This week's readings in Baar (1997) for my Cognitive Psych class had some real-life examples for me. The priming effect seems to be an issue I encounter often, such as when I was looking for a misplaced homework packet on our pool table. The loss of a good friend to cancer yesterday was a good example of intentions and expectations. Both were very humbling lessons. My preschooler summed it up perfectly. "I will see Miss Chelly in Heaven, but I don't wanna go there...yet!"
Our pool table is the junk drawer shelf of the living room. Everything goes on that table, and my husband forbids anyone from clearing it except for him. Consequently, it piles up with junk mail, book bags and recent purchases. My eyes glaze over at the idea of looking through the mail on the pool table, as it is much like the abyss of a hoarder. (Okay, I am exaggerating here. My husband probably feels the same way about my makeup drawer!)
When my son misplaced his homework packet last week (code for "The dog ate my homework. Oh wait, we don't have a dog!") I walked around the pool table pile, looking for it but not seeing anything. It was there. I just couldn't see it because my brain refused to register anything on the pool table. The priming effect was at work, and it seemed to be like a subroutine running in C programming language. My brain processed it as it always did. It was the same as usual, like saying the Apostle's Creed or any of the other prayers during Mass. It never changed, so my mind could not see the variation. It only saw the concept of pool table. After an hour of looking, we gave up. My son went to school with his excuse and my husband tore into the pool table piles. Eventually, the homework surfaced. It was lying underneath an APA journal I received the last week and the bean box I had placed on the pool table a month ago for our four year-old to use as a calming tool. (No, I don't tear into the APA journals the second they arrive!) I was encountering the priming effect.
Ironically, I had the experience of intention/expectation play out yesterday that was quite dramatic. I lost a good friend to cancer. I had never lost a friend to cancer in which I could actually see the course of the disease consume her. It was a shock to me. Even though I had knowledge of the effects of cancer (my grandfather died of cancer,) I did not have an adult awareness of the disease.
Watching Shelly battle with cancer was something I had no experience with which to draw upon and it left me with the expectation that I would know how to handle the loss when if finally happened. Last night, it happened. Even though I had seen her two weeks ago, and even though I had watched her husband's Facebook page hourly in the last two days, the impact of her death hit me as if broadsided by a train.
I thought I was prepared. I knew it was coming. I had great intentions to be comforting, solid as a rock and unmoved in my faith of heaven. Yet,even though I thought I was ready to hear the words of her passing, I simply could not believe it when it finally happened. It just didn't seem possible. She was just here! I was just talking to her a few weeks ago, and she was so positive and hopeful. I have no experience in dying, myself, (fortunately) so my frame of reference was based on observations but not of experiencing it.
I have never seen anyone actually die. I had never even seen someone close to death, and the sight of Shelly the last time was a shock. Her pain was evident, and the tubes draining and feeding her seemed unnatural. There was no way to prepare for it. My brain could not wrap around the idea of death.
It is the one great mystery we all share a lack of knowledge in, and I am still trying to make sense of it. How does a person go from being on this earth, to suddenly not being here? My expectation of death will always be this vagueness, just as though I have the words on the tip of my tongue. I know it is there, but I cannot bring it up as I have a missing piece to connect it. I know the concept, but the experience has yet to be real to me. I have no context with which to compare it.
I find myself saying the same thing as Temple Grandin in the movie, Temple, "Where do they go?" I was quite convinced I knew (i.e., heaven and hell), yet each time someone dies, I know nothing. My intentions and expectations have no basis in knowledge, so I am left with a vague sense of what just happened, and it always shocks me when it does happen. I simply cannot reconcile it, and live to tell the tale (at least in a blog.) Death is everyone's greatest "state of no experience" (Baars, 1997, p. 122) and we simply won't have the context to draw from until we each die.
It is a lot like my son saying his homework is lost, even though it sits right in front of me on the pool table. Until I get right into it, take things apart and experience it, I will not have the context to know what happens. It will remain a mystery, just like the mysterious dog that ate my son's homework, the mysterious abyss that is our pool table, or the mysterious abyss that is death.
Baars, B. J. (1997). In the theater of consciousness: The workspace of the mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
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