The Introverted Thinker Newsletter #005
Why our brains need to consume nonsense, talking about poetry, and an amazing novel on loneliness and nature.
Happy Sunday everyone! (or whenever you read this)👋
This week I basically wrote nothing because I have some important exams and well, I’m not good at dealing with stress. I hope to resume back to the normal writing output in the next week or so when I’m done.
But here’s a short article I managed to throw together (with a lot of research) on why nonsense is good for us.
Enjoy.
Why Nothing Needs to Makes Sense: The Beauty of the Absurd
Nonsensical brain gibberish is the hidden philosopher's stone.
A blue fox swimming in the Saharan desert. A three-eyed nun performing voodoo in Haiti. A 3-month-old baby feeding steak and chocolate sandwiches to its father. Buying two-fingered gloves with a three-dollar bill in Macedonia.
Ahh, how beautiful is the absurd? The paradoxical things I’ve just stated prove how wildly infatuating nonsense is. It allows us to escape the formality of the ‘normal’ world and get lost in our hilarious thoughts.
Nonsense or absurd things like the one I've stated, or Lewis Carroll's famous poem ‘Jabberwocky’ with its famous line “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”, are experiences that violate all logic and expectation.
Soren Kierkegaard, a famous Danish philosopher from the 19th century, said that such things produce a powerful “sensation of the absurd.” Other historical influentials have come up with theories about absurd nonsense. Sigmund Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” linked this sensation to a fear of death, of castration, or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
We are unleashing the dark side when we go into the world of nonsensical brain gibberish. It gives us a creepy disorientating sensation when confronted with these oddities. But this dark side is actually historically and psychologically proven to have many benefits for you.
Let’s dive into the fantastical world of nonsense and two-horned dolphins.
Absurdity Unlocks the “Other Side”🧠
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” ~ Dr Seuss
We’ve all become far too serious. In my city, London, people are so damn cold. It’s like they’re going to a mental funeral 24/7, the gloomy weather adds to this depressing feel. Sometimes we fall too deep into reality.
Reality is good of course, it’s necessary (obviously). Without it, we’d all be like that one hippie that's stuck in his trip screaming “Jesus was a woman and he’s sending the death squirrels to kill us.” I’m not advocating for being that far out of reality, but as Dr. Seuss says, maybe having one foot in the fantastical world and the other in the real world will do us good.
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
When we think of things out of the ordinary, we are stimulating our brains in ways we didn't think were possible.
“Disorientation begets creative thinking,” Benedict Carey .
Zen masters across the far east have made this connection for centuries. To try to initiate new patterns of thought and unique insight, Zen masters ask their students perplexing mind puzzles like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “Show me your face before your mother gave birth to you?”
These nonsensical thought prompts were used to induce a sensation of sudden enlightenment, as covered in this essay from 1999. Such activities give the brain a certain degree of mental flexibility in ways they can start to think outside the box more.
It is also reported that individuals who seek out uniqueness tend to prompt unfamiliar thinking patterns. This can explain why people with higher IQs like to indulge in making up odd puns, as reported by this essay in The Times.
The proven benefits of alternative thinking:
In this paper, published by Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine, they host 20 college students as part of a study and have them read a nonsensical short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka.
The doctor of the story has to visit a house of a boy who has a painful toothache. He arrived and discovers that the boy has no teeth. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act disobediently and the boy’s family becomes agitated with everything. Finally, the doctor discovers the boy had teeth all along. Many more weird things continue to happen.
The story can best be described as Kafkaesque. It makes no sense, is absurdly odd, and goes in unexplained circles.
The students then have to memorize a bunch of letters that are organized in different patterns. The students correctly memorized the letters twice more accurately than a group of students who read an ordinary short story.
So there you have it, there is clearly some unique benefit to thinking and immersing ourselves in the weird world of nonsense. It allows us to think about and solve problems more effectively in ways that ordinary people wouldn't have thought of.
Now the question you may have is how do we get to this enlightened state. The answer is gibberish.
Practicing Gibberish: The Hidden Philosopher’s Stone🔮
Some say that this language is named after the Middle Eastern alchemist from the 8th century, Ibn Jabir. Because his intelligible speech sounded like gibberish.
Gibberish is nonsensical language that is completely made up. According to Positive Psychology News, it can contribute to our learning skills, improvisation, and power of memory.
For reference, here is a hilarious 30-second clip of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell speaking gibberish in a movie. These men are comedic geniuses.
The weird and perplexing thing about gibberish is that it forces you to abandon your thought mechanisms. That’s why it feels so unnatural and strange.
Just try it. Start blurting out random sounds and stringing together words that don’t make sense. Have you done it yet? No one’s watching you, it’s just between us. I’ll even help you if you need.
“Gonagliza churamee bungatu sythen toof garidan tryk plenka sont biznul avikter shlem.”
See what I mean? It’s actually hard to do. It’s like our brains are forming a barrier to stop us from doing it because it’s so against what we’ve been conditioned to do since birth.
