Monday, August 07, 2006
Why does disaster = DESIRE?!!
We've all seen countless movies and TV shows where a woman does something awful to a man, from spilling food all over his suit to involving him in a fender-bender, and in response he doesn't get mad, he gets romantically interested (or MORE interested)... even if she did whatever it was ON PURPOSE.
WHY?!!
What is it about having his suit or his car ruined that makes a man amorous? I understand that both good and bad events can produce adrenaline and thus a feeling of excitement, but we normally have no trouble distinguishing between "bad" excitement (anger, dismay, etc) and the sexual kind, and the former does NOT usually morph into the latter... why is this scenario consistently an exception?
Why is it that if a woman demonstrates by her destructive proclivities that she's a virtual PSYCHO, that makes her EXTRA-desirable to the victim? Is it because he assumes that she must be ferocious (aka passionate) in bed as well as while she's busting his headlights with a baseball bat? That'd be pretty twisted, but I guess you can make a case for it; however, that still wouldn't explain why ACCIDENTAL assault is so entrancing.
In a recent issue of Cosmo, they had an article dedicated to describing unusual ways that couples met, and one of them was astonishing even given an awareness of this absurd tendency; there was a mixed group playing some sport or other, and a woman hit a man in the head with a ball, knocked him out, and was so embarrassed that she ran off and didn't come back... and I'll bet you can guess what his response was. Can you imagine being laid out by someone's clumsy or unfortunate ball handling and responding by wanting to DATE that person? (If you're male, you might have said "yes," but bear with me while I try to sort it out.)
There was a 2nd mind-boggling incident described in the article that, while not involving harm to a man or his belongings, was tangentially similar because it dealt with another sort of situation that would normally make someone want to distance themselves from the other person, NOT pursue them; having seen them make a fool of themselves. A woman used the men's room in a restaurant out of desperation, found herself without toilet paper, and came staggering out of the stall with her pants half up to find, what else, a MAN at the sink, looking at her and trying not to laugh. She bolted, mortified, to rejoin her friends at their table... where she received a dessert from the man who'd seen her and inexplicably found her humiliating display to be emotionally or sexually stimulating. Would YOU see someone stumbling around with their pants half-down in a bathroom as reason to want to go out with them?
This reminded me of an incident involving a notoriously standoffish singer (male) and a then-teenaged fan; the 1st time she met him, she'd somehow managed to get drunk during the show, and vomited all over him. Did he recoil in revulsion? Have her thrown out? Race from the room in a fury to change clothes, hating her forever after? No; he laughed his @ss off, and... it's left vague as to what sort of physical contact they might have had, if any, but she ended up being his "friend" and working for him as her career, so at the very least she was rewarded for her poorly-aimed reverse peristalsis by being given 2 decades (so far) of closeness to a famous person. My head swam when I read about this, because it seemed utterly surreal that a person would respond to being vomited on by a stranger with anything more pleasant than disgust; despite a singer being involved, we can't be SURE that sex, or sexual desire, resulted in this case, but in a broader sense this is still the same concept in action, I think, because at the very least it caused him to want to form a relationship of some sort with her.
In case you're wondering, it's not just straight men that fall prey to this irrationality; a gay man who's been with his lover for half his life revealed to me that the 1st time he went to bed with him, he fell asleep on him in the middle of the act... which you'd THINK would have made his now-husband so hurt and upset that that would've been the end of any possibility of anything further happening between them, but, surprise surprise, had the opposite effect instead.
My husband, who's usually utterly lacking in psychological insight, has provided me with a good explanation of what's going on in all these cases; when we initially discussed this topic a few years ago, he said that making a memorable impression was the key to getting a man to want to know a woman better (or another man, presumably), and that a bad impression was still an impression and so created the same focusing of attention (for the most part) as a good impression would. When I read him the examples of this concept in action from Cosmo, he came out with an even better thought; once disaster has struck, many of the emotional barriers that normally exist between strangers or acquaintances are shattered, AND it fast-forwards them past lots of "getting to know you" steps because you simply can't make tentative, painfully-polite conversational forays with someone once they've barfed on you or wrecked your car... a sort of intimacy is formed by shared participation in a disaster, and the achievement of this intimacy creates a feeling in the man of having "made progress" with the woman, which encourages him to strike while the iron is hot (and makes him happy to have been spared the awkward introductory phase, even if it means he was unconscious and possibly concussed).
