So that’s not what it’s really called, but I’m working on it still.

I’m interested in the use of humor and its effects on our health. Laughter, it is said, is our greatest coping mechanism, a stress reliever, as well as an immune system booster. There is an interesting transformation, however, that takes place as an observation is registered in our mind, processed and (potentially) reacted upon.

Some researchers believe humor, or a humorous reaction to an observed event, is triggered by aggression and can be linked to testosterone. It’s unclear from this line of thought what the true motivation is behind this compulsion to react to observations with humor, but I’d like to think that it is non-gender linked nor a malicious testosterone induced chest beating spasm. I believe there is a rapid evolution of thought that takes place after an observation and the result can be one of many things. Very abstractly, I believe it might look like this:

It’s obvious that this spectrum of humor bends to subjectivity, but it’s clear that aggression is possible here but not it’s not a driving motivator. What I’m particularly interested in here is focussing on removing the tepid joke (yellow) from my reactions to humorous observations – and certainly anything to its right. Let me tell you why.

I believe that humor is a powerful tool and I love it. As I’ve matured as a human, I’ve found myself ever more capable of increasingly sophisticated and higher orders of humor. While I believe I am capable I also believe that thoughts generally are evolutionary. By this I mean that they grow and change and die and are reborn only to die again. Coming across good ideas and jokes is a game of numbers. It’s just statistics. So while I have more sophisticated and mature thoughts now at thirty than when I was at, say twelve, I still have the legacy of unsophisticated humor rearing its ugly head every now and then.

I want to curb my behavior of reacting to humerous observations when the reaction is anything less than a good joke, and I want to do this when I am in either an academic or professional setting (let’s be honest – I’m gonna tell a ton of bad jokes at home or with my friends – sorry guys).

But this task isn’t as simple as just NOT opening my big mouth. In addition to believing that telling aggressive or bad or even just plain old jokes all the time is counter productive in a professional or academic setting, I also believe that these kinds of (collectively and subjectively) poor reactions to observations are extremely hilarious to me personally. The older we get, the more intent we get on polishing (read: white-washing) our personalities for professional consumption, the less energized/powerful/free we feel. We die inside when we don’t get to tell bad jokes. I’m sorry, but we do.

There is tremendous benefit to staying in touch with the most ridiculous possible manifestation of yourself, and I’d like to do this by channeling these bad/aggressive/tepid jokes in a way that does not disrupt the current task (the funniest observations seem to always occur when you’ve got important things to do) but accurately records the moment to either be enjoyed at a later time or expressed in a way that satisfies the joke’s desire to be shared.

Here are two ways this recording process might take place:

Yes, this one is inspired by Kelly Dobson. These are just ideas at the moment, so please stay tuned.

I’m gonna build right on top of what Doug was talking about in his zombie CDC example and mention another zombie-ish tactic aimed at exposing some kind of useful insight about our health – this one operates more on an individual level than the CDC’s exercise.

Night of the Gummies (part of The Truth campaign) also “goes beyond conventional definitions of functionalism to include the poetic” by spoofing the pants off of one of big tobacco’s assertions that Gummy Bears are as addictive as cigarettes.

Here’s the problem with focus: you’re using the same mechanism (the brain) to both a). perform the action, and b). provide the feedback.

I’m not sure how we’re expected to do this or how anyone has ever been able to do anything, ever. I’m not sure what a good analogy might be, but when we are asked to focus on one thing, an assignment, our work, cleaning our apartment – anything, really – essentially we are asking our brain to focus on this particular thing. This usually takes most of the organ’s entire functional capabilities and devotes it to the one task, especially when it’s a task that involves lots of analysis, reading or writing.

Despite this at-capacity state, we nevertheless require that our brain also monitor it’s own performance – checking the original goal and assessing our progress towards that goal. These seem to be two different tasks operating at two different time intervals. Looking at it this way it becomes very easy to understand why we lose our focus during the course of any activity we are doing.

I wonder if there is a way to devise a secondary feedback system to monitor our focus on a given task. I’m not suggesting schizophrenia here, but it might be nice if there were a way to set aside some external or reserved cognitive process to give us feedback on what we’re thinking of.

This makes no sense, I realize. Thank you.

I feel as though these are sadly inadequate when compared to the complexity of second-order cybernetic systems or a conversation system. I don’t think I have a deep enough understanding of models like these yet to construct or even identify one in the wild, but I’m looking forward to getting some more info tomorrow.

http://fredtruman.com/_itp/12_diy-health/cybernetic-systems-01.pdf

As of this posting, I haven’t implemented any of these (it’s needs to specifically take place on a weekday morning), but I’m going to give Trigger 01 a shot on Monday morning with some concrete terms of reward / non-reward drafted ahead of time.

Check back for the update, but you can see how it’s been developed thus far:

http://fredtruman.com/the-cabinut