Conventions and drinking competitions

Okay, so we know that our brains have a kind of visual patterning auto-pilot system that tells us what we see. If you think about this logically, it would seem that our brains don't like anomalies: it doesn't want to recognize something different or take in a lot of new information unless the scale of newness is such that it can't be avoided.

My question: is there a way to loosen that system a little? Because I'm a little bored here. I'd like to notice something I haven't noticed before. Even something small.

So, I start looking, and I'm not turning up much. There is this apathy that I keep trying to shrug off like a heavy wool blanket that's tucked into the mattress, and I struggle against it its confines in spurts before finally collapsing, exhausted, no longer interested in trying.

We are habituated to our daily lives. That much is very simple to understand. The conventions, the constructs of daily life are like the breath our body measures . . . by and large going unnoticed unless a dramatic interruption is effected. To be stripped of all those conventions then is perhaps the way to conquer the apathy, to see the new small details, or the larger ones, like "you don't know what you've got till it's gone".

So to find something extraordinary without dropping free fall from our comfort zone we seek out alternatives. Unfortunately altered conscious states have a hefty piper fee. And one can't help but feel a little skeptical of say, an all night session with a bottle of vodka- there may be revelations, but will they be remembered?