The Psychic Pattern Matching Machine

I had a psychic experience once. A while ago I was exiting from the freeway behind a flatbed tow truck towing a car. We were stopped at a traffic light, on a hill, and somehow I knew that when the truck started up the hill, the car was going to come loose and that I should leave plenty of room behind. The light turned green, and sure enough the car moved backward as the truck moved forward. Fortunately it didn’t come completely off of the truck, but it did fall far enough off of the truck that had I not left extra room it might have hit my car.

I’m not a psychic. I don’t believe in psychic ability, at least not in the “magic” sense. (Maybe you do…there’s nothing wrong with that. I won’t judge.) What I do believe is that the human brain is the most powerful and efficient pattern matching machine in the world. I like to call this “intuition”. Every time we see, hear, smell, or touch something, our brains subconsciously compare it to every sensory memory pattern we have in an attempt to synthesize new information. Every sensory input either creates new knowledge, or reinforces what we already know through pattern matching. Our brain does all of this without conscious effort, just like breathing.

What I believe happened in the tow truck incident was that subconsciously I recognized something that didn’t match the “secure tow truck operation”, the “acceleration and incline physics”, or the “safe following distance” patterns in my brain. I have no idea exactly what I saw; I just knew that something bad was going to happen. And that’s the downside. We don’t have conscious control of intuition. We can’t turn it off and on, we can’t force it, and we can’t control it. All we can do is choose whether or not to listen.

In improv conscious invention of circumstances, connections, characters…anything really…is difficult. Invention requires thinking of an idea, executing that idea, communicating that idea to your scene partner, and then finding the next idea and repeating the process. And we have to do it fast, before the audience gets bored. It’s hard work. Discovering those things by just letting our subconscious pattern match on what’s happening in the moment is easy. It just happens. In fact, if we are inventing instead of discovering, we have to consciously ignore our intuition while it’s trying to give us the answers for free. When we let our subconscious guide our scenes our work seems more pure and less forced. And it’s much more fun, both for the actor and for the audience.

Trust your intuition. Discover the scene rather than inventing it. Have fun.

Now get out there and make stuff up.