Did you know that if you surgically separate your amygdala from the rest of your brain (your amygdala is where your emotions come from) your experiences stop holding any meaning?
Like if you separated my amygdala from my brain, I could walk up to you and have a conversation about death and tell you you’re going to die and it would mean nothing. Because I would have no feelings about it. Meaning and emotion go hand-in-hand. If I don’t feel sad about the possibility of you dying, death has no meaning. Fascinating, right?
Well, I don’t know whether it’s my personality or brain function (*taps on amygdala* – “Is this thing on?”) or what, but I sometimes experience a loss of meaning to things.
The best way for me to describe it is through music.
No, I’m not going to play you a song. I said, “describe.”
Quick info sesh: there’s something called the Nashville Number System. It allows musicians (think studio musicians in Nashville) to read music in any key. It simply assigns a number (1-8) to each chord in that key, so in the key of C, C is 1, and D is 2. In the key of D, D is 1, and E is 2. Make sense?
Well, I was taught by a slightly psychotic Juilliard graduate to use this system whenever I played chords, which enables me to look at a chord chart in G and transpose it automatically into any other key. It’s very useful.
Until I forget what key we’re in, and suddenly, 1 means absolutely nothing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been playing in church, hammering the keyboard in the middle of a song when suddenly I have absolutely no idea what key we’re in. What is 1? What is 4? I have to freeze and wait for meaning to return or I’ll just play random chords, clashing with everyone else.
Have you heard those stories about fighter pilots running into the ground? They’re capable of incredible stunts and maneuvers, but after a while, they get so spun around that they don’t even realize they’re upside down, and they fly into the earth instead of the sky. That’s what it’s like to lose all meaning in the middle of something.
I think we do this in relationships, too. Especially online. I think the internet is one big fighter jet that gets us so scrambled that we don’t know up from down and we lose all meaning and end up crashing into the other humans. We forget that the person behind the post or the article or the weird little bitmoji is a real someone with real emotions with rational thoughts, doing the best they can in life.
But even face-to-face I can forget that the person in front of me or the person I’m discussing is a real human with real struggles and real emotions, and I just say whatever comes to mind, forgetting the meaning of humanity. The only way I know to fix it is to freeze and wait for meaning to return. This can lead to some incredibly awkward social interactions (freeze tag, anyone?) but it’s better than the alternative: permanent damage.
Has this ever happened to you? How did you fix it?
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