Nothingness and Anticipation
Much as in the case of King Arthur, we are always fighting to preserve something. We fear that something important will be lost. It will become nothing. And it is nothingness that we dread—as I have suggested in several different ways in the first two essays in this series on the psychology of nothingness. Arthur commands Tom of Warwick to retain something called the legends of Camelot. Arthur is willing to die in battle but does not want the stories of Camelot to be “forgot.”
At every moment of our life, we similarly to not want something to be “forgot”, be it a list of things to do or a memory. Certainly, one of the major cognitive functions served by our brain is retention of that which we don’t want to forget. Some of what we retain goes into short term memory and erased during the sorting out we do at night when we are asleep (one of the important reasons for us to get a good night of sleep). Some of what we retain eventually ends up on long term memory and is stored in most instances in our hippocampus (often embedded in or associated with a memory scheme).
It is critical to note that we deal with nothingness in another important, ongoing manner. As I have noted elsewhere (Bergquist, 2026a) and in the first essay in this series (Bergquist, 2026b), there is good reason to believe that we live in the immediate future. Just as we adjust our bodily functions in anticipation of what is about to happen within and to our body—the allostatic model of Peter Sterling (2020)—so we are always anticipating what is likely to happen a moment in the future so that we might behave appropriately (adaptively) in the present moment.
This is not an easy task for us to perform, given that we don’t really know what is about to happen. It is a void into which we inject our image of what we think will occur. Just as our brain fills in the blind spot in our eyes, so it fills in the immediate future with an anticipated image. This operates in a very smooth manner. We tend to blend what is now occurring with what we anticipate is likely to occur. Furthermore, we usually have a pretty good idea about what is about to happen. However, we can’t be sure. Like Arthur, seeking to be assured that the memory of Camelot will not be forgotten, we wish to be assured that what we anticipate will actually be there in the coming moments.
While we are usually unaware of the smoothing function and are reassured that our anticipation is accurate, we become aware of this critical operation of our brain when we are surprised, and our anticipation is not confirmed. Something “pops out” in front of us. We fear that the masked man with the chain saw will leap in from of us while we are creeping through the barn. Our heart races and we may even jump backwards when he suddenly appears.
A much more pleasant example of something unanticipated occurs when a gifted comedian finishes off a joke with an unanticipated punchline. There is a whole theory of humor that suggests it occurs when we are somehow caught off guard. We expect the “usual” and are provided with the “unexpected.” A classic example is the Henny Youngman joke that begins with the phrase: ”Take my wife (or husband).” This is supposed to serve as a lead into a story about his spouse. Instead, the statement is to be taken literally: “Please [take my wife].”
