Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lectures)

by Douglas Coupland

  Anthropozooku

  Small haiku-like moments during which human and animal behaviours exhibit total overlap.

  Antifluke

  A situation in the universe in which rigid rules of action exist to prevent coincidences from happening. Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of antifluke.

  Attack-Moderates

  The result of a common political tactic used by members of extreme orthodoxies. By forcing people in the political middle to polarize over issues about which they don’t feel polar, the desired end state is achieved — one in which the hyperamplification of what was not very much to begin with creates a tone of hysteria amid daily cultural discourse. This resulting hysteria becomes a political tool used by the instigators to push through agendas that would never have been possible in a non-hysterical situation.

  Bell’s Law of Telephony

  No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.

  Binary Subjective Qualities

  Subjective human qualities that most of us take for granted but which remain elusive for some people with brain anomalies. These include humour, empathy, irony, musicality, and a sense of beauty. Subjective sensitivity is often regulated by specific nodes in the right side of the brain that fine-tune and contextualize the information we take in. (See also Cartoon Blindness; Cloud Blindness; Metaphor Blindness)

  Blank-Collar Workers

  Formerly middle-class workers who will never be middle-class again and who will never come to terms with that.

  Capillarigenerative Memory

  The tendency of history to remember people who invent new hairstyles: for example, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, and the Beatles.

  Cartoon Blindness

  A brain connectivity issue that makes a person dislike cartoons or information presented using illustration. Specific versions include an aversion to Saturday morning children’s television and the inability to understand and appreciate New Yorker cartoons. Seriously.

  Catastrophasic Shifts

  Enormous, life-changing decisions that are delayed until a crisis has been reached. In most cases this is the worst time to be making such decisions.

  Centennial Blindness

  The inability of most people to understand future time frames longer than about a hundred years. Many people have its cousin, Decimal Blindness — the inability to think beyond a ten-year time span — and some people have the higher-speed version, Crastinal Blindness — the inability to think past tomorrow.

  Christmas-Morning Feeling

  A sensation created by stimulus to the anterior amyg-dala that leaves one with a strong sense of expectation. (See also Godseeking)

  Chronocanine Envy

  Sadness experienced when one realizes that, unlike one’s dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forward.” (See also Sequential Thinking)

  Chronophasia

  An inability to maintain stable circadian rhythms or to approximate time or time sequencing, possibly caused by irregularities in the 20,000-cell region of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

  Chronotropic Drugs

  Drugs engineered to affect one’s sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short-term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

  Cloud Blindness

  The inability of some people to see faces or shapes in clouds. Like prosopagnosia, or “Face Blindness,” the cause can be traced to impairment of the fusiform gyrus of the inferior temporal lobe. Fun fact: the psychological phenomenon of seeing faces in clouds or perceiving as significant other vague and random stimuli is called pareidolia.

  Collapse Attraction

  The situation in which people are usually at their most attractive and interesting shortly before a total personality collapse. While some of us are attracted to those who are vulnerable — because it makes us feel good by comparison, or it makes us feel good to be able to help, or to think we can help — it also turns out that if you are convinced that nobody could possibly like you, you often become less inhibited. Not caring gives you a bulletproof aura of mystery and aloofness.

  Complex Separation

  The theory that, in music, a song gets only one chance to make a first impression. After that the brain starts breaking it down, subdividing the music experience into its various components — lyrical, melodic, and so forth.

  Connectopathy

  Idiosyncratic behaviour that stems from idiosyncratic neural connections.

  Cover Buzz

  The sensation felt when hearing a cover version of a song one already knows.

  Crazy Uncle Syndrome

  Or, for that matter, Crazy Aunt Syndrome. One of the few genuine indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of their crazy genes, you don’t end up crazy yourself — you merely end up different. And it’s that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful. (See also Trainwreck Equilibration Theory)

  Crystallographic Money Theory

  The hypothesis that money is a crystallization or condensation of time and free will, the two characteristics that separate humans from other species. (See also Time/Will Uniqueness)

  Dark-Age High Tech

  Technical sophistication is relative. In the eleventh century, people who made steps leading up to their hovel doors were probably mocked as being high tech early adopters.

  Deharmonized Sin

  Seven deadly sins vs. the Ten Commandments vs. every other way of counting transgressions — the inability to scientifically count and calibrate sin.

