Can a Wandering Mind Make You Neurotic? | Hacker News Reader

Can a Wandering Mind Make You Neurotic?

nautil.us

77 pointsbsbechtel47 comments

I can think of like 5 different ways that you could define "a wandering mind," yet the author just takes it for granted and acts like we all "get it," even though the definition you choose might change the conclusions she reaches and the nature of the discussion.

It's just that vagueness that characterizes discussions about consciousness or subjectivity. It makes me think we have an incredibly long way to go before we accurately model the human subject, which is a prerequisite to any meaningful AI.

You may be interested in this paper by Hubert Dreyfus, "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it even more Heideggerian."

http://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf

Thank you! A very interesting and insightful criticism of various approaches to AI, especially what we can learn from GOFAI. Do you have any other papers to recommend?

You might check out stuff from John Haugeland, who coined "GOFAI" back in the 80s. Here's a nice essay I quickly found online (that's sort of indirectly about AI) for example: http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/haugeland/Mind+...

I'm EXACTLY like the daughter mentioned in the article. My ruminations make me more creative and poetic while making me careless and depressed.

Does anyone here have any ways I can tackle the downsides of being this way ?

To be good at escapism and at creating it (e.g. poetry, music) one may need first a desire to escape.

I am a hobby poet and musician. What a coincidence :P

What's the one thing you actually enjoy doing that does take your out of your recursive depressive thinking for a minute?

Do more of that thing every day. Do less web surfing and less rumination.

It's all about mental habituation.

Allow me to randomly speculate that in your mental world, reading some Intellectually Fascinating Article has an extremely high priority, whereas eating dinner is just some stupid thing your body demands, and so because of this configuration of like/dislike or attraction/aversion you tend to chow down whatever is easiest so you can get back to the Fascinating Article.

That habit becomes deeply learned by your neural networks, reinforced by daily training. Fortunately your species has evolved the mysterious capacity of thinking and willing, so you can in fact make decisions that are counterintuitive to your own neural training.

You may find that you need some violent tactics such as temporarily cutting off your internet supply. That snaps you back to reality (oh, there goes gravity). Makes it way easier to focus on prepping veggies.

Isn't part of the problem that electronic or thought-based stuff moves too fast, is infinitely elastic and offers too little real friction-based resistance? Which leads to a stagnation of patience with actual passing time and physical reality. So I suggest doing whatever requires and encourages patience. Cooking is a great example because if you try to do it as fast as possible you will burn your garlic and that can very effectively train your neurons to chill out and do one thing at a time.

Depressive thinking existed before the Internet.

Agreed. I don't know much about those times though and I can only really speak to what I'm familiar with.

A mind is a fabulously diverse collection of parts, and each one of everyone's parts is shaped a little differently from everyone else's. It might be a little simplistic to assume that one strategy will work for anyone, sight unseen.

In my oughts and teens, I trained classical piano. Some days toward the end I was practicing for 4-6 hours during and after school, and I interviewed at the Boston conservatory. They told me they most likely would not accept me, but that's not really why I stopped. I knew I had to stop because despite over 15 years of serious intensive practice, I could still not make it through a 3 minute piece without my mind wandering off on some tangent of curiosity. At best my playing was distracted and unconvincing, and at worst (usual) I would screw up in the middle when my conscious attention came back to the present.

The only way I can stay task focused for longer than a few minutes at a time is by putting on headphones with a driving beat (EDM or similar) and stimulants. Caffeine is usually enough to get me through the workday. I'm a programmer now.

I made it through grade school and undergrad with respectable grades thanks to aptitude and quick learning, but I probably have an attention disorder that went undetected because of it.

>thinking and willing

One doesn't simply think away the structural defects in one's mind, any more than neurotypicals could transform themselves into genius IQs through force of will. A mind is shaped over time by internal and external influences, but plasticity drops off rapidly after the developmental years. Don't know your history of study, but why not browse through some videos of congenitally or traumatically brain-damaged individuals on youtube for some insight?

Thanks for the correction. I try not to assume neurotypicality and I should be more clear that everything I say is just a suggestion that may or not be helpful.

I agree that you can't think away structural stuff. What I wanted to say is that you can use clear thoughts and intentions to guide you to do things that deviate from your habits, which I think is mostly true.

