The Words That Choose You — Your Ancient Brain Knows Your Next Move
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything.
You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley
Do you ever think about how many combinations of words there are out there?
Even just here on the Living With Clarity site. Titles and clickbait headlines are thrown at us like signboards from street vendors. Open AI is now pumping out about 100 billion words per day (1,157,000 per second) — we can’t possibly read them all, so how are we sifting through them?
How do you know which words are for you?
Most of the words that come at me everyday, including what AI spits out, I glance at and skim read. Especially large paragraphs. There better be some good information in that massive chunk of squiggles for me to slog through them.
I did, however, grow up reading the Clan of the Cave Bear series which have pages upon pages of descriptive text. The author, Jean M. Auel, could go on for three pages just describing the scenery — the species of trees, plants, animals and contour of the prehistoric land.
I loved that subject though. I loved that information. I took on those print heavy pages and soaked in all of the words. I didn’t skim a one.
What is really happening when words grab us?
Your brain is older than you
I read a research paper recently (that’s a lie, I only skimmed the abstract), that stated that the same systems in our brain that we used for foraging for food now forage for information. The basal ganglia — a group of nuclei in our sub-cortex — is older than human beings. That just there is an interesting combination of words. Something that we possess and use daily is older than the container it sits in?
Scientists have proposed that this is where intuition comes from.
This part of our brain is extremely adept at pattern recognition. It’s looking at an entire scenery of bushes and seeing the ones with berries on them. Even more refined than that, it can reliably infer ‘berries’ from a signal that may seem like it has nothing to do with berries, like the sound of a river nearby, and initiate taking steps towards them.
Your brain will reliably find something to sustain you.
The basal ganglia is essentially our wise old sage, sitting back there going “seen this all before, take the left lane!” Yes, it’s our intuition. It’s our gut feeling. It’s the magical thing that we don’t understand fully. The thing is though, that it is still unique to each individual.
We’re all searching for our own berries.
A berry might be yum to one and yuck to another. The same words that stick out at me aren’t going to stick out to you. I’m attempting to write these words and produce some combination that will appeal to you but at the end of the day, that’s between you and your own basal ganglia to decide.
All of this is to say what I’ve said before, based off of this presupposition from Arthur Schopenhauer:
“A man can do as he wills but he cannot will as he wills”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
We don’t choose which words to be interested in. They choose us.
The basal ganglia can help you find the compound noun in the haystack but what made you want it so badly in the first place? Follow that thread down to its core and you will discover something essential to sustain you across your entire life.
Words are almost as ubiquitous as food in our daily existence.
Food sustains our body. Words sustain our soul.
Words are symbols for meaning. Words are the roads we pave that lead us on an adventure. The best — the only — words to follow are the ones that interest you.
The things that interest you — that grab you — are not random. They are connected to your purpose.
FOLLOW THEM!