What Is Your Name?

Unfortunately, I haven't learned how to name moss yet. Look at these beautiful plants! So much going on!

 Plant identification, brain science, and depression

One of the most startling discoveries I've made since Zach and I have been learning plant identification is this effect: human brains tend ignore what they cannot name.

There are all sorts of scientific explanations for this: our brains encounter huge amounts of information at all times, and use various filters to block out most of it. The grains of sand that reach your conscious mind are tiny compared to the pebbles of reality caught in your brain's mental sieve (and not having a strong "sieve" can cause sensory or attention difficulties). 

But something about being able to name a thing signals to your brain that it's important. And so, your brain pays attention.

I had never noticed garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata, family Brassicaceae) until I learned what it was called— and then I saw it everywhere. I thought there weren't too many elderberry bushes around (Sambucus nigra, family Adoxaceae), but once I learned their name, I found their feathery white flower umbels in every ditch and wetland edge. That three-leafed vine all over the woods was (mostly) not poison ivy, but fuzzy bean (Stophostyles helvula, family Fabaceae), and once my mind named the difference, I found that I'd been studiously avoiding a plant that would not actually give me a rash.

Even just learning general family names brought my attention to plants I'd never paid heed to before: redbud tree and a sweet pea might not appear to have much in common, but a glance at the flowers tells that they're more closely related than redbuds are to dogwoods or maple trees (family Fabaceae is very distinctive, and also super cool!). The names lead to connections, branches on the family tree that give insight into how different plants split off and fill ecological niches.

And just as it's helpful to have names for things outside the brain, it's helpful to have names for things happening inside, as well.

I wrote earlier this year about finally getting diagnosed with depression, and I can't how much having that name— This is Depression, that is what I'm experiencing right now— has helped me to deal with it in a healthy way.

Because it's hard to see something if you don't have a name for it.

Sometimes I feel like the past couple years have been a steady stream of me collecting names, of concepts I've felt nebulously but haven't been able to pin down. Anxiety. Gaslighting. Agender identity. Executive function disorder. Demisexuality. Triangulating. Lack of boundaries. Religious trauma. Scarcity vs. abundance mindset. Orthorexia. Flight or fight response. Orthopraxy over orthodoxy. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Unhealthy coping mechanisms. Not all of these apply to me, but they've all been useful in one way or another, a way of puzzling together reality in a way that helps me pay attention to what I could not name before.

So now, when I'm having trouble sorting things out, when my brain is muddled and I'm not sure where to begin thinking about something, I've begun asking this question:

What is your name?

Whether dealing with minds or mint species, it's a good place to start.

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