this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by seleniumg@sh.itjust.works to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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This just happened to me the other night.

I'm in a dispersed camping spot in a National Forest. It's not crowded. I go to sleep around 9:30PM and wake up at 4:30AM to someone parked right next to me. There's no trees between us and no possible way that they did not see my car.

As I drive out of the forest I pass dozens of empty spots.

This has happened to me twice. Who are the people who do this? There's no rational explanation for it.

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[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 120 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Instinctual survival habits.

If you asked them why, they likely couldn't give you an answer, or they'd rationalize one on the spot without realizing it.

We have millions of years of evolution telling us it's better to be grouped up to sleep, and just a couple generations at most for recreational camping etiquette.

Instincts will always wins that battle

[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 33 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There's probably different levels of this instinct that correlate to experience camping out in the boonies, as well as the size of your own party. For instance, an inexperienced individual or small family probably would want the security of being near other people. But more experienced people want the solitude, and especially so for larger groups.

Chalk it up to someone not too familiar with camping.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 25 points 4 months ago

I wouldn't judge someone who shows up to a campground at 430 am too harshly...

They're probably running on pure lizard brain at that point.

Like, depending on your definitional of rational, there was/is a reason for this behavior, but it's not like someone intentionally decides to do it. It's just autopilot.

A lot of what we do is just autopilot and rationalizing it later. Shits crazy interesting, but we can't really study it because it's not ethical to just cut people's brains in half for no reason other than to gain knowledge. And there was only a brief period it was a valid medical treatment for things like epilepsy.

Sperry performed another similar experiment in humans to further study the ability of the right hemisphere to recognize words. During that experiment, Sperry asked volunteers to place their left hand into a box with different tools that they could not see. After that, the participants saw a word that described one of the objects in the box in their left field of view only. Sperry noted that most participants then picked up the needed object from the box without seeing it, but if Sperry asked them for the name of the object, they could not say it and they did not know why they were holding that object. That led Sperry to conclude that the right hemisphere had some language recognition ability, but no speech articulation, which meant that the right hemisphere could recognize or read a word, but it could not pronounce that word, so the person would not be able to say it or know what it was.

In his last series of experiments in humans, Sperry showed one object to the right eye of the participants and another object to their left eye. Sperry asked the volunteers to draw what they saw with their left hand only, with closed eyes. All the participants drew the object that they saw with their left eye, controlled by the right hemisphere, and described the object that they saw with their right eye, controlled by the left hemisphere. That supported Sperry´s hypothesis that the hemispheres of brain functioned separately as two different brains and did not acknowledge the existence of the other hemisphere, as the description of the object did not match the drawing. Sperry concluded that even though there were no apparent signs of disability in people with a severed corpus callosum, the hemispheres did not communicate, so it compromised the full function of the brain.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roger-sperrys-split-brain-experiments-1959-1968-0

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

Here's something interesting, it's cultural. There was a study done in the 80's or 90's and they found that Hispanics and Asians were more likely to sit next to each other in an otherwise empty room, whereas Caucasians were more likely to sit very far apart.

[–] apocalypticat@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Nice! Looks like you answered a "million+ year" conundrum within 1 hour.

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 15 points 4 months ago

I just really liked the idea that OP thought they were exaggerating the timeline with that, when they were still waaaaaay off on how baked in that behavior really was.

Modern life makes a lot more sense when you realize we really weren't built for this shit. On an evolutionary timescale we went from taking a shit while walking like a horse to Star Trek in an afternoon.

It makes it a lot easier to let shit go instead of assuming the other person is fucking with you intentionally. Which ironically is another thing baked into our instincts. It's safer to think someone you don't know is a threat and is acting maliciously. Now a days it's maladapted into road rage shootings because someone forgot to signal for a merge.