Item — HN Reader

Interesting!

> People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waiting for the other person to be done so they can say what’s rattling around inside. The body is slower, needs more time, and then words bubble up organically, one after another, without planning. People who exist more in their body are generally better at connecting emotionally with others.

I don't really understand this one.

Maybe there's a bit of a reductive or meaningless conflation here. A body can be fast while the mind is also fast. A body can be slow and pensive, and the mind follows. Being bodily 'in touch' does not equate to emotional sensitivity IME.

I am reminded of people whose bodies are dysfunctional or disabled or disregulated. I don't really see a correlation there where they have less emotional sensitivity. Often the opposite. I am then reminded of people who are hyperactive and always want to be moving. One might say they 'exist more their body' but they might often be impatient and inattentive in conversations..

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author?

3 comments

I think this is really about the actively made decision to spend longer with each sensation than you 'normally' would - relative to your own individual baseline. Basically whether this is a tool in the person's metacognitive toolkit that they typically use or not. Like 'the feeling of the touch of a thought' on the mind itself, as opposed to a linear pre-simulation of a performance to play out loud. Or the difference between making what you say out loud a cheap, low entropy, lossy encoding of all that you're thinking, versus gathering all the aspects quietly and needing to find a way linearize all that incidental complexity.

The author uses several metaphorical dichotomies, and I think this one is the most tenuous and unintuitive. I understand the two groups of people, but tying it to where they "generally exist" doesn't make sense to me. The mind/body dichotomy can imply so many different things that this would need a lot more elaboration to clarify. Or maybe I'm not enough of a natural people watcher.

To me "to exist in the body" Vs "to exist in the head" is a bit about where your point of view is when your mind is processing reality.

I'm not talking about the literal visual point of view but rather the metaphorical center point of the conscious experience.