Michael Harris, in “The New Science of Daydreaming,” (Discover Magazine, June 2017, paywall) notes how hard some of us apparently find it to be ourselves – a thought I almost can’t fathom:
“I’m sorry, Julie, but it’s just a fact — people are terrified of being in their heads,” I say. “I read this study where subjects chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than be alone with their own thoughts.”
It’s the summer of 2015 and the University of British Columbia’s half-vacated grounds droop with bloom. Julie — an old friend I’ve run into on campus — gives me a skeptical side-eye and says she’s perfectly capable of being alone with her thoughts. Proving her point, she wanders out of the rose garden in search of caffeine. I glower at the plants.
The study was a real one. It was published in 2014 in Science and was authored by University of Virginia professor Timothy D. Wilson and his team. Their research revealed that, left in our own company, most of us start to lose it after six to 15 minutes. The shocks are preferable, despite the pain, because anything — anything — is better than what the human brain starts getting up to when left to its own devices.
Or so we assume.
What the brain in fact gets up to in the absence of antagonizing external stimuli (buzzing phones, chirping people) is daydreaming. I am purposefully making it sound benign. Daydreaming is such a soft term. And yet it refers to a state of mind that most of us — myself included — have learned to suppress like a dirty thought. Perhaps we suppress it out of fear that daydreaming is related to the sin of idle hands. From at least medieval times onward, there’s been a steady campaign against idleness, that instigator of evil.
Is this really true? I’m well aware that I’m an introvert, if not a misanthrope (my Arts Editor ventures closer to that land than I do, but there are days I can see its misty headlands). But to not daydream – I find that hard to believe.
For me, daydreaming is where I find solutions to problems, and problems in solutions. It’s where the stories lurk, those to edify the audiences, and those to satisfy my ego. Drifting over the landscape of yesterday’s trivial adventures, sometimes I can see a theme from the vantage point of cross-connections.
And sometimes it’s merely reminiscing over old friends.
And I do believe it’s part of what makes for good software, when I do generate such. I’ve often said you’re just as likely to see my feet up on the desk as you’ll find me typing away. I’m actually fairly well convinced I don’t leave my feet up on the desk enough, sometimes. Hurried solutions are just bugs not yet found.
But on the other side of the table, what does it say when people cannot stand the idea of being alone with their thoughts? Never having watched people fall apart under torture of solitary confinement, I’m not sure how they really react, and from that derive sound suppositions. How life-like are dramas?
So let me speculate in computer terms. I’ve mentioned before (or should have) my musings that the current world-wide fascination with smart phones and texting and that sort of thing bears more than a passing resemblance to a distributed computing project, as the various nodes talk to each other, develop thoughts, do work, etc. Now, remove the hardware, and does it hold together?
Yes. Social networks are simply all of us talking to each other, bound by bonds of necessity, affection, mercantile, and others. And while we see ourselves as autonomous creatures, with clear boundaries and strongly held beliefs, it’s far more accurate that our interdependencies, our requirements of each other, define ourselves. (I think I’m echoing a fairly recent philosopher at this juncture, but I can’t think of whom, or where).
Now push this another millimeter along – just how much do we share? Take myself for an utterly trivial example – while in my youth I’d follow various sports teams, these days the best I can muster is a faint “good for them!” when the Minnesota Twins put together a win streak. If I wanted to be more a part of that particular bit of tribalism, I’d have to reach out on my network, find friends already involved in Twins fandom, etc. On the other hand, I can offer a lot in the area of UNIX software development, as well as glib philosophizing (as an acquaintance once emphasized in frustration).
So let’s move it to the classic conception – the hive mind. It’s not improper to suggest that various members of the human hive mind will have various and differing responsibilities, from the hunters and farmers, strong in their disciplines of food generation, to philosophers who (ideally!) are strong in the subtleties of morality, and all the other job responsibilities. This all just flows along.
So if we add in the reasonable supposition that some responsibilities will breed stronger minds than others – or at least minds more suited to such rigors as actually being alone – we might assume that, as a composite creature, some parts of the human hive mind will be dependent on others, just as I am dependent on others in the area of sports enthusiasm. As a more concrete example, some folks may have an inclination towards moral contemplation, while others just sort of go along with the flow in terms of moral behaviors, occasionally straying as opportunity arises.
Some of us know those folks, some of us are those folks.
So Michael’s article suggests there’s a great lie at the heart of the entire “autonomous” human. Our interdependencies are not merely of tangible goods and services, but of the entire gamut of moral, emotional, and intellectual realms, some unsurprising, some surprising, and no doubt some galling to the great adherents of the autonomy myth.
And I find it galling to think that most of us can’t stand being alone with our own thoughts.