For example, working around your attention problems by consciously using music and caffeine is something you could remind yourself of consciously in case you would forget. That type of thing.

I know that willpower is a tricky thing. That's why I emphasize thinking about something that you already enjoy and that takes you to a different mind state from the one that is causing problems. For me, that's cooking, but also riding bikes and walking. If I consciously decide to do slightly more of those things, that seems to be an effective and not-too-painful way of "improving" my average mind state.

> Allow me to randomly speculate that in your mental world, reading some Intellectually Fascinating Article has an extremely high priority, whereas eating dinner is just some stupid thing your body demands, and so because of this configuration of like/dislike or attraction/aversion you tend to chow down whatever is easiest so you can get back to the Fascinating Article.

I literally just chowed down an easy meal and rushed back to my computer to continue this Fascinating Article, only to find this sentence, which described exactly what I was doing.

What exactly causes the blue?

I recently discovered that the people/subjects I don't understand frighten me. And that causes load of other negative feelings. Exploring those subjects removes the fear at some point. And they are also often lot less negative in reality.

So personally I've found that "ignorance is bliss" only works as long as you are not at all aware of the shit. Once you are aware, it's best to go all in.

People I don't understand greatly disturb me. Subjects not so much.

Same here. But I remember thinking high speed trading is evil when I had absolutely no idea what it is about.

"Explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and abysses and dark corners, is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore—let’s say in a marriage or a deep friendship—if everything is illuminated, explained, and put out on the table. There is something profoundly wrong. It’s a mistake. It’s a fundamentally wrong approach toward human beings." - Werner Herzog when asked what was wrong with psychology and self-reflection (http://www.gq.com/story/werner-herzog-profile-cave-of-forgot...).

Herzog is a brilliantly creative person, and if you read "Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin", you'll see someone who is connected to the external world so much, full of life and vigour, like the son of the author, but has deep insights into the human nature that we typically attribute to those who live in their heads, the tortured geniuses.

On the other hand, Logicomix is a brilliant read on the angst of mathematicians, especially Bertrand Russel who sought to make the foundations of Mathematics more rigorous, coming from a deep childhood conviction that reality can and must be explained from objective truths. What a contrast to his inner life plagued by demons of depression, which as the reasonable effectiveness of Cognitive Bias Therapy proves as coming from an illogical way of looking at the world. Russel even wrote The Conquest of Happiness, which meant that he was trying to solve the puzzle for himself and dedicated great energy in that pursuit.

The other book that captures the life of the tortured geniuses is Colin Wilson's The Outsider, which does a fantastic study of artists like Camus, Sartre, Van Gogh, Hesse and many more. He quotes from Bernard Shaw's play "John Bull's Other Island", which for me captures the essence of the depressed soul:

  Keegan: You feel at home in the world then? 
  Broadbent: Of course. Dont you? 
  Keegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.

The Outsider is a gateway into existential literature which is especially illuminated by Sartre's Nausea and Hesse's Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. These are all great books to read both for pleasure and as wayposts to help us find a centre for our own minds. Colin Wilson concludes The Outsider with a recommendation on how to unify the divided soul of the melancholic; his answers veer back into what normal people do - live a life more connected with the external world.

There are no magical cures - this is a question that humanity has been pondering for ages, and till we learn to decode and manipulate our brains and hormones, we'll keep asking. Apart from living externally, there are a few things that do help. Meditation and CBT are specific ways to control our mind from brooding into negativity, and much has already been said about it.

The other way to avoid sadness is to be happy, not in a hedonistic sense which we adapt to really quickly, but as in how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines the state of Flow. To work, to be challenged, to grow in complexity, and to forget ourselves in the process.

Something else that I don't find often mentioned in popular literature, probably because of the woo-woo nature of the topic, is to look at the finitude of our lives. Death is probably the most philosophical moment of our lives, but unfortunately it leaves us no time to contemplate it, which is a pity, because it could've helped us deal with the relatively petty griefs of life better. The oft-referred BBC Article about Bhutan's secret to happiness (http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150408-bhutans-dark-secret...) does go into it. They meditate on death a few minutes every day, giving them the right perspective to look at their daily lives.

