the weekend brought another interesting experience. a friend of mine has a 100-gallon salt-water fish tank, which is better than any TV i had ever seen. on sunday he went out and bought a giant sea aenemie (SP?) because he read about the symbiotic relationship it had with clown fish (and he owned one named Nemo). the aenemie, despite being a glorified plant, proved to be awesome, as it acclimated to its new surroundings. it managed to change it's orientation 180 degrees, from facing downward to facing upward by continually inflating different parts of itself and using its "tentacles" to propel itself around the corners of the rock.

the really interesting part came, however, when, about 30 minutes from the new guest's arrival, Nemo discovered the aenemie. bear in mind he had never seen one in the course of his brief fish tank existence. as the other fish watched, green with envy (though that might have been the floating algae), nemo nuzzled medina (i didn't name her), helped her right herself, convinced her to open up fully and let the cilia flutter freely in the breeze of the artificial currents, and made a nest in her (admittedly vaginal) center. with almost no capacity to learn and no prior experience, his firmware dictated a behavior, which made for a great nature show. and medina, while being generally hostile, allowed him in without zapping cause she "knew" him too.

as cool as our own learning mechanism is, there is a lot to be said for this kind of innate recognition and understanding. reason is a great tool to let us adapt to new situations, and obviously doing that in an evolutionary, generational way is substantially slower, but isn't it a joyous occasion when your instinct brings you a beautiful connection or a useful experience, and the mind does not have to explicitly interfere.

the most awesome is probably internalizing reasoned knowledge into an instinctual understanding, where a new skill becomes so second nature that it flows out of you as you observe. determining how to optimize and speed up this process would probably be the most valuable discovery for me ever. until then though, it's practice practice practice.