Boredom begets curious behavior (Part 2)

I should preface that I have zero background in neuroscience, nor am I a process control engineer.  I am a chemical engineer, and a really bad one at that.  This post is really just to justify to myself why I can sit and sew until my butt goes numb, but when it comes to acting like a normal human being, I fail on every level.

And let me leave no question in your mind - when I say that I fail at being normal, I really mean it.  While people spend their time doing fun, enriching activities like visiting other cities or clubbing or whatever, I would rather spend several hours in solitude trying to figure out how to do this to my hair:

 
So we previously touched upon the fact that I am actually an android, which if you had any doubt, is ABSOLUTELY 100% FACTUAL.  I have now reprogrammed my brain at least thrice over the past year to do such useful things as calculate the exact time required for cooking a piece of meat on my stove so that it's passably edible but won't cause the ambient air temperature in my apartment to exceed smoke alarm sensitivity thresholds.  And yet, when it comes to recalling really simple things like the verb form of "adhesion" in conversation, I come up with such gems as "adhese."

And I wish I had a cute excuse for this, but the truth is, my brain is just a really efficient (or maybe really dysfunctional, depending on how you look at it) machine.  Anything quick input-output related is easy as pie.  Conversion from square meters to square feet?  No problemo.  Analyze historical trend data over a year and come up with a target range?  Done.  Teach myself German?  Cool.

Hold a normal conversation with a stranger in a grocery line?

...
...
...

X___x

And that's my problem.  Analytical is simple.  Social is hellish.  And that's NOT to say that I dislike spending time with people.  Actually, I love it.  I'm just terrible at it.  Ineffably terrible at it.  Why?  Because my reality-coping-skills are like a severely under-effing-damped unstable control model.

Oh, snap.  I just used engineer-ese totally out of context.  But, because I hate alienating people, I'll try to explain what I mean.  Sit tight, non-process engineer peeps, I'll try to make this as transparent as possible.

So let's assume that my brain is a processor unit of some sort.  It takes external stimuli and processes it to form useful thoughts.  So now let's say instead that, more specifically, my brain takes in two different streams - one is the psychological (that's still the external stimuli - data, actions of other people, day to day senses, etc.)  The other one is all the chemically goodness that my brain needs to work.  We'll call this the "neuro-cocktail", and it includes things like... dopamine, epinephrine, etc. etc.   So we'll pretend it all kinda looks like this:

In super simplified process control, there are several basic variable types:

• Control variables - this is more or less the desired output, or in my case, "z".  For all intents, we'll say that mood can be quantified on a non-discrete numerical scale
• Manipulated variables - inputs we can control.  In this case, it'll be "x", pretending that we can specify the level of my emotion by specifying the amount of neuro-cocktail goes in the mix
• Disturbance variables - inputs that are out of our control.  This is everything that's thrown at me daily that I can't just filter out, "y". 

If I had a working controller in my brain, it would be more like this:

Essentially, I'd be able to gauge my "z" output, and using that number, feed back to whatever glands/organs/so on that release the neuro-cocktail and adjust accordingly to get to a proper mood.  This is a basic feedback loop.  If you could plot how your mood shifts in respect to time, normally, things should look like one of the following:

Critical damping - your control is so good that your the stimulus doesn't really jostle the system, and you level off right away.  Hooray!

 Over-damping - you over-shoot a bit, but you regulate pretty fast

 Under-damping - you could use some work, but you eventually get things under control

My brain does none of these things.  This is what my brain does in the face of a social challenge:

That's essentially me vacillating between this:

 and this:

rapidly, over the course of a day.  Which yes, has happened.  And, no.  No hormones were involved, thank you.

This is called an unstable function.  It oscillates, gradually growing until it "explodes".  In other words, really shoddy controller.  Furthermore, I have a time delay, which is also kind of weird.  I'll give you an example.  The other week, while driving, I was making a right turn at an intersection.  It was my green light, but as I was turning, two girls walked into the road to cross the street.  I stopped, and so did they.  Why?  Certainly not to let me go.  In the intersecting road, their friend(?) maybe? person? leaned out of the driver side window, and held out his smartphone, presumably to take a picture.  At least, I think that's what he was doing, because they stopped and posed.

I have a very low tolerance for people who waste my time, so I honked my horn - quickly.  No lingering blaring beeping, because I hate that, too.  Just a quick "please get out of traffic."

Their response?  They turned around, flipped me the bird, and shouted, "Beep [no, for real.  They said 'beep.'  This is not some form of puerile censoring] you, bitch!" before walking away. 

I could have done a lot of things in the situation.  Predominantly, I wanted to hit the gas, or jump out of the car and punch them in the face, but like a boring responsible adult, I silently drove away, thinking nothing of it for an hour.  Except, instead of letting it go like a normal person would, I later fumed about it for the rest of the night.  But I didn't fume like a typical person.  No, instead, I wavered between fury and guilt.  Yeah, they shouldn't have been in the intersection, but maybe I overreacted because I was in a rush.  Maybe I shouldn't have honked.  But nooooo - they were clearing stopping to play supermodel for their paparazzi, which is just a stupid thing to do.

And on, and on, and on.  Because that is what I do.

Most of the time, it's not just simple one-off events.  It's a slow build that leads to the unstable oscillation that has me sitting in PJs and eating chocolate until I kick myself so hard that I'm forced to do something to take my mind off it.  I've mentioned this before, and it happens with some alarming frequency.  What never occurred to me before is that this is my form of a feedforward controller.

No, I'm not making up words.  Let's look back at a modified brain diagram again:

Our newest line is a reading of our disturbance variable.  This controls our input as a function of the disturbance (as opposed to controlling the input as a function of the final output).  Theoretically, it acts much faster than a feedback loop, but it has the big drawback that it won't do anything about unrecognized disturbances.  Of course, in my case, this isn't an issue, because my controller is literally just ignoring everything else by focusing all my attention on a single task like decorating a cake or building a tent fortress from blankets or whatever other inane thing pops up.

I think this is some people's justification for excessive drinking or recreational drugs - their own personal overactive feedforward controllers to make sure nothing else gets through.

But that to me is dull.  If I'm going to spend my time and energy on something, it should serve some multi-level purpose.  It makes me feel good.  Maybe useful.  Interesting, even.  I get as good a euphoria from making things with my hands as I ever did by drinking - possibly better, because drinking never makes anything better for me.  It just amplifies whatever I already feel.  Yes, that is correct.  Taking this:

I have no idea what this is, but it was $1.  Valance, maybe.

40" waist pants.  Also $1 for a ton of fabric.

and making this:

by copying this:

Photo via Made by Rae

with eyeballing and algebraic scaling to get the measurements (because I was too cheap to pay for the pattern) gives me a buzz.

You thought I was kidding.  Shame on you.  You should know me better by now.

Does that make me weird?  Probably.  Do I care?  Not enough to change it.  Why?  Because at the end of the day, we all have our weird vices, and if the most degenerate thing I do with my weekends is poking myself with a [sewing] needle and comparing my brain to a feedback loop, then the world probably can find bigger fish to fry.

Until the next.