It seems insane to me, but then again so do lots of common psychological patterns; all I can conclude is that, should I ever unexpectedly be single again (and either the body's never found or I'm acquitted, lol), I'm going to walk around with a Big Gulp with a loosened top that I'll dump all over the man of my choice.
WHY?!!
What is it about having his suit or his car ruined that makes a man amorous? I understand that both good and bad events can produce adrenaline and thus a feeling of excitement, but we normally have no trouble distinguishing between "bad" excitement (anger, dismay, etc) and the sexual kind, and the former does NOT usually morph into the latter... why is this scenario consistently an exception?
Why is it that if a woman demonstrates by her destructive proclivities that she's a virtual PSYCHO, that makes her EXTRA-desirable to the victim? Is it because he assumes that she must be ferocious (aka passionate) in bed as well as while she's busting his headlights with a baseball bat? That'd be pretty twisted, but I guess you can make a case for it; however, that still wouldn't explain why ACCIDENTAL assault is so entrancing.
In a recent issue of Cosmo, they had an article dedicated to describing unusual ways that couples met, and one of them was astonishing even given an awareness of this absurd tendency; there was a mixed group playing some sport or other, and a woman hit a man in the head with a ball, knocked him out, and was so embarrassed that she ran off and didn't come back... and I'll bet you can guess what his response was. Can you imagine being laid out by someone's clumsy or unfortunate ball handling and responding by wanting to DATE that person? (If you're male, you might have said "yes," but bear with me while I try to sort it out.)
There was a 2nd mind-boggling incident described in the article that, while not involving harm to a man or his belongings, was tangentially similar because it dealt with another sort of situation that would normally make someone want to distance themselves from the other person, NOT pursue them; having seen them make a fool of themselves. A woman used the men's room in a restaurant out of desperation, found herself without toilet paper, and came staggering out of the stall with her pants half up to find, what else, a MAN at the sink, looking at her and trying not to laugh. She bolted, mortified, to rejoin her friends at their table... where she received a dessert from the man who'd seen her and inexplicably found her humiliating display to be emotionally or sexually stimulating. Would YOU see someone stumbling around with their pants half-down in a bathroom as reason to want to go out with them?
This reminded me of an incident involving a notoriously standoffish singer (male) and a then-teenaged fan; the 1st time she met him, she'd somehow managed to get drunk during the show, and vomited all over him. Did he recoil in revulsion? Have her thrown out? Race from the room in a fury to change clothes, hating her forever after? No; he laughed his @ss off, and... it's left vague as to what sort of physical contact they might have had, if any, but she ended up being his "friend" and working for him as her career, so at the very least she was rewarded for her poorly-aimed reverse peristalsis by being given 2 decades (so far) of closeness to a famous person. My head swam when I read about this, because it seemed utterly surreal that a person would respond to being vomited on by a stranger with anything more pleasant than disgust; despite a singer being involved, we can't be SURE that sex, or sexual desire, resulted in this case, but in a broader sense this is still the same concept in action, I think, because at the very least it caused him to want to form a relationship of some sort with her.
In case you're wondering, it's not just straight men that fall prey to this irrationality; a gay man who's been with his lover for half his life revealed to me that the 1st time he went to bed with him, he fell asleep on him in the middle of the act... which you'd THINK would have made his now-husband so hurt and upset that that would've been the end of any possibility of anything further happening between them, but, surprise surprise, had the opposite effect instead.
My husband, who's usually utterly lacking in psychological insight, has provided me with a good explanation of what's going on in all these cases; when we initially discussed this topic a few years ago, he said that making a memorable impression was the key to getting a man to want to know a woman better (or another man, presumably), and that a bad impression was still an impression and so created the same focusing of attention (for the most part) as a good impression would. When I read him the examples of this concept in action from Cosmo, he came out with an even better thought; once disaster has struck, many of the emotional barriers that normally exist between strangers or acquaintances are shattered, AND it fast-forwards them past lots of "getting to know you" steps because you simply can't make tentative, painfully-polite conversational forays with someone once they've barfed on you or wrecked your car... a sort of intimacy is formed by shared participation in a disaster, and the achievement of this intimacy creates a feeling in the man of having "made progress" with the woman, which encourages him to strike while the iron is hot (and makes him happy to have been spared the awkward introductory phase, even if it means he was unconscious and possibly concussed).
