Each and every one of us wants to feel special. We want others to see us in some unique way that suits only us and nobody else. We would go to great lengths in order to be special: the way we choose what to wear, the odor we put on ourselves, the way we choose our words while communicating and many more choices that serve us the need to distinct ourselves from others in this vast (filled-with-youtubed-cats) world. You see, I needed for some reason to add the side note to my last sentence to serve that need too… damn you self-awareness!

Putting high aspirations aside, we are extremely intelligent creatures – and the reason for it is because we have an amazing thing and it’s called the neocortex. The neocortex is the latest and most critical update we got from nature’s repository. At this very moment, your neocortex is using your visual sensory input, analyzing sequences of lines, circles and other shapes that are forwarded to an “upper layer” in the neocortex where they are perceived as letters. These letters are combined and then forwarded to the next upper layer where they are perceived as words. Eventually, this stream of information reaches the top layer of our neocortex, where it is actually focused on the idea that is being conveyed at this very moment. Beyond converting elementary visual shapes to meaningful ideas, our neocortex is also capable of making predictions about the future using patterns learned in the past, as I’m pretty sure that you can easily predict what the next word in this sentence would __. Cool, isn’t it?

The truly beautiful thing about our neocortex is its ability to generalize. For example, when we want to cross the street and we see a car coming by, we take the patterns we have previously learned about the car speeds, the average pace of our movement, and the length of the road and generalize them such that in any unseen future situation, we would know to apply them and keep a safe distance when crossing the road. Generalization allows us to group (or should I say, label) similar patterns into one compact concept, which we could later use in our everyday lives.

our genaralization abilties are also pretty useful when it comes to handling spellng erorrs

But… what can we do if our intellectual center needs to generalize the huge amount of patterns we are surrounded with and try to make sense of them, while our emotional center wants us to feel special and distinguished from others? Must their desires collide? I wondered…

In my early twenties, getting a label was a cool thing. I got the “make fun of himself” label amongst my social peers and it was fun. I felt relieved that I had “found my place” in this always-confusing social mix, and was proud of the contract that had been drawn between my colleagues and me. “I had a tendency to be such one anyway, so why not to declare on it?” I thought. However, after enjoying the benefits of being “special” in that way, I started to notice that in some events I really didn’t feel to be as my social label suggests. Sometimes I wanted to step outside that label and be someone else (or should I say, myself!). “Hey mister! You signed a contract here!” said my internal I-need-to-feel-special voice whenever I was tempted to act differently.

And I felt that I was not alone. As it seemed, I saw distress signals coming from the “bright-one” labeled person, as he was improvising the answer to a question about a matter he really didn’t know. And I saw the “cynical-funny” labeled person breaking his head, trying to find the proper cynical response for some situation, as he just wasn’t in the mood to be such one. And what about the “need-to-be-emotionally-strong” label that most of us adapt for the people whom we care about, that we would keep even when we feel hurt or frustrated?

Although the social temptation is very strong, when it comes to people, I try to keep my generalization abilities dormant. As far as I’m concerned, I will try to apply the best conscious efforts I can in order not to label people, or follow the “unspoken rules” needed to keep some label they gave me. Without this ability that allows to “auto complete” people’s behavior according to some social label, a new world opens. A world in which we could be exposed to the colorful depth of the people around us. And in that depth, we could find how each and every one of them is special in its own way. A way, that is impossible to generalize.