Driver, Follow that Cat!

Lee Gomes in the Wall Street journal of 3/12/08 draws your attention to studies about cats and people.

His take-off is the laser. It seems if you aim a ten-dollar laser pointer across the room your cat will attack the dot at once. If you move the dot, or if you start again a while later with your old ploy, the cat will get right back at it, relentlessly proving it didn't learn the dot was not a bird. Or! Or proving that it cannot "choose" to chase the dot. It must chase the dot, because committing the cat to action takes place prior to choice.

Scientists and their ilk have studied where in the cat's thinking the "decision" to follow the beam comes from. The reaction is apparently primitive in the history of the cat's mental evolution, and the alarming news is man is not much different.

That is, we will go back to a stimulus again and again even though we haven't chosen to.

The decision to pay attention to history is in this case missing. That tells me a lot about myself. Occasionally I'll watch TV shows I've seen before, or rent movies I know almost by heart. I've read War and Peace three times. That's not the problem I'm addressing here. What scares me a little is my subscribing to two New York newspapers so I can read about the same international developments. Then I top that off with browsing through a dozen other media resources from NYC to LA, too often picking up the same tidbits via the news reading services -- all on the Internet.

So here's my conclusion: I spend too much of my day learning the same things over and over, and the only thing that will correct this loss of time to redundancy is to step up and take responsibility for thinning the numbers of newsbits I get each day, before I can think about it. However, I want to reduce repetition, not block new news. How can I do this? I'll put my mental media-policeman to work on this at once and keep you posted.

How can you help stomp out pre-conscious, redundant news? Begin at home.

For instance, I just cancelled the Wall Street Journal --where ironically I found Gomes' column -- and will subsist here in South Carolina on only two dailies, one a local and the other the New York Times. That's a start.

But darn it! I cut back on the WSJ just when it was culturally waking up.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.