Wait, wait....

"Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!!" is a weekly radio show, humor barely disguised as quiz. I love to listen to it while I'm driving. Occasionally, I am particularly delighted by a guest when I pull into the driveway, and dash into the house to find the program on the inside radio and listen.

And never do. Never. It is impossible for me to listen to WWDTM while not driving. Driving provides the perfect setting for listening to light, amusing radio.

Why? I can watch light, amusing TV at home, usually while reading a book at the same time. I can listen to serious radio at home, with some effort not to get distracted. But light amusing radio is best heard in the context of particular split concentration. I can listen while paying enough attention to the road, but the content can't stand up to exclusivity -- for me. My guess is that different folks have different places on the concentration scale where WWDTM fits. But for me, WWDTM requires neither too much nor too little attention to coexist with driving.

And, when I do arrive home, I can't remember any of the great funny lines from WWDTM I've just heard minutes before, probably casualties of that same split concentration.

What is going on? Nothing very dramatic. We have always had split consciousness. The Neanderthals had an eye out for predators while looking for their own meals. So does my cat. Pretty trivial.

This all came to be important while I was supervising a beginning counselor. We were talking about a certain client. The counselor had enthusiastically signed on to help the client "follow his dream". I was disturbed on plenty of levels. Counselors are usually expected to work with a client to make sense of the client's emotional world, not to promote a fantasy as the solution to all the client's problems. In this case, in particular, the "dream" was enormously self-destructive to the client.

But, the counselor said, when I attempted to intervene, it's the client's DREAM! He repeated this over and over, as if I just had lost my hearing. Even when I directly instructed him to change his approach, he just said, again and again, "It's his DREAM!". I discussed with him his own dream, of being a counselor, trying to do with him what I wanted him to do with the client. Failure ensued. He is no longer a counselor.

We pay a lot of attention to "dreams"; I know some folks who dream of being baseball players, or great lawyers, or, as above, heroic rescuers of terribly impaired people. The dream is in some little drawer somewhere. It has energy, and it pushes on the drawer to try to get out. We talk of motivation and goals, but they are watered-down versions of "DREAMS".

This dream stuff is about mind, and subject to the same language structure I've been talking about before. Alert Reader will notice that "dreams" are invariably of positive achievements -- they may be silly, but they are not malevolent. We don't talk of "dreams" of being animal torturers, or of working on an assembly line, or of being bored to distraction adding up columns of numbers. "Mind" things -- now to be known as "mind-type" things -- are always prescribed in the language of social norms. Mind-type things traverse, even ignore, the boundaries of self and world. Brain-type things do not.

Lots of mind-type things can exist at the same time. And how could it be otherwise? Mind-type is part of a social context. We can't expect social context to be simple. My "dream" is about my desired place in the world, in a thousand different ways. Some folks are described as more "single-minded" than others. We talk of them with ambivalence, In the end, mind-type is never simple, and we don't really warm up to the people who pretend it is.

What about WWDTM and split concentration? Not "mind" stuff at all. "Brain" stuff. Some day, possibly pretty soon, we will be able to have good brain-type explanations of concentration. The explanations will be descriptions of biological events going on in the physical entity of a person.

All this stuff comes together in social pathology and brain pathology. At the current state of psychiatry, we are trying to deal with social pathology -- mind pathology -- chemically. Stupid, and destructive. Somebody who is "mad", in the 19th century way, maybe catatonic, maybe hallucinating -- sure, give them a chemical. But in the 21st century, we simply put the mind type, social pathology, into the brain-type, physical pathology. The Soviets did the very same thing in mid-to-late 20th century; political dissent, mind-type, was defined as brain-type, and treated as such.

I know this sounds obvious to Alert Reader, even trivial. From the perspective of the brain-damaged, though, not so much, or, I suppose, so little. I know that my brain-type pathology slides into social pathology, mind-type; I can see it on the faces of the people I deal with. When TLE invades my life, whether in excessive talk, shifting emotional states or odd impulses, suddenly I have moved from brain-type to mind-type, and, as I said before, I feel the humiliation that is so characteristic of the loss of control of the body. I can see the shift from interested talk to the judgments about my social deficiencies. I want to say to people, hey, don't give up on me, I'll get control of this somehow, and pretty soon.

But, not quite yet. Hypergraphia, remember, is part of TLE.

This entry has been pretty strange, first saying how different the types are, then talking about where they interact. But, latter-day Descartes that I am, I think I have found the magical locus.

Bateson: "Mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker."

And then he went off into evolution. But, just a shout away, shout away.