{"id":69,"date":"2013-03-06T05:11:10","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T10:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.curtisbright.com\/bln\/?p=69"},"modified":"2013-03-06T05:11:10","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T10:11:10","slug":"leaving-my-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/2013\/03\/06\/leaving-my-head\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaving my head"},"content":{"rendered":"

The TED website<\/a> hosts a large collection of inspiring talks on many different topics. The talk on how schools kill creativity<\/a> is particularly fantastic; both funny and insightful, and is in fact the most-watched TED talk to date. During it Ken Robinson makes the following remark:<\/p>\n

There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not to put too fine a point on it, this describes me perfectly. (Although I am a graduate student rather than a professor.)<\/p>\n

This behaviour has both its strengths and weaknesses. For example,\u00a0I have almost never felt lonely in my life, despite being alone a good portion of the time. Perhaps this is because by living in my head I am able to keep myself company. Indeed, my\u00a0modus operandi when thinking about something could be described\u00a0as a “conversation” with myself in which I try to make arguments for both sides of an issue.<\/p>\n

However, like all human emotions,\u00a0loneliness\u00a0undoubtedly\u00a0exists for a reason. In this case, it seems to be a trigger to make friends, which in turn improves one’s well-being. Without\u00a0loneliness one has less short-term pain, but also less motivation to seek out ultimately beneficial connections.<\/p>\n

In my case, I never gave much thought to the downsides, or even viewed them with a kind of perverse pride; the “cost of doing business” as it were. In short, I didn’t make much of an effort to\u00a0ameliorate the absent-mindedness; in fact, I thought such traits were essentially\u00a0unchangeable.<\/p>\n

Early this year I decided to make a conscious effort to get out of my head. There were multiple reasons, but one is that almost every job I do involves interacting with other people in some way, so I figure that becoming more empathetic will actually improve the quality of my work.<\/p>\n

How does one go about venturing out of their head? Well, I am still learning that. One step I’m taking\u00a0is to learn—and remember!—the names of people I recognize from somewhere. I haven’t had a 100% success rate, but I’m already much better than I was previously, when I would be likely to forget someone’s name before my conversation with them had finished. Additionally, I will not ignore the fact that\u00a0yes, I have a body<\/em>, and to this end will pay more attention to things like exercise, diet, and appearance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The TED website hosts a large collection of inspiring talks on many different topics. The talk on how schools kill creativity is particularly fantastic; both funny and insightful, and is in fact the most-watched TED talk to date. During it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}