Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Losing my religion

Part 1 - Templates

a few days back, someone excitedly brought his laptop over to me, and showed me a mail.it was a series of basic mathematic addition questions,which had to be answered as quickly as possible, but the last question was to name a color and a tool - i said 'red hammer'... he scrolled down and the mail said "red hammer". he had said red hammer too, we tried it on some more people, and around 90% said 'red hammer', which figured, coz the mail said around 90% inthe world would say 'red hammer'.
consider this- you go for a movie -second show. during the break, you go to the loo, in the next cubicle u see a friend and 90% of us would say "what are you doing here?"
countless situations where we thought 'i was about to say that'....the same music we like, the same tv shows, the same content in blogs, the feeling of deja vu in numerous situations... all what we call coincidences...
and so, the hypothesis - templates, many in number, but yes, all of us templates nevertheless, programmed to respond in a certain way in a certain sitiuation... which is why there are only so many responses to any sitiuations, which is why inventions and discoveries arent exactly common...you think matrix, predictable :), so far maybe, but here's where the hypothesis deviates because we are not having any 'machine conspiracy' around..
lets deviate a little anyway, when you get back home today, try thinking about what you did for the last hour, not the easy response of a generic answer "i was travelling back from work", but a minute by minute recall...you would find that most of the actions were on auto pilot, like changing gears in a car...and therefore you wouldnt remember...
another lil experiment for you, on a regular working day,can you go without saying 'hi'?.. you would perhaps remember not to say it for an hour, then 'auto pilot' would take over...back to the hypothesis, all of us have an auto pilot, all of us also have a higher being inside us, a being constantly ignored in favour of the easier 'auto pilot', but extremely important, nevertheless..why? that is for later parts.
until next time, be unpredictable :)

3 comments:

Kirthi said...

Interesting post.
I concur but only partially. That we go into the "auto-pilot" mode is something comes out of social habit. We probably need our brains to function on more demanding tasks than processing a reaction. I still remember on women's day when some guy wished me, inadvertantly I blurted out same to you without a second thought.
That does not mean our thinking is cliched.
If you mean that we sometimes need to get out of the "auto-pilot" mode and stand back and give certain things a second look, then u have a point.

manuscrypts said...

nope, i am not even getting into the social bit.. i am just saying that we are becoming less 'aware' this way...

cappucinno said...

Interesting post and page-auto pilot huh? maybe we shud consider the 'null' hypothesis then.