It seems insane to me, but then again so do lots of common psychological patterns; all I can conclude is that, should I ever unexpectedly be single again (and either the body's never found or I'm acquitted, lol), I'm going to walk around with a Big Gulp with a loosened top that I'll dump all over the man of my choice.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Your brain... and the Brain
From the May 2006 issue of Discover magazine (yes, I'm still WAY behind in my reading) comes an article called "Blinded By Science: What Were We Thinking?" which gives us the following fascinating info:
"Countless baseball pitchers have had their careers cut short not by a pulverized rotator cuff or a line drive to the eye socket but simply by thinking about what they were doing. Once a pitcher starts 'aiming his pitches,' as the commentators call it, their voices heavy with foreboding, it usually isn't very long before he's back riding a tractor near the house he was born in"
"The great British snooker champion Jimmy White (snooker, for the uninitiated, is a version of pool played on a table the size of a football field with pockets the size of pinpricks) was known for his habit of rhythmically tapping the table surface with his ring finger as he lined up his shot. A presumptuous interviewer once proposed to him that it was a timing device, like a drummer's four-beat count-in, a technique to help him marshal his powers of concentration. Not at all, said White. He actually found it incredibly distracting to have some idiot--albeit himself--tapping on the table as he lined up a shot. And that was the whole point. If he weren't distracted, he'd be calculating angles, and every time he had tried doing that, the cue ball had ended up in the audience."
This is surprising stuff, but it shouldn't be; we know that the subconscious takes in masses of raw data, which it selects bits and pieces of and strings them together with whatever alterations are necessary for it to flow smoothly for us (including distortions of our perception of time-see my post of 6-4-06), and does it all instantaneously... how could it do that unless it was able to perform analyses and calculations far beyond what we can do consciously, in #, speed and accuracy? Compared to what the unconscious mind does to turn crude sensory input into a usable version of the world around us, and to allow us to do difficult things like rock climbing and snowboarding without having to plan every muscle movement, aiming a ball is a snap.
Here's the part that IS validly surprising:
"researchers assembled a crowd of typical Dutch shoppers--sending home, one would imagine, the ones whose shoulder-slung panpipes and Caucasian dreadlocks marked them as liable to freak out in a laboratory setting--and put them through a series of tests to see how they make buying decisions. In one test, the volunteers were split into two groups and asked to choose among four cars. One group was given much more elaborate descriptions of the cars than the other group. Then half of the members of each group spent four minutes in a quiet room, carefully considering their choices. The rest were forced to spend four minutes doing anagram puzzles, in Dutch--which can't be much of a picnic even if you speak Dutch--to distract their conscious minds.
After the test subjects were dismissed and the research team crunched all the numbers, a startling truth emerged: 'Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products.'"
Interacting with the physical world with precision is a skill with obvious survival value, and is reasonable to expect a successful species of animal like humans to be able to do, but why would our unconscious minds need to be able to analyze "non-sensory" information (like gas mileage and crash test results) such as was required in the above experiment, much less be able to do it better than our conscious minds? What kinds of complex intellectual decisions did primitive humans have to make, that they needed this ability? "Here's a bunch of facts about antelope species X, and a bunch of facts about antelope species Y; which one should we try to hunt today?"... and then, what, they'd focus on sharpening their spears for 4 minutes and then announce their decisions? Or; did they use those minutes to pray for "the god of the hunt" to tell them the right thing to do, attribute whatever their subconscious minds came up with to divine intervention, and act accordingly, because those types of decisions had been better in the past than the ones they came up with themselves? Is THAT the survival connection, that those who instinctively DIDN'T consciously think things through, and whose unconscious minds were able to handle increasingly complex theoretical scenarios, did better than their compatriots who tried to figure things out directly?
Is this part of why we do NOT (as a rule) want "heavy thinkers" to be our leaders, or even our friends or lovers... because people who try too hard to consciously sort things out tend to be less "successful" than those who go with whatever percolates up from the depths of their subconscious minds?
And; how much impetus was given to the success of religion in every human tribe by the realization that praying over difficult problems generally produced better solutions than thinking about them?
AND; how many times have you heard a religious person say that they prayed about a problem, or gave up on it and asked their deity of choice to handle it, and the answer "just came to them," which they believe means that the deity helped them? I'm unwilling to totally discount the idea of there being a deity, as I can't prove there isn't one (or several), but isn't it reasonable to assume that at least SOME of these cases are intervention by the subconscious rather than by the divine?
