The dangers of habit

Three linked ideas about seeing, the self, life and education. What is that moment when we suddenly notice something or have a moment of recognition - of a thing that has been there, in our line of sight, but has not yet registered, or maybe we saw once and now has faded and now again suddenly it leaps to the foreground of our conscious thought?

*filters* - we begin to recognise filters exist when we realise we can only ever possess a partial perspective on our lives and indeed the lives of others. There is what we 'see' and more importantly what we do *not* see. Filters, arguably, develop from:

*habit* - repetitive actions that brings about:

*desensitisation* - where certain emotions, visual stimuli, intellectualthought become the common place and commonsensical and eventually the unnoticed and in many ways the accepted and unquestioned. Ideologies by any other name.

Deleuze might say question everything, do not accept the obvious, yet do we really have the capacity to live this on a daily basis. If our social life, our existence, is so complicated with multiple possibilities then yes this complicatedness itself seems on the surface 'good' but how do we navigate and choose between these multiple possibilities that are constantly available. Choices in life do not exist on an even plane, they run like deep rivers and to swim against the seemingly natural flow or to strike a new course, against the tides that push us, then we need energy and to fight each 'barrier' to accomplish this and only in this fight do we begin to understand or find illuminated just how deeply embedded we have become in certain modes of being and thinking. Each battle erodes a part of our desire for a certain way of being, gradual compromise, for the sake of simplicity perhaps? Internally we reason these compromises, making calculations of effort versus worth, to leave enough energy for reaching goals that are in many ways undetermined and may exist simply as space for further possibility and that elusive sense of self-satisfaction. Herein, with time, we find that each of us has their own given, relative and culturally mediated sense of happiness.

So education must not simply be about learning to live mechanically in this world but surely to have the tools and abilities to create visions that can provide the possibility for thinking differently and in this, the means to visualise change and paths that might take us there. But this is two-sided in the sense that we need the capacity to deal with change and the challenges presented to our own sense of being becoming in this world. Ways of coping with the unforeseen and the unexpected. Our education, our learning is as much about creating change as it is with dealing with change and the nature of change itself.

Comments

[Pat Parslow]

I would argue that the filters we build are a natural evolutionary consequence of living in a dangerous but generally relatively predictable world, and of a need to be able to respond quickly to certain types of stimulus. By slowly 'programming' our brains with pattern matching filters, we build a repertoire of short cuts which can trigger responses on an almost reflexive basis, and without the need for the somewhat slower involvement of the conscious mind. As we come to live in safer environments, and have a reasonable set of survival reflexes 'built' in, we can afford to start questioning things more.
I think that the filters are not necessarily built through habit, although that is certainly a mechanism for it, but through repeated experience, or, indeed, through experience which has sufficient impact to leave an 'imprint'. Enough to form a pattern recognition 'subsystem' in our brains which can be associated with an action to produce a reflexive response.
Whilst I would broadly agree about desensitization, I think there are two types of 'unnoticed'. There are those things to which we become habituated, which we no longer consciously notice - such as wearing clothes. I think that in general we are able to focus our attention on these things, through the ("magic" that is) conscious effort. However, more worryingly, I think there is another category of things which remain unnoticed by us.
The filter mechanisms, built through habituation, help us recognise and quickly respond to stimuli in the environment. They can be formed through direct personal interaction with the environment, but also, I think, through social interaction. In extreme cases this can be akin to 'brain washing', where we can be 're-programmed' to believe things others would find unbelievable, or, indeed, to not believe things others find to be common sense.
I posit that this actually happens to some degree throughout our lives. If we experience something, whether it exists in the real world but goes unnoticed by others, or if it is purely a construct due to random noise in our brains, society (initially family) is fairly quick to let us know that we must have been mistaken. If this is repeated frequently enough, I suggest that we start to filter those things out - they are stimuli which (assuming we suffer no physical harm from them) have no pay-off in terms of the social reality in which we live.
This applies to connections between different fields of study. As people are typically (traditionally) trained (habituated) by the 'education' system to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli, and subject areas are kept separate from one another, they are being conditioned to quite literally not see connections between topics.
So I completely agree that we need to be equipping our young learners with tools to break down barriers and visualise different ways of thinking, and the routes to them.

As an aside...
I have often wondered whether the stereo-typical tendency of teenagers to experiment with various levels of mind altering substances (from nicotine and alcohol, sleep deprivation and trance inducing music, up to the harder forms of drugs) might be a self-medicating approach to doing just that - often considered to be attempts to break out of the hum-drum existence they are in, perhaps these are really ways the brain uses to try to forge the new pathways (or break down the old ones) so that the individual can start to 'think' again?