Time Traveling with Neuroscience!

I've been having a very 90s/early 00s-coded time over here, and this makes me happy—because has anyone else noticed how much the 2020s have just kind of sucked so much? 

It all started with a song on the radio that I hadn't heard since maybe 2004, which sent me down a musical rabbit hole featuring The Beta Band and Remy Zero and South. Later that day I saw that Wheatus was coming to town and I thought, there really is nothing I'd rather do than sing very loudly to Teenage Dirtbag along with a crowd of my peers and then pretend to act interested in the rest of the set along with them too, so I bought myself a ticket. 

I often think about the neuroscience behind the law of attraction (which is basically that you have a network of neurons in your brainstem that filters the data coming at you and determines what enters your conscious awareness—I've read that that your brain receives millions of bits of data PER SECOND and of that, it processes about 50 (which seems like such a minuscule amount as to beg the question: are any of us really experiencing reality at all?)—and that this filter generally favours the information that aligns with your goals and beliefs and emotional state, and THEREFORE, your goals and beliefs and emotional state greatly shape the reality that you experience. SO, for example, if you're a person who believes you will someday be a famous singer, your brain is going to favour the bits of data that align with that, and you're going to be more likely to see opportunities to sing in public, to enter competitions, to be aware of all the different avenues for that dream to come to fruition, and to run full steam ahead down those pathways without self-selecting out of them. It's not so much that you can want a dream so much that it comes true, but...it kind of is? Just less in a mystical way and more in a psychological way.

So anyway, I think this is why, when I began immersing myself in 90s music (as well as dressing like Daphne Moon as much as possible and watching all the 90s-era films I could get my hands on) my brainstem filter began to send me back in time. (I had to pause while typing this to sing along very loudly to Don't Look Back in Anger. I'm back now!) I have, for example, noticed that more and more 90s bands are on tour through Regina all of a sudden. Or this: on February 20, I had an essay published in the Globe and Mail, and an excerpt of I Think We've Been Here Before appeared in the Village Voice on the same day. Isn't that such a 90s thing? Print media? Like, first of all, even being able to walk to the grocery store and buy a physical newspaper, then walk over to a friendly neighborhood coffee shop to sit and read it while System of a Down plays over the store speakers, but secondly, finding my words in those newspapers. It could be that I'm overly immersed in the literary world, where we are constantly talking about the loss of available spots in print media for authors to put their words, but that day felt so delightfully old school. I felt like Carrie Bradshaw, minus the heels (I break toes whenever I try to wear heels).

Then last week, I was invited onto a community radio show called the Queen City Improvement Bureau—exciting in and of itself because I'm a big fan of the QCIB (they accompanied me on many walks around the neighborhood in the early days of the pandemic)—but exciting in a specifically 90s way because we recorded in a radio station with a wall full of physical CDs behind me and gig posters everywhere and it just felt, for that hour, as I sat in my chair with that enormous mic in my face, like I was in a 90s sitcom about a funny little group of ragtag radio people. It did not have 2020s podcast vibes, you know? It was live to air, and the humor was dry and Canadian, and we talked about movies that the hosts saw live in theaters in the 90s (and also things like soda fountains and death).

On the same day, I did a TV interview with CTV, a live on location thing at my local grocery store. There maybe wasn't anything overly 90s about that (except maybe the fact that it was TV as opposed to social media?), but we were talking about my Globe and Mail column so the theme was basically just people being nice to each other, which doesn't feel overly 2020s. 

Anyway. Maybe this whole post is just book marketing advice? If you time travel to the 90s using *~*nEuRoSciEnCe*~*, it is easier to do publicity. Thank you for your time.