One Saturday afternoon this past summer, I grew bored with my routine of typically thrilling activities, namely watching Food Network and playing solitaire. Thus, I needed to think of something even more awesome to do. Luckily, I found just the thing lying around my house: magnets. Holy hell are they fun to play with or what?
I got to thinking about how amazing magnets are. It’s bizarre to me that two pieces of metal can attract or repel each other with an invisible force. I know there’s a scientific explanation, but it’s much more fun focusing on the mystery of them.
Sometimes I look at life with the perspective of an alien from another planet who has just landed on Earth. I look at things that are incredibly normal for an average earthling then realize if you truly examine it from an outsider’s perspective, you see just how strange it is.
Magnets seem like normal, relatively mundane things. Think about them long enough, though, and you realize the forces they have on each other defy our normal thinking about how things should work. They can trump gravity and float in midair. They’re just… weird!
The weather’s another absurd phenomenon. It’s such a normal part of every person’s life that most don’t think about it that much. If it rains, you use an umbrella. If it snows, you go shovel it. Is it not incredibly strange that we, as inhabitants of Earth, periodically experience water falling from the sky in little drops?
Even when weather has a larger impact on our lives (hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.) they’re still dismissed as normal because that’s the way the world works. But if I lived on a weather-less planet and came to Earth, it would probably really freak me out to see that white stuff called snow falls from the sky, accumulating everywhere and completely changes the color of our surroundings for months.
But more than anything, the power of our brains blows my mind. Language in particular is insane. Our brains can translate symbols on paper into words, each of which are then translated to its own specific meaning and finally grouped together in sentences to convey an idea. And your brain interprets symbols so fast you don’t feel like you’re doing much thinking at all, when in fact your brain is doing something extraordinary!
Not only do we have an almost instantaneous recognition of words, we also have an incredible ability to sense what others are thinking and feeling. Usually within a few seconds of talking with a friend, I can get pretty good idea of their current state of mind. Our brains pick up on the tiniest changes of inflection in their voice and every detail of their facial expressions. Just like language, all of these things happen in your brain without you having to even noticeably think about it. It’s automatic.
Maybe I’m too easily impressed by these ordinary things, but I’m a firm believer that most normal things in life only seem that way because we’re around them so much. If you stop and try to think about them like it’s the first time you’ve seen or heard of them, the most mundane things might blow your mind.
E-mail Elliot at ejmorris2@wisc.edu to join him in a philisophical chat over some wine and cheese.