As I was mulling all this over, I realized that *I* use the power of the unconscious, er, unconsciously; if I'm going to toss a piece of trash and want to have it land in the can, rather than 3 feet away, I just toss it without "planning" the throw, and when I'm not quite sure how I want to word a portion of something I'm writing, I'll do eBay searches for a couple of minutes with no attention being given to the topic, and when I come back to it the words will just flow on out.
If we're capable of grasping the mysteries of the omniverse, it'll probably be our subconscious minds that figure them out; hopefully, we'll be paying attention when the answers bubble up into our conscious minds.
There are a couple of entertainment-type tidbits that I wanted to pass on, so here they are before I forget them in the continuing frenzy with my mother and visiting relatives (everyone's doing fine, just FYI):
The original Warner Brothers cartoons (with Bugs Bunny et al) and the non-verbal Pink Panther cartoons are by far the most brilliant creations of their genre; it's always amazed me that this decades-old stuff has never been equalled. There are only 2 cartoons that I'd call even remotely close, and I do NOT mean "The Simpsons" and "South Park," which pander to the lowest common denominator too much for my taste; I mean the "Dilbert" animated series, which is obviously based on the ultra-funny comic strip of the same name, and "Pinky and the Brain," which is the continuing saga of 2 genetically-altered lab mice who try each night to take over the world. The good news is that the latter has finally started coming out on DVD; only 22 of the 65 episodes are out so far (including the Christmas special!!), but the others will presumably be coming soon. If you already love this series, now you can own some of it, and if you're unfamiliar with it, by all means rent it... you're in for a treat.
I saw a movie during one of those times when nothing much was on called "The Emerald Forest," in which an American man who's helping to build a dam in Brazil brings his family to the site, which abuts the rain forest, and his little boy is abducted by a secretive, primitive tribe... and isn't seen again for 10 years, despite his father's endless attempts to locate him. When he IS found, he's fully integrated into the tribe that snatched him, and doesn't really remember his original family... and doesn't want to rejoin them. It's a cool concept, but what makes it riveting is that it's based on a TRUE STORY; I'm sure that endless dramatic license was taken, as it always is, but the basics of the story have to be real for there to BE a story, and the depiction of the Amazonian tribes and the struggles they face is thought-provoking and disturbing... it's well worth watching.
"Countless baseball pitchers have had their careers cut short not by a pulverized rotator cuff or a line drive to the eye socket but simply by thinking about what they were doing. Once a pitcher starts 'aiming his pitches,' as the commentators call it, their voices heavy with foreboding, it usually isn't very long before he's back riding a tractor near the house he was born in"
"The great British snooker champion Jimmy White (snooker, for the uninitiated, is a version of pool played on a table the size of a football field with pockets the size of pinpricks) was known for his habit of rhythmically tapping the table surface with his ring finger as he lined up his shot. A presumptuous interviewer once proposed to him that it was a timing device, like a drummer's four-beat count-in, a technique to help him marshal his powers of concentration. Not at all, said White. He actually found it incredibly distracting to have some idiot--albeit himself--tapping on the table as he lined up a shot. And that was the whole point. If he weren't distracted, he'd be calculating angles, and every time he had tried doing that, the cue ball had ended up in the audience."
This is surprising stuff, but it shouldn't be; we know that the subconscious takes in masses of raw data, which it selects bits and pieces of and strings them together with whatever alterations are necessary for it to flow smoothly for us (including distortions of our perception of time-see my post of 6-4-06), and does it all instantaneously... how could it do that unless it was able to perform analyses and calculations far beyond what we can do consciously, in #, speed and accuracy? Compared to what the unconscious mind does to turn crude sensory input into a usable version of the world around us, and to allow us to do difficult things like rock climbing and snowboarding without having to plan every muscle movement, aiming a ball is a snap.
Here's the part that IS validly surprising:
"researchers assembled a crowd of typical Dutch shoppers--sending home, one would imagine, the ones whose shoulder-slung panpipes and Caucasian dreadlocks marked them as liable to freak out in a laboratory setting--and put them through a series of tests to see how they make buying decisions. In one test, the volunteers were split into two groups and asked to choose among four cars. One group was given much more elaborate descriptions of the cars than the other group. Then half of the members of each group spent four minutes in a quiet room, carefully considering their choices. The rest were forced to spend four minutes doing anagram puzzles, in Dutch--which can't be much of a picnic even if you speak Dutch--to distract their conscious minds.