  Denarration

  The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story. (See also Limbic Trading; Narrative Drive; Sequential Dysphasia)

  Deomiraculosteria

  God’s anger at always being asked to perform miracles.

  Deromanticizing Dysfunction

  Writes Alice Flaherty, “All the theories linking creativity to mental illness are really implying mild disease. People may be reassured by the fact that almost without exception no one is severely ill and still creative. Severe mental illness tends to bring bizarre preoccupation and inflexible thought. As the poet Sylvia Plath said, ‘When you’re insane, you’re busy being insane — all the time when I was crazy, that’s all I was.’”

  Deselfing

  Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)

  Dimanchophobia

  Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but, rather, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord’s Day.

  Dimanchophobia is a mental condition created by modernism and industrialism. Dimanchophobes particularly dislike the period between Christmas and New Year’s, when days of the week lose their significance and time blurs into a perpetual Sunday. Another way of expressing dimanchophobia might be “life in a world without calendars.” A popular expression of this condition can be found in the pop song “Every Day Is Like Sunday,” by Morrissey, in which he describes walking on a beach after a nuclear war, when every day of the week now feels like Sunday.

  Drinking Your Own Spit

  That’s what it feels like to see yourself on TV.

  Dummy Pronoun

  The word it, as in “It’s raining” or “It’s six o’clock.” Not to be confused with Itness. (See also Itness)

  Ecosystemic Biology

  Biology that looks at bodies, both human and animal, as ecosystems as opposed to discrete entities. This way of thinking is bolstered by the fact that the average body has roughly ten times as many outsider cells as it has of its own.


  Eternal Divide

  Unlike the future, Eternity, by its very definition, cannot be limited by the vagaries and unknowns of time. At best we can understand Eternity as existing outside of time, as timelessness — an infinite present. Which makes you rethink that eternal afterlife you were counting on. But don’t worry, because another name for timelessness is nirvana. So it’s all good.

  Exosomatic Memory

  Memory stored in externalized databases, which at some point will exceed the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there will be more memory “out there” than exists inside all of us. As humans we will have peripheralized our essence.

  Fate Is for Losers

  A state of being whose opposite is Destiny Is for Winners.

  Fictive Rest

  The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction. Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack one’s own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.

  Field Denial

  The near absence of any discussion around the fact that while fields exist (for example, magnetic fields) nobody actually knows how they work, nor are we any longer trying to figure them out.

  Frankentime

  What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is being spent working with and around a computer and the Internet. (See also Time Snack)

  The Future of Labour

  The fact that there is no word in the Chinese language for a “me day.”

  General Anesthetic Afterlife

  The concept that death must be akin to being under general anesthetic. A variant of the belief that because you don’t remember anything from before you were born, you need not worry about what happens after you die.

  Goalpost Aura

  The ability of places and objects, such as football goalposts or artwork in a museum, to possess an indescribable aura. An application of the more well-known process of sacralization — wherein places such as churches and mosques are understandably transformed through human emotion, thought, and belief into sacred places — to seemingly random elements of our lives.

  Godseeking

  An extreme version of Christmas Morning Feeling. Significant scientific literature has postulated that religious experience stems largely from a God module based in the temporal lobe. Additionally, for those who believe, as many physiatrists do, that our ideas of God are heavily influenced by our infant memories of giant, all-powerful beings — our parents — the hippocampus, encoder of those memories, must also be important for religious experience. And finally, there is evidence that the parietal lobe plays an important role in all mystical experience. All of which leads us to the primary objection to localizing religious activity in the brain, the reductionist “nothing but” argument: that if religious states are brain states, they are nothing but brain states, and the experience of God is simply a neurological phenomenon.

  Grim Truth

  You’re smarter than TV. So what?

  Guck Wonder

  The brain has always been poorly understood. Warriors on ancient battlefields must have wondered what the grey guck was that spilled out when they lopped off the top of someone’s skull. At least with a heart you could tell it was doing something useful. Maybe they saw the brain as filler material the gods used to fill skull cavities, the way pet food manufacturers bulk up tinned meat products with grains.

  Humanalia

  Things made by humans that exist only on earth and nowhere else in the universe. Examples include Teflon, NutraSweet, thalidomide, Paxil, and meaningfully sized chunks of element number 43, technetium.

