To have a plastic mind
Editor’s message: English is not my native language. If you read something weird or anything wrong, please let me know.
To live and feel a continuous reconfiguration of the ecology of everything — an ecology in which we are continuously understanding the meaning of communication, of feelings, of sensations — .
E.g.: To wonder of the color blue. To see the endless color of the sky, to feel the warm of a turquoise ocean, or the touch of a glowing sapphire: each a new reconfiguration of the concept blue.
It has come to my mind that is to have a plastic mind.
These thoughts have come to my mind in this millenial learning, re-learning, forgetting, oblivion, and re-learning of experience and re-experience of things.
As an example, I read some time ago about blind people that could experience (I wouldn’t say that they just touched it, that would be oversimplifying) the most famous visual works of Picasso, Da Vinci and others.
Now that I think about it, of course they didn’t just touched it. That was a whloe new sense of perception. To touch a visual work, that could not happen just with the same old cognitive process, we need a new one. Those people set it. They understood the masterpiece through a new sense. (And to keep on thinking that senses are just the same old five ones that wouldn’t be having a plastic mind. I’ll explain more in the next lines.)
Last week I attended a conference by social community psychologist Ignacio Ramos Beltrán in which he said something fundamental for mind plasticity which was that we should restore some settings in our brains, some areas of knowledge long lost or forgotten. We must restore the geographies in our brains that we have historically marginalized.
He said this after I asked what can we undertsand of the notion of ‘territory’ in other cultures — which I recently was told by a zapotec that they do not understand that concept, much less do they have a word for it — for us to be more inclusive towards those people or those places.
The zapotec, btw, told me that they don’t understand a word for territory because they do not see themselves as an unconnected part of it.
‘Territory does not exist. Interesting. Fascinating really…’ — my mind goes.
I’ve been doing field research in different populations around Mexico’s territory that have different culture from me for around 6–7 years. I’ve come to listen the most insane ideas.
By this time, by act of listening an argument that I cannot understand its premises due to my occidentality, I know that I have to restore and configure new settings to understant or not-understand, for example, what territory is.
In the seminars of Gabriel Bourdin, specialist in the work of Marcel Jousse, theorist of the anthropology of the body, I’ve learned to read human acts differently, not the common verbal expressions, but gestural ‘language’, that which Marcel Jousse and Bourdin call mimemes or the recreation of the im-pressions made ex-pressions of the cosmos. A plastic cosmos too.
How plastic is the universe (or multiverse) we live in? Just look at the changes that have happened! We’re not an atom, we’re not dust. But we are in a way. If that is not plasticity of existance I don’t know what is.
This human mimemes, throughout a not so extensive existance in cosmic proportions, have made us who we are, thus this acts have constructed our culture(s). Not language, what some say is the essence of humanity, there is something far more basic and at the same time more universal of human knowledge, like mimemes.
In this time of gloabalization, we’ve come to create such an intricate and precise communication with words that it is difficult, sometimes impossible to understand another ways.
To exemplify this disability: the other day I read at the bus stop, standing there, in the irrelevance of everyday life and commute, I read. I unavoidably read.
Without wanting to do so I read. When I realized this, I tried to just see the letters without understanding them. So I became more anxtious and frustrated because I couldn’t do it. I could not not read. And I asked myself, what could I be deprived of by not understanding that ordered form of lines and spaces in another way? What knowledge was my mind forbidding myself to? What ignorance?
Some days later I came up with this plastic mind term.
In relation to this reading disability — the ability of reading — I think that I have to put in practice the restorage of knowledge and new subjectivities, and neglect even the most essential cognitive knowledge such as language.
I need to restablish cognitive abilities that I’ve lost while learning. I have to become an anthropologist of the mind to empathize with those other logics, like my zapotec friends — not psychoanalysis or psychology, rather psychic anthropology (which is not the same as cognitive anthropology)—.
I need to rethink myself in the world. I need to take as knowledge what for others may be ignorance.
To have a plastic mind is learning to learn, but most importantly is learning to un-learn. Because in this cosmos there are infinite realities and possibilities. It’s like J.L. Borges multiple parallel universes in “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan”: there are so many paths and each one leads to a different reality. But perhaps, I think, there is a way to un-walk our path and go to another.
To have a plastic mind is to understand, reader, that you and I can share our minds, that we actually share our minds — in a gestural, Joussian, cultural way — so we must re-configure our ecology of the mind.
To blow one’s mind, to make it burst. To cause an eruption. To explode into a mental orgasm.
To destroy just to follow with the creation of a new mind universe.
That is to have a plastic mind.
