What the hey!? Thoughts on Confusion

Fair warning, I wrote this up after Torts and I wasn't firing on all cylinders if you take my meaning. Its up to you, gentle reader, to find meanig on this one. It may even be incomplete but frankly I have neither time nor stamina to return to this one.

Having now sampled the wonders of the Socratic Method as a teaching device, applied in several different fashions by several brilliant law professors in the tender opening days of my law school career, my map has been expanded to add fresh new thoughts on confusion as an instructional device.

But first, what is confusion? Several times I’ve heard how a confusion induction ‘works’ by bombarding the conscious mind with suggestions or stimuli, until the critical factor is dropped. Why then the highly draining hyperempiric responses undergone during our ‘orientation’ process. While making the transition from disoriented to oriented, the principle of ‘strategy’ (from NLP) as defined here as the method through which we navigate reality. As such, confusion, is the state in which our reality strategy has collapsed or been interrupted, of which there may be several responses. Some withdraw to reconstruct their reality, others deny, and for others allow change.

All of this must be confusing. Good.

Are we absolutely unable to respond to a host of stimuli at incredible speeds? Probably with the conscious mind still engaged, however if it happens to be stimuli from a certain source, we become ‘trained’ to it so we can engage conscious thought while reacting at high speeds simultaneously. Video games (fighters or shooters) for example nowadays are extremely fast paced involving near instantaneous reactions as well as planning. When someone begins and is new, they don’t have those reactions but with time and unconscious competence, they’re handling more information than one typically needs for many confusion hypnotic inductions. They begin without the proper ‘strategy’ to navigate the game, something they develop over time.
Orientation- Students are constantly subjected to places, people, and experiences of which they are unfamiliar with. Noticeably, everyone is completely exhausted by the day’s end. It is not that the work is necessarily more complicated or strenuous than an average day’s effort, however they exist in a new environment without having developed the day to day strategy that will be had in a few weeks time. We are hyper alert in such experiences, as the mind is both providing your conscious mind with so much information (hyperempiria- heightened awareness) to aid you in protecting yourself, and utilizing a great deal of energy to process it in a way that will make the situation familiar. For lack of a different strategy, herding instincts kick in and people quickly form little associations that will eventually become cliques. Learning is also accelerated as rumors and hearsay quickly become gospel.

Socratic Questioning- If the new environment isn’t enough to cause some flexibility in the students’ state of mind, we then have the no holds barred questioning from professors from the very first day, challenging, overturning, and undermining all assumptions and pretenses of understanding that the students may have. This seemed to me as an overall strategy of mind elasticity, before we can learn things wrongly, we constantly are forced into questioning our thought processes as a means of casting doubt on our classroom and reading strategies. The final intent then is (I imagine) for us to develop similar questioning processes ourselves, redefining and remapping our very method of thinking, our thinking and perception strategies. In effect, the first years of law school seem to be a giant modeling program, as we have a fixed curriculum, and are railroaded into thinking along the lines the professors want us to. The constant undermining of our current reality sets the stage for easy formatting as we’re already placed in a highly receptive state. By learning to doubt our own intuitions, not only are we suppressing our current strategies, but the constant reinforcement prevents them from resurfacing, while making us all the more pliant.

The Return of The King

Possibility is back in action and incredibly busy. I'll be posting again soon.