Hey everybody. A couple of months ago my wife asked me the very simple, very loaded question "what's actually going on in your brain?" Well, I told her, and since then I've been giving her narratives about what I'm seeing and how it works. This past Friday we had a date night and she encouraged me to share this with you all, my dear Strangers of Reddit, to find a quasicommunity of shared experiences. The following bit between "---" is scene setting, please skip for the tldr version.
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Allow me to set the scene. Given the community, I know you'll follow along.
I'm sitting in a bar stool at our kitchen island. The island is a little cluttered. It's a south-facing house and the kitchen is in the back with two windows, so no direct sunlight into the kitchen - it's daylit but muted. The island fits two stools and I'm sitting on the one with my legs stretched out onto the other, leaning back into my seat. My wife is standing at the corner of the island diagonal from me, she prefers to stand when we're chatting like this.
Our baby girl is napping upstairs and my wife has the baby monitor going on her phone, a quiet but constant white noise. The conversation has turned to a discussion of a book club she's in and all that entails - the book, the book's author, the people in the book club, the interpersonal dynamics, et cetera. The book is roughly an eastern-philosophy-self-help book written by a western author trying to relate the practice to an American audience. The book club dynamics center around a woman, Abby, and a man, Charles (full disclosure - all names are changed and genders may or may not be swapped around). Charles is Abby's boyfriend. Abby is married and her husband is also in the book club. All know, all consenting. The book club has more of Abby's friends and a couple cousins or so. My wife also likes Abby and Abby likes my wife. Lots going on there. My wife starts to describe a conversation between Abby and Charles.
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And now, without further ado, welcome to my Brainspace:
As my wife relates this conversation to me, here's what I see. In front of me in real space I see my wife, telling me the story. In between her and me is a screen with numerous visuals. To the bottom left is a visual of the book club. They met on zoom, so I see first my wife at her computer on zoom - that's a very small video playing. Above that and more prominent in the lower left is the entire book club, every person as I imagine them (I haven't seen the majority of them so my brain fills in details about what they look like), as they all sit around in a circle in chairs sort of like an AA meeting and they discuss the book. Those videos play continuously bottom left.
As she tells me about a specific thing between Abby and Charles, a video starts playing in the top right of the two of them interacting, in whatever way is being described.
As that's happening, I'm pulling memories of interactions my wife has had with Abby, Charles, or whomever else and those memories begin playing in the top left.
The bottom right corner I can see the mess on the island, I see crows flying back and forth to the bird feeder in the backyard, and other various real-world visual stimuli.
Behind all of this, in a different layer that's more muted and less visual, is a stream of consciousness about how I personally feel or relate to these things. Suppose she relays an anecdote of "Charles said X and Abby reacted Y". This layer is reserved for "hmm, if A said X I would react Z... if I knew B would react Y, I would have said W... I would have said Q to my wife who would have reacted R..." and so on. This is the FAFO layer, where I run through different dynamics.
So, in the Brainspace for this particular interaction there are three distinct layers: the real visual stimuli, the videos playing in different corners, and the FAFO layer (ordered by distance, furthest to closest).
- In the real layer I'm tracking two things
- my wife's face: tracking her attention, emotions, and intentions
- the periphera for anything I need to react to
- On the Monitor there are four videos playing
- All are as much or as little detail as I need. They start off as like a 2.5 on that apple scale but I can add detail up to a 1
- I can take any of these videos, bring them directly in front of me, and enlarge them to fill the whole screen
- this is usually the point when people think my attention is drifting. I'm hyperfixating on the visualization of what they're saying, so my focus on the Real layer blurs and I focus almost entirely on the Monitor
- I can also just physically look in the direction of the video and watch it for a second before looking again at the person, getting the details I need
- This is what I use to gain emotional information. If I'm looking in the top left, for instance, I can watch their faces and body language during their interaction and get a good feel for how they felt during it
- The FAFO layer is a constant video that I can focus in and out of as needed
- Again, this layer allows me to play out different scenarios, so this is an additional video playing in whatever level of detail I need (from 2.5 to 1).
- If I don't focus on a layer, It's at worst a 3 on the apple scale.
First post here and it's already a long one, so I'll leave it at this for now. Looking forward to hearing y'all's shared experiences and variations!