The Queen of Cats

Interlude 7: Mindscapes

I'm not a psychologist. This is all bullshit. Bear with me. 

Transcript of a Speech by Dr. J. RavBrian Warne at the K15 Convention

Dated Tuesday December 31 2200

Hello everyone! My name's Rav, and I'm a head technician for The Mindscape Project!

I think it's important to note, before we begin that this is a very important year.

The dawn of the new century. And the new century brings with it new challenges in all felids and occupations, not just my own.

But this is my speech. So fuck them. Let's talk about me.

I'm a psychologist. And that identifier has had a lot of meanings over the past few centuries. If you translate it literally, which is nonsensical at this point, you come up with the study of the soul. And that isn't very useful to us, as scientists, as researchers and most of all, as curious students.

Because psychology, believe you me, is very definitely a science.

A systematic approach in attempting to analyse a person's mind.

Now we're getting somewhere.

But what is a person. For the past three hundred years, we could get away with saying things like that. One, a person, someone. But generalized statements like that are ridiculously inadequate for modern psychological research.

Because, as you all know, none of us are the same.

The human mind is as unique as a fingerprint.

So before we get into the Mindscape theory, let's try to get to the bottom of this strange little conundrum. Why are we all so different?

An older form of psychological analysis based 'one's' psyche-see what I mean?- on two distinct types of influences.

Firstly, you have your genes which is a biological term for one unit of DNA that is the basic unit of heredity. As far as our discussion here is concerned, let's call a gene a conduit for the biological transmission of psychological characteristics.

To put it simply, two people make sweet sweet love and the fruit of their passions would be a sweet, cuddly little baby. But that cuddly little baby is no psychological blank state. The man has a tendency to flare up when the car in front of him doesn't take the turn fast enough. With a swish of a magic wand, the cuddly baby inherits that little trait. The woman can't keep anything where it belongs and is disorganized. Swish. You have a scatter-brained, bad tempered little cuddly baby.

Why am I not talking about the positive things? Kindness and gentleness and humility and courage and honour?

Because those things aren't as quantifiable as anger or clumsiness. You might be born a shrew but you can be tamed. Your culture plays a huge role in the way you eventually end up as a person.

And that brings us to our next influence. Memes. Memes are conduits for the cultural transmission of biological traits. If apes raise you, you ape the apes. And that is exactly what a meme is. It comes from the same root word as the common English word mimic.

Let's go back to our cuddly little baby. It sees its cousin helping the grown-ups with the washing. It learns that helping people could be useful. It also learns that hurting people, while not very nice, can also be useful. It learns and learns.

And it adapts.

So now, we have two competing and coexisting influences. The genes and the memes.

Now, let's look at another little Psych. buzzword that's been floating around for years now. The subconscious.

A layer of mental, cognitive activity that the life-liver, the one, the person, cannot perceive.

And what happens here seems to affect the way we live our conscious life. The life we know about.

The subconscious remembers all. It catalogues every little thought, every deed, every breath and meticulously builds a personality out of them. Which it then projects on to you.

For the past couple of centuries this term was used as a kind of answer for everything. It was all in the subconscious. The reason our cuddly little baby grew up to rob banks and rape little girls was because of the subconscious.

I won't go so far as to say that the subconscious is a myth, but I will say that the concept as it is not adequate for a complete and wide reaching psychological survey of any mind.

The idea that there's this plane of mental existence that no one can tap into and which is responsible for every little word or deed we consciously do is way too good to be true.

But our genes and memes do have to meet somewhere. And they do have to interact with each-other in a way that is independent from the other parts of our mind.

What does this catalogue we talked about look like? what is it? How does it work.

That's where the Mindscape Project comes in.

People have been doing this for centuries, perhaps even millennia. A recent idea you might be familiar with is the idea of a mind-palace. The idea that you can store a vast amount of information within your mind by creating a fake space. A mental room or house or palace you can walk around in. You can make your diagrams and your pictures here. You can do whatever you want to keep your memories and ideas together.

This was a little fringe tactic people used to use to help them remember better.

But this is nothing. This is like consciously renting out a tiny little place in your mind for carrying out little activities that are too much of an inconvenience for you to learn the hard way.

We have to search wider than that.

Our brain is very into metaphorical-physical space. That's not the right word here, but bear with me. The brain loves wrapping abstract concepts and ideas like love, anger, clumsiness, hate, square-roots, velocity, similes, metaphors, irregular verb conjugations, football scores and anything else into a form that it can tangibly come across.

A landscape in the mind.

Or, a mindscape.

What we think, is that everybody has one of these things somewhere up in the noggin. Every brain needs something like this to keep track of everything that it learns. All these influences. All the ideas and concepts. All these genes and memes.

These mindscapes are very versatile and distinct for each person. Because we all perceive our environments very differently.

So we have a subconscious plane where our mind works on all the information we feed it, and then it provides it to us when we need it.

The next question is how to access it. Because that's what this project is all about. Accessing the information in order to provide psychological succour.

We've been working on this for a while now. The basic triggered are light, sound and touch. Out of the three though, it's the lights which work best. Combinations of flashing lights with different colours and intensities and we just might be able to trigger a scenario in which the conscious and subconscious mind converge.

Or, in layman's terms, you get to visit your own mindscape.

Pretty cool, right?

Perhaps the most startling discovery is how entire Mindscapes get transferred through hereditary transmission. So, it seems genes have a much larger role in the development of the psyche than we ever thought.  

Well, we have some presentations lined up here and some tables where you can interact directly with the tech we've been developing. We hope you have a lovely convention.

Enjoy.

I hope that wasn't too ridiculously boring. And I also hope that all the different threads are all starting to converge. 

Thanks so much for all the support. 

Cheers!