The Choices Menu
Say you're at a restaurant. What to eat can only be decided within the confines of what the restaurant has on the menu. You can consult the waiter for his recommendations. And he too will be determining the same from within the menu.
Similarly, I find that whenever we are choose something, we're choosing it from this internal menu we are served by our nervous system. The Choices Menu.
You're sitting on a couch and you have a TV in front of you. Your phone is lying on the table. You can also glimpse at the ready-to-eat-something you quite like the taste of, lying on top of the fridge.
In this scenario, the Choices Menu is quite simple - your environment is offering you things you can do. You can watch the TV, use your phone or eat the specific something.
Currently you may not remember there are boiled eggs inside of the fridge, or this book you were reading you kept in the other room as they're not in your direct environment.
The Choices Menu is the menu of can-dos your brain serves you based on:
- Your immediate environment
- Your fresh past environment
Let's proceed further. Sitting on the couch and thinking back on recent memories, you recall you chose today to be your doctor's appointment. And now the Choices Menu is updated.
The "freshness" of a specific past experience can be based on various things. If can be an experience you recently had, or a really old experience you recently recalled. It can be something which has an emotional value. It can also be something which is necessary for your survival, like the doctor's appointment. All this will update your Choices Menu.
If a specific environment isn't fresh, and it isn't in your direct environment, it simply does not exist for you.
I think while we ask "what should we do?" and other questions, it might also be worth asking "what CAN we do?". What are all the things that we really can do, which are neither the product of what we freshly recall, nor what our direct environment tells us?
Then we can also design our environment so it naturally takes were where we want to go. That's design. That is engineering.