Ambient Amplification

Well, first things first, if you're thinking of googling the title, I'm not sure you'll find anything useful there. And now to the point. This story begins with a simple, but rather interesting thing one of the professors of my course told us. So a lot of people in my research group work on sound simulation and propagation. The math professor I'm talking about, was talking about thunder, more specifically, what do we hear as thunder when lightning strikes. So, what a lightning strike does, in layman terms, is to set off a shockwave, somewhat like what happens when a bomb goes off, though not strong enough to throw you off. This shockwave itself, will only last for a short time, much less than a second, and it will cause the thunder clap. But we all know we hear stuff for a much longer time, well, that's simply the amplification of ambient sounds, i.e. the sounds prevalent in our environment, which are amplified thus enabling us to hear them, ergo the title.

The interesting analogy that came to my head is the way things tend to overwhelm us at times. Now we've all seen sportsmen go "out of form" and struggle to do even the simplest of things, when they seemed to have the midas touch only a little while back. My theory is, and it can be easily backed up by personal experiences, is that when we face a sudden shock, things which didn't bother us before, start to take on astronomical proportions. Minor irritations assume the role of major bottlenecks, and you don't understand what is going on. And quite expectedly, nor can anyone else. This interesting amplification of ambient experiences, does not confine itself to just bad experiences, in my opinion. We've all seen people "ride the wave" of success. Somehow, sometimes, our instincts take hold in such fashion that everything we touch turns to gold, so to say. We know of many names for this sort of effect, like being in the zone, to name one. For some people, or so it seems to others, this streak lasts their entire lifetimes. What I do know is, that trying to analyze such a streak usually ends up in destroying it. And people go to extreme lengths to preserve such streaks, resorting to seemingly superstitious acts. The simple fact is that to others these acts will seem somewhat random, and not having an effect on the task at hand. But, as much as I may hate quantum mechanics, I agree with the premise that a butterfly's flapping of its wings can change the world. Now this may seem illogical to a lot of people, but seemingly random and unrelated acts can benefit or harm our main focus. Trying to explain to someone why you put on the right shoe before the left, comb your hair a certain way, or even why you eat a certain breakfast on special days, is certainly not easy. Not to say I follow any of them, just as a disclaimer :) . But the simple fact is that these simple rituals calm our minds, and help us tune our minds.

Look, the main driving force behind my argument is my belief in the power of the subconcious, and the things we don't notice in our everyday lives, can in some ways affect our performance. People usually attribute that to emotion, but I don't think that's the only thing in play here. The way we pick up such habits is by remembering the times we were successful in doing something. Maybe we did tie our shoes a certain way that day, and repeating that seemingly unrelated act recalls some other things from our memory which we didn't notice conciously. It's not an unknown fact that we do notice and remember a lot of things we don't "notice" i.e. our concious mind is never made aware of it. That's not to say that data is useless, that seems to be the way in which we learn simple tasks, like walking as a kid. Maybe our tics, these habits, act as a recall system to load up the auxiliary data we otherwise would not know how to conciously access (Forgive the computer specific language, force of habit, but you get what I mean :P ).

On the bad side of things, such shocks tend to bring us down probably because they break some assumptions we worked with. And assumptions are usually the base elements in the pile of cards that is our existence, so they tend to bring down a lot with them. It's quite easy to devolve into simpering idiots, and wallow in the pools of self pity, among other things :P . The actual event that brings us out of such phases is something along the lines of this phenomenon too, and depending on the kind of person you are, both the events may have differing probabilities of occurence. My guess is that increasing maturity, tends to even out these probabilities, in the sense that we tend to recover from downturns faster because we have faced most of those things before. In some sense that should imply, that to gain maturity and avoid mistakes, you must make a lot of them in the first place, preferably though, in things that don't matter too much. It does seem sensible to think that emotions do play a role in triggering these events, as such shocks are usually accompanied by some emotional shock. That seems to suggest that this, is what makes us human, as this is where our existence starts to deviate from the logical. But well, that's a discussion for another day.