Mr Bipolar

For a couple of weeks now Quinn has demonstrated what we refer in the software business as an IO device shared between tasks. The IO (input/output) device is his mouth - smiling or pouting lower lip. In his brain are running simultaneous tasks, where one task is happy and the other task is unhappy. When the happy task has the mouth IO resource, he smiles; when the unhappy task has the mouth IO resource, he pouts. Sometimes the context switches between tasks are dizzyingly fast, resulting in alternating smiles and pouts on a second-by-second basis. There is a tipping point at which the unhappy tasks win and he goes into full wail. Sometimes you can do things you know make him happy to temporarily defer the tipping, thus buying some time to try to address the source of the unhappiness. But other times it's just too much and all you can do is hold him. By and large, he's a pretty happy kid though.

I guess in adulthood it's much the same, but there is much buffering between the happy and sad expressions such that each individual one is not always outwardly apparent. Plus there is much social conditioning to repress much of the expression, and as well we become capable of indulging our own pleasures and sating our own needs and desires. I suppose too, that as we become more complex beasts that there are so many competing happy tasks and unhappy tasks that the net result is some sort of running average. I guess the key is to, when necessary, try to pick out individual tasks running around in our brain at any one time and identify them, to encourage the good ones and minimize the occurrence or impact of the bad ones.

In the meantime, I will watch with fascination as each individual thought plays out on my son's face. I will what I can to encourage the good ones and discourage/minimize the bad ones as much as I can for him, but also try to equip him to do it for himself as he grows up. With some good luck and some good management, maybe we can keep him on the positive side of the tipping point more often than not.