arcticorangutan on Nostr: Conceptual fight or flight Picture two chess players, each contemplating their next ...

Conceptual fight or flight

Picture two chess players, each contemplating their next move. While sitting completely still. And yet their heart rate, in a high stakes moment, can easily clock in at 160-170 bpm. If you’ve played chess, you’ve experienced this.

But you need not be a chess player to be familiar with an elevated heart rate while physically still.

We are the only species that is capable of taking concepts, mere ideas, so seriously that they trigger a physiological fight or flight response. For better or for worse.

And we are not born this way. It is worth contemplating how we go from a bundle of potentiality to an organism so deeply immersed in concept.

When we do, we realize that we can let go of concepts where they no longer serve us.

Ted Thai’s “Garry Kasparov” (1997-2002)