Right. I just had my morning mind blown by OS X, but the implications are a bit broader than my little accident implies.

I was in Firefox, and was keying in some text, but I must have accidentally typoed a key combination whose function is to collapse the window into the dock. Which event then ocurred — but in very slow motion — a strange thing which I have actually never seen. And this thing is something ordinarily related to time in the sense that, usually, it takes about one second, but this took approximately five seconds — and since I had never experienced this, the effect was exaggerated. Because the event instantly became the extreme focus of my attention, it seemed to me as if -time itself had warped-.

For a long moment I reveled in the sheer novelty, in fact, I was so surprised that I exclaimed something rather stonerly about weirdness and then really allowed the whole experience a moment to expand into my awareness, affecting all of my senses and the basis of my consciousness. Novel experience, after all, strongly stimulates R. Hemisphere assets which are usually otherwise inhibited. When I went back over the event in my memory, I could not be certain that my exclamation had not been vocalized in slow motion time.

Then, the LH took over. Analysis. Part-discrimination and comparison. Identity checking. A single option stood forth. One of the keys caused the collapse to occur in slow motion. I suspected shift. It had, actually, engendered a complete shift for me, probably for the first time since that strange ladder between orders was invented.

“Yes! Shift just shifted me!,” I thought, as I tested the theory that deflates the novelty and renders it into ordinary LH manipulable abstractions. I hit the shift key and clicked the yellow button in the upper left corner of the window. Sure enough, the whole thing slow-mo collapsed, just as I had seen for the first time a moment before. Theory proven. Novelty… overturned?

Now, this is the crucial moment. What are the implications of the LH activity for the previous RH playful experience of learning-wonder. Well, they could be construed to contradict them. Nothing about time changed. It was a function of a machine that is standard. I merely misinterpreted that as being somehow plausibly linked to temporal flow, such that I allowed it to ‘confuse’ my accurate sense, producing a momentary temporal dissociation which, however ‘novel’ was actually ‘just imaginary’. An illusion.

And that’s how wonder gets dismissed in our lives and minds. But the whole argument of the LH is so staggeringly incomplete that swiss cheese looks whole in comparison. In fact, it is the very wonder and dreaming that it is here criticizing which establishes, nurtures, and maintains the structural frameworks that the LH is here applying. It is unaware it is yelling not only at its own foundations; it is like a hand suddenly attempting a coup, and trying to replace the brain and body that move it, unaware that this is not only impossible but represents the boldest kind of relational misapprehension.

And this is an example of the relationship between the hemispheres. The problem for us is that we too rapidly excuse the wonder that the RH rightfully experiences in the face of novelty, passing everything off far too quickly to LH dissection, analysis, evaluation and manipulation. Eventually, starved for the novelty which it is actually everywhere immersed in but denied access to, the mind seeks refuge in drugs, danger, mating, and other ‘high octane’ experiences that manage to ‘overcome chronic LH drag’ toward representation, categorization and abstraction. Denied the natural ‘breathing’ which is the intrinsic novelty in experience itself, contrasted with our capacity to re-present it internally and socially, it is if we have learned to only exhale with our minds — a form of cognitive and relational asphyxia.

I am a talented Apple tech who has been working with these machines since they were invented. Every day. But I am still open enough to novelty to allow it to expand into and enliven my awareness wherever I might encounter it. The fact that -it is possible to excuse it with analysis- is not the point. In fact, that is trivially obvious. What is more compelling is that the crude results of representation are inspired by the dream-intimacy of wonder and the intense focus that arises from being startled -out- of a representational mode into a phase state that is fluidly catalytic not only of representations but of new ways of seeing, sensing, and knowing.

We are wonder scouts. We were born that way. It’s time to retrieve this fact of our nature from the cages of abstraction it is too often dismissed to.