Brain Bubble

First actual new post on the blog! One of my minor superpowers is very good directional hearing. When I was in college, I took an improv theater class. At one point, there was a game, where one person was blindfolded, and the instructor took a ball of paper and tossed it into the center of the room. The blindfolded person then had to retrieve the paper ball. Until I watched other people, I simply didn't understand why this was a game. For me, it was not much harder than it would have been with my eyes open. Locating the paper ball by the sound it made was about as hard as looking to see where it was, then looking away and picking it up. It was a trivial task. Watching other people do it made me realize that was not true for everyone. Coming off of this, I have also taught myself very basic echolocation. When I am in a dark environment, I will made small ticking sounds. I can use these to identify nearby large obstacles. It's not anything like the detail I would get with sight: ...

I'm pretty good at distracting myself from things that hurt, whether that is physical or emotional. My distractability is a little bit of a super power in this area, and I've written about that before. Using that superpower, however, has a cost. The cost is that intentionally invoking that distractability puts a major hit on my executive function. I have much less ability to control what my brain will go to instead. Which is really annoying when there is so much work that needs to get done. Sometimes work is the perfect distraction, but when it's not, there just really isn't anything I can do about it. 

Today we're just on interesting features of my brain. There is a constant soundtrack running in my head. I don't know how common this is for other people. I know that most people have the experience of getting a song stuck in their head. That happens to me, but it's generally fairly easy to dislodge: I can shift the soundtrack with distraction just like anything else. However, there is always something playing. What seems to be most distinct about this soundtrack, compared to other people, is that frequently it is not a song that I have heard before. Sometimes I'll have a particular version of a song that I've listened to, sometimes The Beatles will sing a cover of Sisters of Mercy's "Mother Russia" (yes, since I described that, I currently have it playing in my head. No I can't play it for you), and sometimes I'll just have reasonably pleasant instrumental music that my brain has composed as background. Bowed strings, harps, and flutes are the...

I’ve focused a lot so far on the struggles I have with my brain and how I cope with them. That’s important, but I don’t want to ignore the benefits of how my brain works. Today I’m going to talk about how my distractability can be a very good thing. I can be distracted fairly easily from basically anything that I’m not currently hyperfocused on. That sounds like a bad thing, and--to be honest--a lot of the time it is. However, knowing and harnessing that makes it much easier for me to extract myself from bad mental spaces, brainsucking loops and even just grumpy moods. If I’m upset about something, and I realize that my upset state is not productive, I have a set of patterns that allow me to process as much as is productive, and then actively utilize distraction to take myself away from it. As previously mentioned, I’m a high-energy, high-intensity, high-enthusiasm person. As long as I can find something to be excited about right now, I can engineer a switch to a more positive emotiona...