Welcome to Morning Walks

..and congrats on the new dog.

Congratulations, you just got yourself a dog!

Look at that face! He’s a good dog. All dogs are, really.

Now, there’s one small thing I should probably mention - although it’s too late to do anything about it since this is your dog now…

If you open The Big Book of Abnormal Dogs, yours is in it.

He’s on page 236 right after the one who seems to mope around more than others and the one who runs under the bed every time the doorbell rings.

Yours is in there because he can be high-strung, needs A LOT of exercise and stimulation, and wanders off sometimes.

To be at his best, he needs to be let off the leash on occasion and allowed to run free.

(No, one of those 20-foot retractable leashes will not do. He needs to be off-leash sometimes even though when he is, he sometimes runs off for a while. The good news is that he always comes back.)

It isn’t bad to get him some of that exercise first thing in the morning. Maybe a nice morning walk on a beach somewhere.

That dog… it’s my brain; and all of the above is pretty damn close to how it works.

Most people’s brains trot a fairly straight line down the beach. Most People Brains walk Most People Paths. Mine, on the other hand, is essentially a 3-year-old golden retriever… and that dog is yours now.

The Big Book of Abnormal Dogs is the American Psychiatric Association’s bible: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fifth Edition (DSM-V).

I have a mental disorder.

Now, I personally don’t give much of a shit whether how my brain works, has always worked, and will always work is classified as a ‘mental disorder’ or not. That is unimportant to me. On my side, the experience of that is something akin to being left-handed and having society deem left-handedness disordererd. Cool, great, whatever. I just want a pair of left-handed scissors; is that too much to ask?

Your brain being classified as abnormal gets ya thinking about what we see as normal though… and what the reasons are for that… and the implications… and how they apply to other things and other people and life overall and how well or badly that works for not just me but everyone.

Most human qualities are scalar. Whether the quality is physical, emotional, or cognitive, people fall somewhere along a range. It works kind of like the weather. No matter where you live, there are boundaries of how cold or hot it typically gets. A few days a year, it might fall outside those boundaries; but almost all days fall within them – and most are somewhere close to the middle.

That bell curve is called a ‘normal distribution’. When it comes to weather, variation is normal and so is even significant or extreme variation. That is how weather works. And that is how humans work. We don’t come in one temperature… and with a lot of our qualities, we don’t even stay one temperature.

Society though… the machine we all live within - it has no love for the weather; it ain’t a fan of variation; and it absolutely hates the ‘20’ side of the 80/20 rule. Society likes the fat part of the bell curve. The farther from center some human condition, quality, or characteristic falls, the more society actively works to extinct it from the population.

Maybe your new dog will dig into this more deeply on some other walk but for today, let’s just paw at the surface and then keep walking:

Children are born into a social system – their family. They then eventually move into another social system – school – and then someday graduate out into the next – the workplace. If they are raised in a faith, beneath all three of those other social systems is another: religion.

From childhood to adulthood, we humans (in western cultures, at least) shuttle from Social System to Social System.

Family, education, workplace, religion.

All four share some qualities: some group has the power, makes the rules, determines what is rewarded and punished, and chooses what is enforced and how. The child (and then adult) is expected or forced to participate.

Basically, all four social systems are like sports of sorts and the child/adult is an athlete. The athlete didn’t pick the game but they have to play.

Out of the four social systems, which TWO do you think have the most influence on a child’s development?

Pick two: Family, school, workplace, religion.

You can tell me in the comments which two you picked (and don’t change your answers after reading the rest!).

I suspect the top vote-getter would be ‘School’. ‘Family’ and ‘religion’ would be 2^nd and 3^rd but not miles apart. And ‘Workplace’ would get close to zero votes.

The results, whatever they are, don’t get at what people think is THE most influential social system on a child’s development. They just give us a sense of which ones people think are in the Top 2.

I ask because I have a suspicion about how people would answer; and I think the actual answers are the opposite:

Workplace and Religion

IMHO those two have the most societal influence and power over childhood development – even if the child’s family is not religious and even though the child is nowhere near working age.

I’ll tell you why…

Those two social systems span the longest stretch of human’s lives. While the child is not in one of them and may be in neither; the vast majority of adults are in one – the workplace – and, historically, a large majority have also been in the other – religion.

And those adults are the ones with the power and control and ability to set rules and decide on what is rewarded and punished in the other two: family and school.

In the two systems where participation occurs in adulthood – The Workplace and Organized Religion – the big overall machine of each system wants something from its participants…

It wants people to CLAP.

The work world and institutions of faith want: Compliance, Loyalty, Attendance, and Performance.

Putting them in time sequence: Each system wants people to show up, follow the rules, do what is asked well, and keep showing up. Attendance → Compliance → Performance → Loyalty.

…and those social systems then influence how the two others work and are run… Family and School.

Schools are pressured to prepare children for the Workplace with its rules and order… and Families are pressured to prepare their children for school.

The thing that most influences American children’s development IMHO is… the Workplace… the system of working and earning a living and having a career.

That system has upstream effects which might make for a good dig on another walk but for now, I’ll leave the topic with two thought questions and keep us walking:

Why would the American social system of the adult workplace want to raise children to be adults who show up at work, do as their told, do a good job at it, and stay put?

And…

How might that motivation impact what behaviors are classified as ‘normal’ and which are labeled as ‘out of order’?

I promised I’d keep these walks short, so I need to get us back to the house. To do that, let me bookend this first outing with a little more on your new dog.

Human brains are amazingly dynamic. They serve us through a never-ending system of expansion, trimming, and optimization.

Our brains take in new information and store it and build new pathways to connect it to things we already know. When we use information a lot and task our brains with finding it often, our brains widen the highways to where it is located so it can get there faster. And when we seem to not use it or need to access it anymore, our brains downgrade the roads to reach it so the whole system works better. Our brains maintain highways to the cities and dirt roads to the boonies.

That collection of processes is enabled by our brains’ ‘neuroplasticity’.

Our brain putty can be stretched… extended… to accommodate new information.

And once it has, those roads can be widened - or, when no longer as useful, they can be trimmed and downgraded via ‘synaptic pruning’.

Those three activities - expansion, optimization, and trimming – go on in ‘normal’ brains.

They also go on in mine even though how mine works is classified as abnormal.

The balance is just different in mine. The emphasis on each of those three activities is different in my brain… My brain does truly work differently and, therefore, what it is good at is different too.

People with ADHD, by virtue of their thirst for things that are novel, interesting, or challenging, pour a metric shit tonne of new information into their brains. We amp the shit out of our brain’s neuroplastic capability for taking in new information and indexing it to what we already know.

ADHD brains lean way in on human brains’ having a resident road crew on call to build new roads. We get them to build a shitload of them…

…and since we throw so much new and different shit in there and it usually relates to things we already learned, think about, or find important, that little brain road network gets a shitload of traffic... and a higher portion of the roads stay in use. So our brains don’t downgrade as many to dirt roads. We keep a lot of roads paved…

And that lifelong process produces adult brains which are filled differently and work differently…

Our brains are a different dog.

And when you let that dog off the leash and just let it… be the dog it is… man, that’s fun for the dog.

I have no idea if it’s fun for you but it is fun as hell for the dog…

When you let the dog take you for a walk, sometimes you end up taking a whole different route down the beach. No two days’ will be the same… and to the dog, that’s part of the joy of it.

Today, the path wove through dogs, psychology, sociology, statistics, weather, sports, economics, and neurology… and we were only gone 6 minutes.

That’s a pretty nice start to the day.

Welcome to Morning Walks.

Your new dog already loves them.