The Interrupting Cow

My eldest adult daughter, when she was a young child, told a particular joke with such proficiency –  never failing to elicit the hoped-for surprise response from aunts, uncles, parents, and others – that it endured for bounteous years.  It was one of the endless variations on the knock-knock series . . . 

MOOOOOO!!!

Knock, knock

Who’s there?

Interrupting cow.

Interrupting cow wh . . .

Pause to explain.  This is where the child’s skill of ‘timing’ comes in, for she must scream MOOOOOOO!!! in an obnoxious manner before the adult has had a chance to finish the final response, “Interrupting cow wh . . .”

  

MOOOOOO!!!!  Much laughter ensues when the adult comes to realize what has just happened.  The adult has been interrupted . .  . MOOOOOOO!!!

This might define many years of motherhood for me . . .

I had a vision . . . I could see and feel and hear the thoughts in my brain, perhaps manifested as brain synapses – tiny strands of matter that connect and make sense of all the data coming and going -- and these connecting synapses were being chopped into bits and pieces by a fine sewing scissors – all day long.  Perhaps the living links carried thoughts or story ideas or plans for a future life, or the line of a poem I’d write one day, or maybe just dialogue with myself – but interrupted, snip-snapped, all day long – until my brain felt inside like a bowl of chopped up, one-half-inch sized spaghetti pieces.  This was my vision.  And each night, as I slept, some of those pieces (I could sense it, I say!) would secretly reconnect – and I would remember . . . but then, a new day began and they would be disconnected, snip-snapped, again. 

I often wondered what I was doing to my brain, what was happening to my brain in those many years.  What would be the long-term accumulation, I asked, of always having the brain synapses snipped just as they were trying to connect?  Would there be a learned response for disconnection? . . . would learning stop?  Would I develop an induced form of Attention Deficit Disorder?  Would my brain eventually stop thinking altogether?  Was I creating Alzheimer’s in myself?  All those uncontrollable interruptions of young motherhood were coming at me from every angle . . . I felt them in the brain, saw the break, experienced it, heard the sharp snip-snap, and I worried about it.  I often said, “I just want to complete one sentence in my brain . . . without interruption.”  I wanted to write books full of sentences someday.  What was to become of me?

Brain synapse, "the connector"

My fear – or hunch – has been corroborated.  In the New York Times last Sunday I read an article called “Brain, Interrupted” which studied, not mothers, but regular people, subjecting them to interruptions (only two! what a joke) while requiring them to perform a simple task of reading something and answering questions about it.  The Interrupted Group scored 20 percent lower than the Control Group.   “In other words, the distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20 percent dumber,” the article says.

The High Alert Group was warned there might be an interruption, but the interruption never came.  Unbelievably, this group improved by 43 percent over the Control Group.  This surprise finding suggests that participants learned from their experience, and their brains adapted.  “Somehow, it seems, they marshaled extra brain power to steel themselves against interruption, or perhaps the potential for interruptions served as a kind of deadline that helped them focus even better.”

Nowhere in the article does it mention snip-snapped synapses or spaghetti bowl brains – but I had the vision (for I am prone to such things), and I know this is what happens.   

My greatest lesson from all those years is this:  Anticipate interruptions.  Life will never be free of it; interruptions do not go away, they only change.  When I sit down to write or even read, I am prepared.  My brain is on high alert.  I was trained by the best.  And now I know, because of the aforementioned article, that if the day should ever come when there is not a knock-knock or a ding-ding, for even an hour, I will accomplish much.