Saturday, December 15, 2007

"the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances;
if there's any reaction, both are transformed." - Carl Gustav Jung

Lazy

A good friend of mine went to a training session in the gym she just subscribed to. As she was telling me everything they made her do, she mentioned something she learned. Apparently our body prefers to use the muscles that are the strongest and avoids using the weak ones, because it's more difficult. If an exercise requires that we use the weak muscles, we slightly change it to be able to use the strong ones again.

This made me wonder if it's the same way with the brain. We must be using the same parts of our brains all the time, and avoid using the other parts. We think in familiar ways, we recycle familiar opinions, listen to familiar songs, do familiar things. But when something new, unfamiliar arises, we get confused. The night before, when I asked another friend what she would change if she could only change one thing, she said she would "try to make people think in less extreme ways."

Going back to the original story, when I asked about the brain, "I think it's lazy to say it's the way you are," my friend said. She heard somewhere that our brain builds new links when we start thinking about different things, in different ways.

Part of my confusion, fear stems from laziness, but it's not only me. We try to keep new, unfamiliar things at bay, we put on our poker faces and wait for people to adjust to us. My way or highway.

Any kind of relationship is only meaningful if both sides are willing to adjust. This is what I think, if it matters at all...

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