The Attributes by Rich Diviney

Author:Rich Diviney [Diviney, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

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TO SEE HOW THIS works, let’s consider my perception of roller coasters, which is this: They’re awful.

When I was ten years old, our family went to Disney World and we all rode Space Mountain. It was the first time any of us kids—me, my twin brother, our little brother, and our older sister—had been on a roller coaster, and we had no idea what to expect. Space Mountain would be a fairly tame coaster, except it’s inside a dark building so you have no spatial awareness, no sense of where it’ll lurch next. All I remember is a long, slow climb up a steep incline, a slight hesitation at the top, and then a plunge into a black abyss. Everything after that was utter disoriented fear.

When it was over and we stumbled into the Florida sunlight, I was dizzy with relief and motion sickness. So was my twin. Our little brother was a complete mess, scared and crying. My mother leaned down to comfort him, and he promptly threw up on her. My sister was fine, but my dad was pissed, as fathers tend to be when things go south on a vacation. “All right,” he snapped at us, “that’s it for roller coasters.” Except it wasn’t: for the rest of our time at Disney, the first, frightened question any of us kids asked before every ride was, “Is this another roller coaster?”

The intensity of that experience forged a neural pathway on our brains. To this day, neither my brothers nor I are roller coaster fans.

My wife’s perception of roller coasters, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. She loves them. The taller, steeper, faster, and loopier, the better. And that’s primarily because her brain got wired with a different neural circuit.

She grew up in western Pennsylvania, the youngest of three kids, and her family had been going to Cedar Point, an amusement park in Ohio famous for its roller coasters, for as long as she could remember. For years, she watched her siblings and her parents ride the Gemini—a wooden coaster 125 feet tall that reached sixty miles per hour—always whooping and hollering and having a grand time. When she was eight years old, she was finally tall enough to ride, too. Like me, her memory of that first ride is blurry, except for the end: Her brother and sister and parents joyously laughing, all of them congratulating her on being such a big girl. She was glowing with pride. So she rode it again. And again and again and again.

When my wife and I get on a roller coaster today, we physically experience the exact same ride. Same long climb, same precipitous drop, same sensation of speed. The sensory input is identical. But her perception of the ride is vastly different from mine because our brains have cataloged roller coasters differently. She loves it, and I do not.

And now the conspicuous question on the page: Why am I riding roller coasters if I don’t like them? Because I’m trying to develop my attribute of open-mindedness.

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