  Iddefodial Storage

  The brain’s way of protecting itself from itself. To whit, if our subconscious is so wonderful, why do our bodies work so hard to keep it deeply buried?

  Ikeasis

  The desire in both daily and consumer life to cling to generically designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information. (See also Invariant Memory)

  Indoor/Outdoor Voice

  A very quick test one can use to understand the expressive world of people further along the autistic spectrum than others. People unable to modulate their voices to suit the environment are just that much further along. (See also Internal Voice Blindness; Preliterary Aural Bliss)

  Inhibition Spectrum

  From the centre to the right:

  “normal” → shy → quiet → reclusive loner → scary loner → hermit → Unabomber

  From the centre to the left:

  “normal” → talkative → life of the party → no off button → rants → talks to self → madness

  Instant Reincarnation

  Most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for total radical change in their lives. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.

  Internal Voice Blindness

  The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue, a fact that undermines the conventional wisdom that one’s inner voice is one’s own. Witness the universal confusion when non-professionals hear recordings of their own voice. In fact, the tone of one’s inner voice is almost impossible to nail down.

  Curiously, what artists commonly refer to as their muse — a seemingly external voice that guides them in their work — is actually a defective and/or amplified inner voice mechanism, a function regulated by the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes, which are responsible for speech and auditory processing.

  Interruption-Driven Memory

  We remember only the red traffic lights, never the green ones. The green ones keep us in the flow; the red ones interrupt and annoy us. Interruption: this accounts for the almost universal tendency of car drivers to be superstitious about stoplights.

  Intraffinital Melancholy vs. Extraffinital Melancholy

  Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely or to be lonely within a dead relationship?

  Intravincular Familial Silence

  We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

  Invariant Memory

  The process whereby the brain determines when looking at an animal whether it is a dog or a cat. There exists no perfect model of a cat or a dog, yet we can instantly tell which is which by rapidly moving up and down long lists of traits that define cat-ness and dog-ness. The brain’s ability to form invariant representations is the root of all intelligence. Some people refer to invariant memories as idealized Platonic forms or as generic forms.

  Itness

  The ability of one agent to create the perception of an object, person, or event as possessing “it” — for example, not wanting to be “it” in a game of tag — or even the ability of a dog owner to create instant itness when choosing a stick to be thrown for retrieval.

  Karaokeal Amnesia

  Most people don’t know the complete lyrics of almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)

  Limbic Trading

  The belief that the need for stories comes from deep within the brain’s limbic system — where memory and emotion percolate, and where stories are first processed before they are passed on to the left hemisphere, the home of intuition, imagination, and inspiration — and that storytelling is one limbic system’s way of communi-

  cating with that of another person.

  Limited Pool Romantic Theory

  The belief that one can fall in love only a finite number of times, most commonly six.

  Lyrical Putty

  The lyrics one creates in one’s head in the absence of knowing a song’s real lyrics.
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br />   Malfactory Aversion

  The ability to figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then to stop doing it.

  Mallproof Realms

  Realms where shopping never happens. For example, Star Trek characters never go shopping. Also, universes that wilfully exclude commerce.

  Mechanics of Friends and Influence

  The fact that people will like and respect you for no other

  reason than that you give the illusion of remembering their names.

  Me Goggles

  The inability to accurately perceive ourselves as others do.

  Memesphere

  The realm of culturally tangible ideas.

  Metaphor Blindness

  An exceedingly common inability to understand metaphor, which often leads to avoidance of art forms, such as novels, where metaphor might be encountered. (See also Poetic Side Effects)

  Metaphor Spectrum

  Confusion in the noun centre of the brain that leads to schizophrenic or delusional thinking:

  Napoleon was a general → Napoleon is great → I think I am great → I am Napoleon

  Monophobia

  Dislike of feeling like an individual.

  Nanoexploitative Industry

  Pretty much everything invented after the year 1900 is based on our knowledge of things that are incredibly tiny and processes that occur at atomic or subatomic levels.

  Narrative Drive

  The belief that a life without a story is a life not worth living — quite common, and ironically accompanied by the fact that most people cannot ascribe a story to their lives.

  Negative Nonprocessing

  The fact that the brain doesn’t process negatives. Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel, the smell. Try — you can’t.