How recursive are you?
Something different this beautiful morning :)
A few days ago I spend an evening with a good friend. He is diagnosed with ADHD.
If you don't know what that is, have a look here.
In any case, it stands for "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder".
We were talking about something which he described as "displacement", where you feel a separation of yourself in some form.
I told him I recognize this effect with some mind games I play sometimes.
One of those for instance, is to imagine infinity.
What helps with that is to look at the night sky. Start from where you are, inside your head, first person view. Then start traveling upwards, keep going, all the while realizing how far you've gone, and how far you still have to go.
If you think about this process from a programmers point of view, and you'd define the situation, you could come up with recursion. In a program, a recursive function, is a function which, once initiated, starts a loop in which it calls itself, thus exponentially increasing the number of loops that are running.
In a program, you can crash the system with recursive loops. So you have to be careful, to build in detection methods for stopping the loop if it tends towards infinity.
If I do the experiment above, my goal is to keep it up for as long as I can, but everytime try it, I can't keep it up for too long. I can almost feel the recursion building up exponentially, and then something inside me decides to let go, and I am back on earth :)
Now imagine you do not have these detection tools, and that in situations like this you get into a recursion... the system crashes!
A few days ago I spend an evening with a good friend. He is diagnosed with ADHD.
If you don't know what that is, have a look here.
In any case, it stands for "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder".
We were talking about something which he described as "displacement", where you feel a separation of yourself in some form.
I told him I recognize this effect with some mind games I play sometimes.
One of those for instance, is to imagine infinity.
What helps with that is to look at the night sky. Start from where you are, inside your head, first person view. Then start traveling upwards, keep going, all the while realizing how far you've gone, and how far you still have to go.
If you think about this process from a programmers point of view, and you'd define the situation, you could come up with recursion. In a program, a recursive function, is a function which, once initiated, starts a loop in which it calls itself, thus exponentially increasing the number of loops that are running.
In a program, you can crash the system with recursive loops. So you have to be careful, to build in detection methods for stopping the loop if it tends towards infinity.
If I do the experiment above, my goal is to keep it up for as long as I can, but everytime try it, I can't keep it up for too long. I can almost feel the recursion building up exponentially, and then something inside me decides to let go, and I am back on earth :)
Now imagine you do not have these detection tools, and that in situations like this you get into a recursion... the system crashes!
Recursion is everywhere around us. Even, or maybe especially, in nature. If you're unaware of this and lack the natural ability to stop these loops, I can certainly imagine that life would not be a pleasant experience...
At the same time, I am playing games with it, because I like the experience. I also think it trains my mind to be more flexible and focused.
I don't know if this has anything to do with adhd or anything else, but I thought it at least interesting enough to write it down...
I would love to hear your thoughts about this...
posted by asji at 6:24 AM
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