I can study by any music. I don't know if I was born with this skill, or acquired it living with a bunch of loud crazy ass pilots in college.

As for how the brain concentrates, that's an interesting subject to me. Imo, the brain concentrates on two things: stimulus, and thoughts. Paying attention to stimulus is at its peak value when young (under 5 or so), when kids are learning at a voracious rate. Paying attention to thoughts comes after that and is honed throughout most of our adult life. Unfortunately, it's usually to the detriment of concentrating on stimulus. I think someone's truly enlightened when they can willfully switch their attention between these two brain inputs.

Our minds are always working, whether we realize it or not. A month ago, I tried an experiment where I wrote down every thought that came into my head for a half an hour. 30 minutes and 8 pages later, my hand was cramped.

---
I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

Jinkers! How many things came on your head, anyway?

---
"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

And thus continues the trend of newbies winning the contest.

(i never put my entry in. i had gone 5 strips before i realised that it broke the female rule , and didnt feature indy pete at all. Besides. Dexx appearing in Home and Away has limited appeal as a joke)

---
"Life Sucks, Then you Die. The bit inbetween isnt very funny either"

Um, I may be going out on a limb here Perm old boy, but I'm pretty sure I'm about 4 months your senior!

I just lurked for a bit!

---
Dad was flammable

Damn. Despite the fact that I failed to enter a comic series, I thought I had a pretty good shot based on my quantity-of-midgets-per-photo ratio of 6:1.

---
"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

Um, I may be going out on a limb here Perm old boy, but I'm pretty sure I'm about 4 months your senior!

I just lurked for a bit!

---

Very probably , but if Habnem can be called a "Power Newbie" , then you and I can both be classed as newbies.

---
"Life Sucks, Then you Die. The bit inbetween isnt very funny either"

In her book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggests that writers spend a certain amount of time every day doing that in composition books. She says it flushes all the crap out of your system and lets the good stuff come out for actual, publishable work. She says that looking over her old books sometimes gives her story ideas she would have otherwise lost.

I did this religiously for a couple of weeks for at least 15 minutes a day. Then, like every regimen I am gung-ho about when I begin it, I started losing interest and slacked off quite a bit. Every now and then I pick up where I left off and just free write for a while. It makes REALLY interesting reading a couple years later.

---
I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent

Jinkers! How many things came on your head, anyway?

---

It was about 20 chain-of-thoughts. Where a chain of thought would be something like, "I need to pay my registration on my car. My car's on the 2-year emission plan. I just had an emission test last year. So I only need to pay the bill. Maybe I can even take care of it right over the internet. I wonder if Arizona's DMV has that option? If they do, it would be better than waiting in those damn lines." So 20 chain-of-thoughts corresponds to maybe 100 or so thoughts. In a half an hour. (And I have little doubt I missed quite a few while writing.) That blew me away. These weren't forced thoughts. Just what the subconscious lobbed up to my awareness.

I bet it does. It's pretty eye-opening, too. I'd never really paid attention to how my mind works. I took lots of psychology classes and know the theories of the mind and structure of the brain, but never paid attention to the patterns of thought processes.

Now, instead of writing them down, I'll try to just observe the path my mind's taking. I wonder if this is how someone goes mad? You start paying attention to your mind and the next thing you know you're talking to your pet knuckle, Wilbur.

---
I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

When I sit up late chatting with a friend, I love to try to track the conversation back, now and again. It can be a lot of fun trying to work out the path of topics your conversation followed over an hour, or two, or three...

Doing the same thing with chains of thought can be fun, too.

---
This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

I started that in a college class then dropped it. Then I picked it up again around 1985 for about a year. I actually mailed them to a girl I knew in Mexico - they were like manuscripts. She wrote back, but covered about one page - she said she got a lot of laughs out of them. I can't imagine. Maybe she was laughing that I had paid the postage.

I have 2 half-baked screenplays that seem to dissolve into this type of writing. I keep meaning to go back and finish, but with 2 young kids it's hard to find long periods of time to do that sort of thing.

quote:

---

When I sit up late chatting with a friend, I love to try to track the conversation back, now and again. It can be a lot of fun trying to work out the path of topics your conversation followed over an hour, or two, or three...

Doing the same thing with chains of thought can be fun, too.

---

I log all my irc conversations, just in case there's a really interesting one that I want to read over and over again.

---
I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent