Yeah, that's part of why we're better. We've got better filters. Think about all those poor people with mental disorders that don't allow them to auto-filter. Discriminatory power is gold. Subconscious discrimination is a superpower.
As someone with an "auto filter mental disorder" I have to work very hard to read this post charitably. I know this is the internet and written text is hard, but it would be easy to perceive this post as "othering" folks with metal illness. I don't think that was your intent, so that's why I'm writing this.
Thanks for putting in the work to read it favourably. I'll work on making my intent (which was less "look at those sub-humans" and more "be thankful for your gifts that not all have") clearer in the future.
I know a guy who, when he was a kid, didn't pay attention in class. They put him in the TAG program, diagnosed him with ADHD and other mental disorders, and the school nurse would medicate him every morning so that he would sit down and be quiet.
I talked to him recently about this. He called it "involuntary medication" and was very upset. He felt that he had been raised from a young age to conform to a way of thinking that he didn't understand.
Are mental disorders real, or are they a way of othering those who we don't understand? I'm not sure.
If he'd said "that's why we're better than squirrels" (which i took it as) you'd probably have not spoken up. Which would have been a shame, because having some aspects of "mental filtering disorder" myself I'd say we have a perspective others don't. We can appreciate the ability to ignore that most take for granted.
I spend time watching the wild, because the richness of detail I perceive is about the same in the woods or in the city. Out here the rhythms make more sense. In a crowded environment I'm grumpy as a wolverine with a toothache; in the woods I'm still irritable but at least I'm not in a mosh pit.
There's a lot to learn from watching squirrels. They can be overwhelmed by their own senses, with apparently contra-survival responses to that. In context it's hardly ever such a simple situation.
