Summer is here, the sun is shining and yet here you are sitting in front of a computer and reading my depressing blog. Shame on you. Here's a fun little experiment you should do instead.
Close your eyes and picture a coin proper to the currency in the country where you do the experiment – not one of the smallest and easiest coin to run across, and not one of the rarer ones. Don't picture yourself finding it on the ground – this tends to arouse feelings of guilt, especially among people raised in Protestant societies. Instead, picture the coin itself, including details you would only see upon very close inspection, while taking a few deep breaths.
Then drop the picture from your mind and take a walk outside, preferably in an inhabited environment such as a town or city. See how long it takes before you find the coin on the ground. Write down the results.
Invent some utterly ridiculous hocus-pocus explanation as for how it works – one which you must not tell anyone. Let the details be as ridiculous as you like. Then repeat the experiment and go looking for another coin, see how long it takes before one turns up. Write down the results.
Now develop some hardline rationalist explanation as for how the coin-finding works. Be skeptical to the point of hippie-sundering fury in refuting your past explanation. Then repeat the experiment and go looking for yet another coin, see how long it takes before one turns up. Write down the results.
Develop your own hypothesis as for the discrepancies in results (which may vary from person to person). Test the hypothesis – go looking for even more coins.
The purpose of the experiment is not to find the most efficient method of acquiring loose change, but rather to explore how your central nervous system textualizes its surroundings, including random events such as finding a coin on the street. Most likely you pass by many coins on your way without noticing them, even during the experiment – not because you cannot see them, but because a part of the brain called hippocampus chooses not to include them in your attention span. The hippocampus has an enormous amount of data to choose from and naturally cannot include everything (the result would be torture), though for the majority of people it can to a certain extent be directed consciously. However, it is one thing to possess this very rudimentary knowledge of how that part of the central nervous system functions, and something quite different to have practical experience.
And regardless of results, you will also get a lot of fresh air, which is in any case worth more than all the coins put together.
(Apologies to Robert Anton Wilson for blatantly stealing his idea, or to whoever he might have stolen the idea from in his turn.)
Replace the coin with a black wallet. Much more money.
ReplyDeleteAs a moneymaking exercise, this experiment is obviously fairly inefficient, wallet or coin.
DeleteIt's a good thing then, that the object of the exercise is something else entirely, in my opinion. And presumably in the author's as well, as he makes the same point in his third-to-last paragraph.