Gibberish represents nonsense and absurdity. Speaking out of pure irrationality and not desperately trying to understand everything is liberating. It’s perhaps the only verbal way that can silence the constantly active “chatterbox” in our minds.
Maybe having one foot in the fantastical world and the other in the real world will do us good.
Within this formal world filled with solemn seriousness and desperation to appear ‘normal’, lies something so far from the ordinary that no one can actually understand. If we can grasp this and comprehend how unserious life is, maybe everyone would have more fun once in a while. As the old saying goes,
“Stop taking yourself so seriously.”
Let’s Talk About Poetry:
So, because I’ve been so busy this week and haven’t found the time to write a lot, I decided to try writing poetry, because it’s quick, and oh wow is it fun.
It’s so much more than what I imagined it to be, I’ve always steered clear from poetry quite ignorantly thinking it was pretentious, but I’m in love with it now.
Whilst I’m not ready to share any of my own poems yet, I found a big old book of Charles Bukowski’s poetry in my home and have been reading some of his poetry, and this one right here is my favorite.
If you don’t know the infamous Bukowski, I’d sum him up like this
A self-proclaimed dirty old misogynistic alcoholic man who is a tortured literary genius. His philosophy and tone can best be described as casual, laid back, and just not caring.
Bluebird by Charles Bukowski🕊💙:
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
Just wow, how fucking powerful is that poem? “There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.” The beauty about this is that you can interpret the bluebird to mean what you like. Maybe it’s some repressed desires, some shameful part of you, a vulnerability that you're scared to expose, dark emotions, anything.
If you weren’t impressed, or even if you were, you have to watch this poem being narrated over some music, I guarantee it will hit you in the throat and grapple with your deepest emotions, it’s less than 3-minutes.
Another Book That Has Entered My Top 5 Favourites:
Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
It seems every week I’m telling you I have a new favorite book, but oh my God I don’t even have words to describe how much I loved this book. I rated it 5 stars, it was so beautifully mind enthralling.
Where The Crawdads Sing is a book about deep loneliness and the soothing beauty of the natural world. It’s a true ode to nature. It’s also a murder mystery with a crazy addictive plot at the same time as a coming-of-age book.
The book follows a young girl called Kya, who lives in a small wooden shack in the swamps of North Carolina with her massive family. One by one, all her family leaves her, until one day at 10 years old, she finds herself completely alone.
And that’s how she grows up, alone, isolated from the other people in town, finding company with the birds and the nature around her.
Kya is shunned from society, abused as an outsider, and becomes known as the mysterious “marsh girl”. The narrative follows her growing up all the way to her senior years. She meets boys, men, falls in love, gets her heart broken, and gets weaved into a murder case.
It is a masterpiece of literature written so eloquently, the descriptions of nature are mind-blowing, it’s like poetry. Here is my favorite line of the novel.
“If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would.
Drifting back to the predictable cycles of tadpoles and the ballet of fireflies, Kya burrowed deeper into the wordless wilderness. Nature seemed the only stone that would not slip midstream.”
The Thinker of the Week
Every week, I include a key historical thinker who has impacted the world through their thoughts and actions. They can vary from philosophers, artists, designers, psychologists, sociologists, writers, eastern meditators, and political theorists.
Michel de Montaigne: 1533-1592🇫🇷
Montaigne was famous for making popular the “essay”, which means attempt in renaissance French. He popularised the word and made it to be what we know it today.
Montaigne spent most of his time writing about how pretentious and arrogant the intellectuals of his time were, he was constantly dissing them. He had a desire to debunk the pretentious attitudes surrounding learning.
His works are also very funny and accessible to read:
“to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing; we must learn a more ample and important lesson; that we are but blockheads… On the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.”
Or maybe you’ll like this one more:
“And lest we forget: Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.”
Montaigne hated the notion from ancient Roman philosophers like Cicero that reason is our most important divine tool of mastery over the world. This false appreciation of reason actually enraged Montaigne, he wrote:
“In practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than Cicero.”
Montaigne oddly took to writing about farting, shitting, and penises as serious topics of philosophical pondering, for example he fondly writes about how much he likes sitting on the toilet:
“Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willing tolerate being disrupted.”
He was also very adamant about not reading books you find difficult or don’t understand due to a bunch of academic jargon. He mocked books that were difficult to read and found Plato extremely boring for this reason, he just wanted to have fun with books.
Montaigne hated that the culture of academia made us study other peoples books before studying our own minds, as he says:
“We are richer than we think, each one of us.”
Montaigne is a wonderfully readable, accessible, and funny intellectual. I am eager to start reading some of his essays. If Montaigne interested you, I recommend this 30-min podcast episode about him from ‘Philosophize This’ that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Once again, I thank you very much if you read this far.❤️
Enjoy your coming week and I hope to see you again next week with a bunch more cool things I wrote/dug up during the week.
See ya!👋
"We’ve all become far too serious. In my city, London, people are so damn cold. It’s like they’re going to a mental funeral 24/7, the gloomy weather adds to this depressing feel." - cracked me up.
Jokes apart, you write so beautifully! :)