It’s funny that our excitement with new things often starts out focused on such obvious truths. For example, our fascination with the brain can often be translated into the simple statement: “The brain does stuff!”
But we don’t say things like that, exactly. We say instead something that sounds much more sophisticated. “Well, it turns out that when you play video games, your brain actually releases this chemical that gives you pleasure.”
We get so excited about the brain potentially being involved in something that we forget that every single one of our behaviors involves our brains releasing chemicals. And so while talking about the brain releasing chemicals sounds like an explanation for the popularity of video games, it’s really a tautology. Hence the translation: “Your brain is involved when you play video games!”
Another example was my initial excitement upon learning that monkeys can be trained to move a mouse cursor with their minds using brain machine interfaces. Hear it? “They’re controlling the mouse with their minds!” As if this wasn’t how they always controlled things.
So when you find yourself excited by something so obvious, what’s the next step? As you learn more about the subject, you’ll naturally try to pin down what you find interesting by tacking on more and more modifiers to your excitement. You learn, in other words, how to ask a more detailed question. So instead of being excited about the brain simply being involved with a thing, you might get excited about the brain being involved “in this way and not that way.” You start talking about “imbalances of chemicals in the brain” instead of just “my brain releases chemicals”.
But I think it’s important that we don’t forget how to return to our first naive perspectives: The brain does things. Because if all our accumulation of knowledge doesn’t allow us to step back to that initial excitement, then what’s been the point of it all? This way, when you hear someone else fascinated in this simple way, you can add color to the conversation with all the more specific and tangible things that you’ve learned along the way.
Just imagine the stereotypical fascination a pothead has with simple concepts. The way he can say a single word and really ponder its significance as if it was a completely novel thought. “I am sitting in a room in a chair. I am sitting in a room in a chair! A chair!” No matter how sophisticated your understanding of a subject, you should always be able to return to your initial excitement: The brain is how we move and think. The brain is how we move and think.