Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Alan: What my partner did seemed very unusual to me. Her confusion was very focused and specific, and her understanding was a fuzzy, bright, movie that was out of focus. When she fuzzed up the confusion, she felt like she understood. I said to her, "Turn the knob, adjust the lens to get it out of focus."

You can do it that way, but you don't have to be metaphorical. People don't actually have knobs; you can just tell them to do it. So when she fuzzed it up, she understood. I hope she's not a heart surgeon! That's one of the strangest ones I've ever heard. If you blur the image, then you understand it! It certainly is different from the other ones we've gotten here. Did that seem odd to her, too?

Alan: Yes, it did, Could that be like turning it over to some lower–level unconscious process that you trust?

No, I don't accept explanations like that. All these processes are unconscious until you ask someone about them. There are many things we do intuitively, but this is different. Of course, you may have missed something important. But assuming that your description is correct, her understanding can't be connected with doing anything. In order to do something you have to have some specific detail. That's why I made that crack about hoping she wasn't a heart surgeon. With her kind of understanding, her patients wouldn't have a very high survival rate.

However, a fuzzy, bright understanding will be good for some things. For example, this is probably someone who would be lots of fun at a party. She'll be a very responsive person, because all she needs to do to feel like she understands what someone says is to fuzz up her pictures. It doesn't take a lot of information to be able to make a bright, fuzzy movie. She can do that really quickly, and then have a lot of feelings watching that bright movie.

Imagine what would happen if that woman married someone who had to have things crystal clear in order to understand, He'd say things like, "Now let's bring this into focus," and that would send her into confusion. When she described things she understood, they wouldn't be clear to him. If he complained that what she said was all fuzzy, she'd smile and be perfectly satisfied, but he'd be frustrated.

Her kind of understanding is the kind I talked about earlier, that doesn't have much to do with the outside world. It helps her feel better, but it won't be much help in coping with actual problems. It would be really useful for her to have another way of understanding — one that's more precise and specific.

In the last seminar I did there was a man whose "understanding" wasn't very useful for him. So he tried out the understanding process that his partner went through. Doing that gave him a totally new way of understanding that opened up a whole new world for him.

What I want you all to realize is that all of you are in the same position as that man, and the woman who fuzzes images. No matter how good you think your process of understanding is, there will always be times and places where another process would work much better for you. Earlier someone gave us the process a scientist used — economical little pictures with diagrams. That will work marvellously well for the physical world, but I'll predict that person has difficulties understanding people — a common problem for scientists. (Man: Yes, that's true.) People are a little too complex for a little diagram like that. Some other way of understanding will work better for people. The more ways you have of understanding, the more possibilities open up for you, and the more your abilities expand.

I'd like you all to try this experience of having someone else's understanding. Pair up with the same partner you had before. You already know something about that person's confusion and understanding, as well as your own. However, you do need to gather a little more information. You already found and listed the differences between your confusion and understanding, as well as your partner's. You haven't yet listed all the differences between your understanding and your partner's confusion. You'll have a lot of that information already, but you have probably missed some elements that were the same in what you compared earlier.