Friday 23 March 2007

Inspiration Gtalk...

There is one thing in life that i respect more than anything else..The Human Mind. The Beautiful Mind. Its not really surprising that many of us actually fail to see the point. It takes effort, time and above all, tenacious curiosity to do it. But to those of us who have discovered it, the experience I'm sure would have been unsurpassed. This post is first of the (hopefully)series, wherein i shall pen down some insight that I have personally gained into this amazing thing called the human mind. Not some ground breaking revelations but interesting all the same.

Having spents hours at an end chatting on Gtalk, some things have become become glaringly evident. So, much so that I' m longing to devote an entire post to it. Here goes...

Hidden behind the 'screen', an online Mr.X ( sex no bar, and I'm seious!), is way different from an offline Mr.X. Its not a conscious effort to project oneself as someone he/she is not, but rather an outcome of a beautiful mind game. Online, its an alltogether different arena, a different game. When you communicate with a person, in person, the mind is at work processing a countless different things of which the owner is not even remotely aware of. But he/she reacts to it all the same. When you think that you are just talking the person, your mind is busy doing things much more than just listening to the verbal communication. There is a lot of non-verbal communication that goes on in tandem with the more evident verbal part. The mind picks up subtle information, or rather tries to infer information from the other persons body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, tone, etc. The processing and the resulting information greatly varies from individual to individual. Like for example, different people form different opinions about the same lecturer even though they all hear the same thing. The mind rewires and reorganizes itself constanly to adapt to its environs, hoping to help it better cope with circumstances that are to come. This, to me, seems to be a natural outcome of Darwins Theory of Evolution. The better I am at reading you (not just listening to you) the more I understand not just what you say, but also what you actually think. So naturally, the more we communicate. the better I get at it. Hence, during an actual face to face communication, the mind is not only busy reading signals, but is also busy sending the right signals across. In a nutshell, this seemingly innocuous talk is much more than a simple exchange of words. Mind you, the brain goes into an overdrive if you are communicating with someone of the opposite gender. There is an entire new spectrum of data processing that needs to be, whether you like it or not ...Probably one of the reasons why heroes get tongue-tied when trying to propose the heroine !?

But that is not the case when you are online. All that the brain is doing is processing a plain, flat, string of text. It means what it means. Period. It does not have to give a damn about anything else and so is at ease and does what is does best...think. The net outcome of all this that when online, I feel much more at ease expressing myself. I freely put across whatever I have to, without any fear of misjudgement or any urgency of having to be spontaneous . I am actually being more of myself.

So, the next time you are online chatting your time away, just keep this in the back of your mind. You may be a very appeasing and loved character online(or god forbid, a despicable and blunt person)....but then, life is a game played offline. Its an all together different arena, and a different mind game...

5 comments:

Amrita said...

a really well thot of write in the era of social networking.... appreciate ur outlook towards such an ubiquitous phenomenon

Anonymous said...

very good read...an apt observation must say

Unknown said...

nice one dude!
into the human psyche!

Swami said...

I see another perspective to your observation. What the other person sees in you is what you portray and not the "you" which the person would be seeing in real circumstances. Rather the person is seeing you in a controlled environment. So though you maybe at ease (because you are operating in only one of the axis) in the online env, its rather a one dimensional view don't you think? Probably thats what you mean when you say life is a game played offline. Good observation. :)

VK said...

@Swami: I agree. Its kinda like one of those blind men liking the elephant just because the round belly feels good! He's still got a whole lot more elephant beyond the belly, which he may not really like. But still, the belly feels good. :)

On the contrary, there's also a lot of scope for a person to pretend to be someone else. To be someone who I just am absolutely not - which would not have been so easily possible offline.