I'm doing. So I lose track of what I did. My brain does tons of things at once, and my consciousness can only attend to (i.e. control, record, etc) a tiny part of it.

The other day, just after I woke up and went to the computer, shaktool materialized in front of me. It turns out he'd been right in front of me for longer than a minute, and I didn't see him.

I think "absent-minded" just means busy-minded. Which is why people like me rely on a stable environment: that way, tasks can be performed on auto-pilot mode, freeing up my consciousness to focus on ideas.

I just got back from D's. That place was so friggin' noisy, that I got a sort of tunnel vision of perception. I didn't recognize people until I was right next to them. I couldn't understand conversations unless I directly next to the speaker. Multi-person conversations were more effort than they're worth.

So I felt uncomfortable. Apparently, the only person who understands that is cozmic1 (ironically, the day that he came, I was ok with the noise). Even jcreed, who is normally sensitive to such environments, is ok with the noise at D's.

On my way in, saw two people at a table, speaking Spanish. The girl had a cute asymmetrical smile. I was very amused when she said "mano de vaca", apparently describing a frugal person. Googling for it, I see there aren't many hits, so it must not be an expression in Spanish. This must mean that either she is a Portuguese-speaker, or she was talking about actual cow-hands.

Comments

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that introduces the whole nervous system in the loop, measuring skin resistance, etc. If there was a direct way to measure brain activity, it would have to be CAT-scan-like so that other physical factors are filtered out.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how skin resistance affects EEG, i.e. whether you can filter out this noise. There is another cheaper technology that measures blood inside the brain, based on infra-red IIRC. I guess I'm thinking of DOI.