Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Focus

Once of my strengths is the ability to focus. I can focus so well that everything outside the vision of my blinders gets blotted out. This is a fortunate ability because my bio-processor is not that powerful, even though I think I have fairly well developed software. Note that I am in the computer analogy mode today. If God created man in his own image, then man has done the same thing with computers. Everything we see in computers reflects the way our brain operates. There is input...our senses, processing, the way our brain processes these inputs and outputs, which is the way we act in response to what our brains reveal to us.

One of the things we have however, that a computer lacks is imagination. It's only a matter of time before scientists figure out how to give computers imagination and that is probably already happening with Artificial Intelligence. What is absolutely incredible about the imagination module of our mind is the ability to game play courses of action and make choices without having to rely on actual experience. We can "Imagine" how a scenario is going to play out without actually experiencing it... What an advantage that gave mankind over the other animals in our evolution. What is even more interesting is that a human bio-computer is like a micro processor, dumb as a box of rocks...Our mind can't really differentiate between what we actually experience and what we conjure up in our imaginations. Our brain treats input from our imagination in exactly the same manner as it does input from our senses. If you close your eyes and imagine real hard that you are laying on a beach in Hawaii, if you pretend you feel the warm sand beneath the beach blanket, if you visualize the gulls and hear the surf...your brain says, "Yep, we're in Hawaii, wonder how we got here all of a sudden?" We can even trick our physiology if we try hard enough. Reading an exciting novel can get our heart to racing, a commercial can make us hungry or thirsty, music put us in a relaxing mood. Wow! Imagination is a hoot, and has become a capability that has gone far beyond its intended evolutionary purpose, ie. allowing us to experience reality without actually being there, and avoid what in actuality can be very unforgiving. The more one can focus, the more effective imagination becomes in blotting out reality and substituting the fanciful for the actual. The implications of this are staggering. Men and woman can escape if they choose from reality and dwell for a period in a world of make believe and can even choose to extend the fantasy further thruough the use of drugs...Gee Willickers! So what are the implications as we find the world we imagine so much better than the world that is actually out there...?

I used to see this happen all the time in the military. Commanders would get so beaten down and worn out by reality that they would retreat into themselves for a breather. They would begin to see reality through a distorted lens as what they wished the world would be rather than what it was. It was an idea that became popular, known as the Ideal State. The notion was that the Ideal State should be the goal to which organizations strived and while one could never really hope to get there, by aspiring one could get further than by setting the bar lower with more realistic expectations. That's how it was supposed to work in theory but in reality it got twisted around. Commander's sometimes forgot what reality was; when things went wrong, as they often did, and expectations didn't pan out, it was the organization's fault...the fault of the people around them. They were lazy, stupid or incompetent. Subordinates, when they saw a leader heading down this road, would often shake their heads thinking..."Here we go again." What then began to happen is that they would tell their bosses what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to know.

I wonder sometimes if the oil spill in the gulf isn't the result of unrealistic expectations leaning on physical possibilities. It's being rumored that management was "Leaning on the Well." That accountants and "Managers" were exerting pressure on engineers to increase production beyond safe levels.

At the a paper company in Rhinelander a few years ago some so called "Efficiency Experts," concluded that running the machines faster would result in the production of more paper. Duh! That;s exactly what happened but unfortunately none of the newly processed paper worked any longer in a copy machine. It seems this type of fiasco is cyclic and each new generation has to learn the same old lessons over again. I'm not sure what all this has to do with focus except we need to step back from time to time and take a broader view. Sometimes too much focus is not a good thing. Sometimes we need to look beyond the trees and into the forest.