P-ing.

I'm a firm believer, even an infirm believer, in a creed that I'll call
"no one knows-anything-ism."

Whether you're coaching a baseball squad, trying to raise children, or creating commercials for a client, you never really know why, where, how or what for.

Maybe this is a leap too far--I am often the Bob Beamon of essay writing--but I've been thinking about these sentences since I read them early Saturday morning. It's about your head, and I'm still trying to wrap mine around it. 

"Learning new things is hard. Remembering what has already been learned is harder. 

"Any successful learning system, be it a brain or a piece of artificial-intelligence software, must strike the right balance between stability and flexibility. It must be stable enough to remember important old things yet flexible enough to learn new ones without destroying old memory traces—preferably for as long as it exists."

The article itself is from "The Economist," and you can read it here. The Economist, along with The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a major part of my "auto-didactic" side.  While I'm not conversant in the latest happenings in the Barbieverse, and I sometimes walk alone along a rickety bridge of despond--the world is too much with me--I am also, in the words of Neal Postman, "not amusing myself to death." Reading from these journals, and the book-a-week I slog through, make me who I am.

I am-ness is not a victory. Survival is just that, survival. But I have lasted 65 centuries on this benighted orb. I care about people and most of the ten commandments, and the reading I do, I believe, makes me better at my job, better for my clients and a better, richer human being. 

If Frank Capra dubbed George Bailey "the richest man in town," because of his numerous friendships, I may be the luckiest. At least, through it all, my brain remains independent, interesting and avid. You count your blessings where you find them.

Of late I have been seeing a battery of doctors and nurses to try to arrest, or at least slow, my life-long descent into what William Styron called his "Darkness Visible," Winston Churchill called his "Black Dog," and Andrew Solomon called his "Noonday Demon." 

To alter another phrase from Hollywood's golden age, "depression doesn't run in my family, it gallops." It took my mother's life, my sister's and probably my father's, though he may have been too drunk to notice that.

So I work with people on my brain and my often lugubrious thought-patterns.

The brain is the most complex machinery on the planet. It makes the most-advanced human-built technology, from Quantum computers reaching their Q-bit quota to the Artificial Intelligence systems that we fear will soon be enslaving us, look like a pop-gun.

Consider this, also from The Economist: "Learning is a result of changes in the pattern of neural connectivity in the brain. Each connection between nerve cells, called a synapse, is a tiny gap between the ends of branches ramifying from such cells. Messages jump across these gaps in the form of molecules called neurotransmitters. Current estimates suggest there are 600 trillion synapses in a human brain."

That's 600,000,000,000,000 synapses, if I got my zeroes in order. That's more zeroes than a republican tax cut for the billionaire class and their supreme court lackeys.

What I've discovered--and coalesced of late, with regard to both people and agencies, are two words:

1. Possibility.
2. Probability.

There's a giant difference between the two.

People and agencies that dwell on the possibility that things will go wrong are often self-stymied, self-defeating, self-conscious, overly-cautious and self-abnegating. 

Probability people and agencies say, we've done something like this before, we've rolled the dice before, we've taken risks before and it's usually worked out. While there's a possibility we'll fall on our collective faces, there's a probability that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and while past performance is no guarantee of future success, it ain't a bad predictor.

All this is a long jump, I suppose.

An old man using a lot of words to get to some simple statements.

Work your brain.
Feed your brain.
Free your brain.
Trust your brain.
Take care of your brain.

You're much better off exercising it than letting flab itself on the cultural and intellectual equivalent of Coco-Puffs.