The mechanical patterns of conversation

Over the past years I became aware or noticed that when I converse with people they use whatever I say as a trigger to retrieve from their memory a story of a reference related to this particular �tag�. In other words they don�t necessarily hear what I have to say but they use my subject as an opportunity to unload on me the information stored by them under the same �category�. This has gotten so bad that I personally consider this a full blown epidemic. I don�t have any historical data about this and moreover I think on occasion I do this myself but the pattern erased hundreds of potentially meaningful conversations. For example, I have an otherwise intelligent friend and I can script my conversation with him. If I say �bread�, he will tell me a story I heard about him baking �bread� thirty years ago. If I say transmission, he will immediately volunteer an out of context story about fixing his Ford and so on� It gotten to the point so that I can induce a story from this man by merely vocalizing the trigger name or a theme.

This happens in conversations so many times that is essentially negates a live exchange where a person thinks about what you just said and reacts as a human being not a storage devise. I do not know if this is occurring today more frequently, nor do I know if others are noticing this phenomena but I do know that because of this epidemic the potentially consequential conversation have been reduced to frustrating mechanical recitations.

Gandalin comments:

Thank you for a lovely and perceptive post. You have hit an important nail squarely on the head. Of course, this has nothing to do with bloggers, or blogging, or computers, or code. But these technologies may have sensitized us to understand this phenomenon in a new way. These automatic responses are very much like embedded bits of code that are very powerfully although unconsciously and automatically activated when the triggers are clicked. The phenomenon illustrates the fact that many of us are not really awake and not really conscious at all.

The reference [by Chakira] to the French Jesuit historian Certeau is interesting, although he was a neo-Freudian, and I distrust neo-Freudians. I will have to take a deeper look at his perceptions. Another figure who worked on waking us out of the false-awareness or slumber of our daily lives was G.I. Gurdjieff, who developed techniques for substituting real consciousness for the false robotic consciousness of everyday life. I think that Rene Daumal's "A Night of Serious Drinking" (i.e. La Grande Beuverie) also touches on this theme.

The clinical psychologist Robert Godwin has written on his nice blog "One Cosmos" about the parasitical "thoughts" that infest and take over many minds.

The hinayana (theravadan) Buddhist technology of awareness meditation (vipassana) also comes to (false?) mind as an approach to dealing with this problem. To my chagrin, I regret that I can not think of a Jewish source for the sort of technology I am trying to describe. I wish someone else could.