Movement

Receiving an instruction and acting upon it can take milliseconds or it can take a minute. Either you instantly act upon the action affirmatively and instinctively or you sort out your mind trying to obtain some discernable logic in the instruction before you act upon them. The knowledge had already been embedded in our large memory scape. Once seen, once remembered and forever captured. However, finding that knowledge requires practice. Practice, is the key to movement.

I like to visualise our brains as a landscape of bright dots which are “knowledge”, an immaterial entity which stores ideas. And between these ideas, there is a neural network connecting each “knowledge” to one another until it reaches a starting point which is “affirmed action.” Electric pulses run through these networks each time you need to do or to know something. When deciding on something, your mind needs information. It sends a signal which races through the network, and searches for this “knowledge” which will tell you something about the information you need and you act upon that information. But because the amount of knowledge which can be stored in our brains are almost limitless, because we can remember and store so many things, this network is vast. There are so many chains, so many links such that potentially, one thought can remind you of another in an instant precisely because they are linked in some reasoning or another. However, when we want to access certain links, by wanting specific information, suddenly we might not be able to find the link. Because of that, we fail to find logic behind an instruction, which leads to delayed logical action. This might be because the link may be remote. A specific word, or a feeling or a scene which we used at the beginning to obtain that information may be the trigger which triggers the chain of links to that knowledge, so you remember. This means that if you do not have that trigger, you will delve and think until you reach that trigger, be it a “feeling” or “scenario” (example: a visualised smell of cotton candy) and then the current connects and you can remember, even if you thought about an information halfway between the “knowledge” and “action”.

But this can be remedied by studying a hypothesis about conscious and subconscious thought. The amount of thought a person process in any given point of time is impossible to tell. There are studies done in the Sleep Labs in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem which can show us the amount of conscious thoughts a person could have, but it does not take into account the subconscious thought a person could be having. This is bad because it is widely believed that subconscious thoughts make up 80% of thoughts at any given point of time. A conscious thought is a thought which you are aware of the link between action and knowledge. But subconscious thoughts are those that you do not know the route and links in your brain but they exist, so the pulses link almost unknowingly by you from trigger to knowledge to affirmed action. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink went on to describe this phenomena which have been utilized by firefighters during decisive moments while battling fires and by art curators in judging the authenticity of unearthed ancient statues.

I will try to hypothesize based on experience. For a long time now, I have relied heavily on conscious thoughts to carry out an action. It had been inbred in me and anyone else who tries to study and pass an exam. The method of examinations requires you to know and regurgitate out the “knowledge” clearly and sometimes it even requires you to regurgitate the links connecting the instruction to the knowledge. In examination, to know you have learnt what you have supposed to learn, you are required to tell the examiners that you know. Thus, everything is in the conscious. That is why when you have read a certain paper perhaps and you are tested on it, but you have not carefully memorized or internalized the information, you will seem to “know” the answer but will not know what to write or how to put it. Or you think you know, but you fail to find logic behind your answer. You have yet to form a conscious link and thus it appears as if you do not know the answer. Of course, this method may have been useful when I was studying. However, it was a bane when it comes to certain real life experience. For example I have been an ambulance medic for more than a year. My job, essentially, is to assist the paramedic in providing emergency treatment to patients. And working in an environment where every second may be the difference between life and death, slow, conscious thought is truly a bane. In reality, how these men have actually worked uses a lot of experience which translates to subconscious thoughts which is activated by conscious triggers. What I mean is when a paramedic assessed a patient and found him or her to not have a pulse, the paramedic would instantly consciously trigger a chain of links in the subconscious and then they act like robots to do what they can to save the person’s life. They already know what to do and that is experience. There is no time to think from one step to another. There is, inserting the Laryngeal Mask Airway, applying Defibrillation Pads, giving oxygen supply, applying LUCAS on the chest, running an IV line in the patient’s veins and preparing adrenaline to inject into the body. All these must be remembered in an instant and you must be calm and composed while doing so. And impressively, they can do so by experience. When I was first posted as an ambulance medic, I try to think of the steps from one step to the other rather than trust my instinct. When paramedics gave me instructions, I think and rationalize on the instructions first and because of my inexperience, I fail to see logic behind certain actions. Those made me think and ask “why” and it costs me precious seconds before I would act, rather half-heartedly. A valuable lesson was rendered to me by an Encik Zul who was frustrated in my slowness. “You think too much. Don’t think just do. Your job is to assist and not be a bane.” And true enough, after I made it a point to just do as a paramedic asks and stop asking why, my actions became faster. I began to see reason behind the instructions of an experienced person after doing whatever they say and pretty soon, I could reason and anticipate the things which should be done on each ambulance calls which made my actions one step ahead of what I was capable of doing. 

Similarly, a same thing happened when I was working as a Tax Officer. The training period was 8 days and we had to memorize a lot of information about tax and how to use the Avaya communication system and internal tax network. Just by studying theoretically was not enough when answering a taxpayers call. I had to think back on my lessons consciously and because of that, my call time per taxpayers was high and in fact every one of the new interns had low KPIs. But IRAS have a trial period for new tax officers to learn the ropes of the system. They will ensure we receive calls and assured us it is okay to get long call times per taxpayer. Pretty soon, I got a hang of using the phone and we started having fun manning the lines and answering taxpayers enquiries because it became instinctively easy to a point when a standard question was posed by a taxpayer at the start of our conversation, we already know what to research on the database and could readily provide them when asked instead of putting them on hold to search slowly where the information are. Practice is very different from theory indeed. Experience is very valuable indeed.

Thus is a long tale about movement which I try to visualize as electric pulses and connections. Interestingly, this visualization can be applied into almost every context. In my blogpost “We Perceive Patterns in Life” I tried to prove a point that the world is just patterns. The world is just patterns over patterns which we used to mix and match to create new things and that everything in the world is really connected to everything else in a finite space. A finite entity. Movement in life be it fast and smooth or slow would be abstract, would it not be? That, is just a conscious thought.