So, I was talking with S earlier today, and she quoted a line from the asdfmovie[1]. It took me a second to understand what she said. It went something like this:

S: [quote]
Me: “What?” “…” “Oh!”

And I suddenly noticed myself going through the process of hearing the words, processing them, then thinking about what to say. I realized how often I actually do the auto-sentence-completion used in predictive punning. The fact that it was so jarring to react to a conversation in order was a clear sign that I had fallen into a pattern.

As Leia said in ‘Heir to the Empire'[2], once you have been in a place for too long, you no longer observe everything that is happening, as your mind only pays attention to larger things and fills in the rest with memories and expectations.

There can be benefits to finishing peoples’ sentences with expectations (more time to think, quicker conversations, less mental energy expended at peak), but there’s a question[3] as to how much you’re actually thinking and listening when you’re filling half of peoples’ sentences from your brain instead of through your ears.

The funny thing is that I really enjoy the feeling of a ‘cache miss‘, which is basically what I described above, where someone says something you didn’t fully anticipate, and you need to go back and re-listen to it. It means that I’m actively learning something, perhaps updating my neural net.

So, how do you balance this tradeoff (between listening and anticipation)? Right now, I tend to lean towards anticipation, but I might start leaning back in the other direction.

[1]The asdfmovie is a work of genius, but not for the easily offended or triggered. NSFW is putting it mildly. It’s violent, and many trigger warnings apply. If you still want to watch it, you can find it (them) here. Also, I’m not sure what the proper plural is here, or if it should even be a plural.

[2]”The Place had become too comfortable, too familiar – her mind no longer really saw everything that went on around her, but merely saw some of it and filled in the rest from memory. It was the kind of psychological weakness that a clever enemy could easily exploit, simply by finding a way to fit himself into her normal routine.” – Heir to the Empire, pp310 Also, even though the ‘Expanded Universe’ is now considered ‘non-canon’, the ‘Thrawn trilogy’ is still by far the best of the Star Wars books (with a close second perhaps the Han Solo trilogy

[3]Also from S, who called it ‘looking for confirmation instead of listening’.