Do I See What You See?
Lifeglass © Jenny Li (Used with permission)
Our perceptions are entirely governed by the way our brains work. Emotion, meaning, identity, and even our sense of time merely reflect the chemical and electrical habits of a vital organ. These patterns change as the infant brain grows into the elderly brain, and there are many opportunities along the way for those patterns to become disordered. We call many fundamental changes of mind ‘illnesses’ and attempt to compensate for them with medicine. Meanwhile, brains the world over routinely disrupt their own patterns with drugs and alcohol, and we call that ‘recreation’.
But what if we perceived our own minds differently? What if chemical interference was considered universally appropriate and healthy? Would people with untreated or abstinent brains then be considered sick or abnormal?
For that matter, what if our brains had evolved different capacities from the start? How might we perceive time? Art and music are products of the mind, so how might they be different if our brains were incapable of differentiating color or producing linear language?
How might we think of ourselves?
Although the question of productive social interactions is an ever-recurring dilemma for people at various edges of the perceiving/interpreting spectrum and for different societies and eras, all brain-affecting substances kill synapses and neurons: not just the more “lay” stimulants and depressants but also antidepressants, antipsychotics and their ilk. In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that their side effects are the only thing they do, which activates a placebo effect.
I doubt that routine killing of brain cells would be considered a good thing in any social configuration except one that explicitly advocates a radical notion of slavery (happy genetically or medically lobotomized slaves, à la Huxley’s Brave New World).
I suspect you’re right. This was an oddly challenging post for me to write because my habit is to bash on recreational drug use and willful or ignorant over-medication. I’m just not a fan of those practices, you know? But for speculation’s sake, I gave it a whirl.
The placebo effect is interesting in it’s own right. Sort of like the braink pranking itself.
I’m totally with you on over-medication. It’s a bandaid to get people “functional” quickly (that is: back to work, the rest is optional, especially quality of living and human interactions). The tolerance of eccentricity has decreased in today’s Western societies, where the metric is concrete “productivity”, the use and usefulness of the specific products be damned. People who would be considered anything from seers to “my odd uncle Harry” are now actively marginalized and medicalized until they resemble zombies.