Living in a different frame rate
The upside to not-so-normal thoughts.
I recently watched a behind-the-scenes of Fantastic Fungi (a movie exploring mycelium networks). The director, Louis Schwartzberg, is a pioneer of time-lapse cinematography who shoots nature over periods of months to create incredible footage of growth and decay. The fungi shots were taken as 4 frames per hour — so one day of filming was 4 seconds of footage. He’s also taken footage of hummingbirds who can beat their wings up to 80 beats per second — much faster than the human eye can see.
In the video, Schwartzberg talks about how different life forms have different “frame rates”:
“For example, a mosquito on your arm… takes a look at that hand coming towards it in ultra-slow motion and has plenty of time to take off because its metabolic rate, its lifespan, is way shorter than our lifespan.”
This isn’t a new concept, but I found the way he expressed it super interesting. I started thinking that maybe people have different ‘frame rates’ too.
Could a faster ‘mental metabolism’ be why I feel 10 years older than my age, while most people feel younger?
I’ve always felt like an outsider.
As a kid, I found spending time with other kids really draining. I was told I was shy, and as I got older, I added ‘introvert’ to my persona. I found a few great teenage friends who I connected with, but most of my peers I found perplexing. I tried to be interested in brand names, and hair colour, and Neighbours, but mostly failed. I’d much rather sit on the headland’s cliff edge and watch the seagulls riding the wind, or search for story-filled objects at the second-hand store.
As I became an adult, I became more comfortable with my weirdo status. I believe everyone has something unique to offer the world. We all have strengths and weaknesses, personality, interests, and eccentricities, and I can usually find something in common with an individual. Groups of people are a different story. Once you start averaging out what people think — bestselling books, blockbuster movies, top 40 music — I tend to dislike them. (If you’re trying to convince me to watch/read/listen to something, don’t ever use the word popular.)
I’m actually pretty happy being me. And trusting my instincts has served me well so far. I wouldn’t want to be one of those normal people — it feels like they’re missing out on an extra layer of life experience. But without realising it, I’ve been filtering myself. I know that lots of what goes on in my head doesn’t connect with other people, so I leave it in my head. Everything must pass a ‘does the other person want to hear this’ test before it leaves my mouth.
“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.” ― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Wait, there’s others?
Then I discovered an article on ‘rainforest minds’. These are deep thinkers, extra perceptive, analytical, creative problem solvers, highly sensitive and intuitive.
“There is no doubt they crave learning new ideas, are introspective, compassionate, and make unusual connections between, oh, all the things.”
Woah, hang on. There were others like me out there?
Did I have … a… (sorry, gimme a minute…) Did I have a TRIBE?!
Does my unusual way of thinking have some value to society? And if I’m supposedly ‘gifted’, why has nobody told me!? It’s taken me 33 years to find a blog post to tell me this is a good thing. WTF, society?
I got my credit card out in existential panic (always the best way to get out one’s credit card), punched in the numbers, and got access to a reputable-looking IQ test. I’d never done one before, and it turns out every question is a multiple choice asking, ‘which image comes next’. It’s all about finding patterns. Is that what intelligence is? I always thought it was something, I don’t know… bigger than that.
Maybe someone tried to tell me I was gifted and I didn’t listen. Any creative people will tell you — anything they can do is easy and boring, but anything someone else can do is amazing. We don’t put value on our own skills because they’re ours. I guess it’s the same for ways of thinking. My way of thinking seems easy and boring because it’s mine.
Having blown my money, I decided it’s probably not great to be labelled as gifted anyway — a word with almost as much baggage as ‘love’.
So, back to the frame rates…
I think I have a different ‘mental metabolism’ to most people. I’m noticing, and thinking about, and finding connections between things that others are oblivious to. And that’s why it sometimes feels like I’m having a conversation with a different species. (Maybe this is what dolphins would feel like if they had conversations with us? They’d be talking about that funny thing that echolocation does and we’d be giving them blank stares.)
What I’ve discovered is there’s value in different thoughts. Instead of leaving random thoughts on the mental shelf, we should share them. Some might be confronting, some might be wrong — but some may create shifts in other’s thinking. As a tribe of rainforest minds, we have a responsibility to use our intensity, creativity, and mental energy (our superpowers?) for the greater good.
I want to hear your stories and your wacky ideas. They may just end up changing the world — or at least changing my world.
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” Clarissa Pinkole Estes
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, check out more of my (free) Medium articles here: A little bit about me and my writing.
