The muse has left the building

My muse has left the building. Since my last blog post I have been having the hardest time coming up with something to write about. It's not that I dont have ideas, its that when I sit down to write none of the ideas I've had since my last post come to mind very clearly. It's a dry spell, or at least a muddy mess.

Then finally something happened that I committed to memory as absolutely I could. Nothing tremendous or revelatory, just noteworthy, especially for its simplicity and directness.


A few days ago, I went to check out this art showing near Channelside with Ashli and Sean. It was not what I thought it was going to be, but interesting nonetheless. The building was really cool; though just a standard warehouse, it had that quiet personality that can make or break a building. We walked around checking out all the paintings, sculptures, photographs and presentations. At the end there was a piece by a guy whose name and position fails me. Regardless, it had two bone remains inside transparent box casings. I couldn't have told you a thing about the bones, beginning with whether they were even real or not.

But Ashli and Sean, both heavily invested in the study of the biological sciences, were sure that the bones were not only actual remains (the issue in fact never came up), but that they were fish remains. Could have fooled me.

And finally the point...

Malcom Gladwell's most recent book Blink, revolves around the capacity of the human brain to make accurate snap judgements via an "adaptive unconcious." Gladwell relates that as we practice higher level learning we condition our minds and memory for cognition and recall. He goes one step further and suggests that we also condition our unconcsious minds to understand things that are not always worth the time and energy it may take to put cognition into words.

I was thinking about that book and it was facsinating to see its ideas so well illustrated as those two fellow art goers came to a quick conclusion of which they were both so sure.