After the test subjects were dismissed and the research team crunched all the numbers, a startling truth emerged: 'Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products.'"
Interacting with the physical world with precision is a skill with obvious survival value, and is reasonable to expect a successful species of animal like humans to be able to do, but why would our unconscious minds need to be able to analyze "non-sensory" information (like gas mileage and crash test results) such as was required in the above experiment, much less be able to do it better than our conscious minds? What kinds of complex intellectual decisions did primitive humans have to make, that they needed this ability? "Here's a bunch of facts about antelope species X, and a bunch of facts about antelope species Y; which one should we try to hunt today?"... and then, what, they'd focus on sharpening their spears for 4 minutes and then announce their decisions? Or; did they use those minutes to pray for "the god of the hunt" to tell them the right thing to do, attribute whatever their subconscious minds came up with to divine intervention, and act accordingly, because those types of decisions had been better in the past than the ones they came up with themselves? Is THAT the survival connection, that those who instinctively DIDN'T consciously think things through, and whose unconscious minds were able to handle increasingly complex theoretical scenarios, did better than their compatriots who tried to figure things out directly?
Is this part of why we do NOT (as a rule) want "heavy thinkers" to be our leaders, or even our friends or lovers... because people who try too hard to consciously sort things out tend to be less "successful" than those who go with whatever percolates up from the depths of their subconscious minds?
And; how much impetus was given to the success of religion in every human tribe by the realization that praying over difficult problems generally produced better solutions than thinking about them?
AND; how many times have you heard a religious person say that they prayed about a problem, or gave up on it and asked their deity of choice to handle it, and the answer "just came to them," which they believe means that the deity helped them? I'm unwilling to totally discount the idea of there being a deity, as I can't prove there isn't one (or several), but isn't it reasonable to assume that at least SOME of these cases are intervention by the subconscious rather than by the divine?
As I was mulling all this over, I realized that *I* use the power of the unconscious, er, unconsciously; if I'm going to toss a piece of trash and want to have it land in the can, rather than 3 feet away, I just toss it without "planning" the throw, and when I'm not quite sure how I want to word a portion of something I'm writing, I'll do eBay searches for a couple of minutes with no attention being given to the topic, and when I come back to it the words will just flow on out.
If we're capable of grasping the mysteries of the omniverse, it'll probably be our subconscious minds that figure them out; hopefully, we'll be paying attention when the answers bubble up into our conscious minds.
There are a couple of entertainment-type tidbits that I wanted to pass on, so here they are before I forget them in the continuing frenzy with my mother and visiting relatives (everyone's doing fine, just FYI):
The original Warner Brothers cartoons (with Bugs Bunny et al) and the non-verbal Pink Panther cartoons are by far the most brilliant creations of their genre; it's always amazed me that this decades-old stuff has never been equalled. There are only 2 cartoons that I'd call even remotely close, and I do NOT mean "The Simpsons" and "South Park," which pander to the lowest common denominator too much for my taste; I mean the "Dilbert" animated series, which is obviously based on the ultra-funny comic strip of the same name, and "Pinky and the Brain," which is the continuing saga of 2 genetically-altered lab mice who try each night to take over the world. The good news is that the latter has finally started coming out on DVD; only 22 of the 65 episodes are out so far (including the Christmas special!!), but the others will presumably be coming soon. If you already love this series, now you can own some of it, and if you're unfamiliar with it, by all means rent it... you're in for a treat.
I saw a movie during one of those times when nothing much was on called "The Emerald Forest," in which an American man who's helping to build a dam in Brazil brings his family to the site, which abuts the rain forest, and his little boy is abducted by a secretive, primitive tribe... and isn't seen again for 10 years, despite his father's endless attempts to locate him. When he IS found, he's fully integrated into the tribe that snatched him, and doesn't really remember his original family... and doesn't want to rejoin them. It's a cool concept, but what makes it riveting is that it's based on a TRUE STORY; I'm sure that endless dramatic license was taken, as it always is, but the basics of the story have to be real for there to BE a story, and the depiction of the Amazonian tribes and the struggles they face is thought-provoking and disturbing... it's well worth watching.