In the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche quotes Montaign thus:

Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come—to them, their wives, their children, their friends—catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair!... To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

So I guess that is my cocktail of tools: meditation, CBT, work, and being mindful of our impermanence.

Hope that helps.

Brilliantly written. Thanks for all the sources.

As a self-diagnosed neurotic, I keep telling myself "This too shall pass".

Toward your latter paragraphs, I am reminded of the medieval practice of reflection on mortality, momento mori [0]. There is a great deal of extant architecture and art meant to inspire one to meditate on the subject, for example the Capela dos Ossos in Portugal, whose entrance bears the phrase Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos ("We bones that here are, for yours await") [1], and the imagery in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting The Triumph of Death [2]. It's unfortunate that, despite the amount of rich Western thought dedicated to such contemplations, popular modern literature, as you observe, seems at least generally averse to the subject.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capela_dos_Ossos

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

Did memento mori comprehend death in the modern way, or did it assume an afterlife that completely changes the meaning of death?

I've come across thoughts about death mostly in Buddhist literature. This is a great introduction to the western Christian outlook on it. Thanks!

I also wanted to recommend Atul Gawande's excellent "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" to help get a more visceral understanding of death. He talks about how the human body starts degenerating as early as we hit 30, and paints a memorable picture of how every next moment is a moment closer to our death.

This rather references user orthogonal's top post: rumination to me simply means deep thought, I didn't realise - until I looked it up - that it also has a meaning in psychology related to negative thinking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumination_%28psychology%29.

I confess I don't rightly understand the meaning being applied in the Wikipedia page there.

The word originally describes how grazing animals process food -- a compartmentalized stomach allows them to chew on some grass, breaking it down partially, then regurgitate and chew it again, to help with digestion even further.

Mapping this to the domain of psychology, it becomes a thought process where one is going through the same steps over and over and over again; you can pick apart any situation you find yourself in, in excruciating detail. The only thing it doesn't lead to is an actionable plan of what you're going to do about said situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant

I'm familiar with ruminants and the concept wrt digestion - I think what throws me most about the Wikipedia page on the psych concept is what it means to "focus on the symptoms of one's distress". I thought distress was a symptom itself of other conditions. A symptom of distress would probably be inability to focus but then how could you possibly focus on that!

>a thought process where one is going through the same steps over and over and over again; you can pick apart any situation you find yourself in, in excruciating detail //

That's a very clear description, thank you. If that's all they mean then IMO the page is absolutely terribly written.

I think the answer is yes. There's an old saying, idle hands are the devil's workshop or something like that. The mind needs to be nurtured and guided just like muscles or it will fall into disarray. Creative pursuits help keep the mind focused. That and some good FPS games.

Books and video games have really helped me not to think when that's needed.

"Worrying about misfortunes that will never happen" is also called "risk analysis" in securityspeak. Sure, a neurotic mind can find you those bizarre edge cases but it can also become a burden when you're needed to reset and tackle a new problem.

"I'm not perseverating, I'm threat modeling!"

I've definitely noticed this, and the cause was never really a mystery to me. Seems like the brain and nervous system would have evolved to benefit from an optimal balance of intro vs extroverted time spent. During externally oriented times the brain is occupied on a task so it would make sense for any anxiety or fear centers to be engaged. While the brain could best utilize downtime by analyze past mistakes or ruminating on things. The fear mechanisms of the brain i would guess use discomfort and aggitation to help spurr on adaption and problem solving. like a neural network stuck in the training phase, too much time spent worrying inward would distort the system and cause problems

David Abrams wrote a book called The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) that's related.

The subtitle is "Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World."

TL;DR: modern life is rubbish; go hiking.

Humans grew up in "nature," whatever that means. Basically they were inside systems they didn't make. They had to understand rivers, trees, birds, stars, plants, all kinds of stuff. At first they didn't even have language, and before symbols, life was vivid and dynamic; there was no alienation.

Some people were (some people still are) shamans. Their job was to commune even more interestingly with the non-human world. For example they would study birds so much that they could imitate them and kind of live among them. They would develop complex ways of interacting with plants.

> It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture—boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most importantly, the common speech or language—in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land.

Hunters also had intimate connections with nature. Spend enough time in the forest and you and your culture will develop sensual intuitions based on subtle bird sounds, so that you can tell without thinking that there is a large mammal thataway, from the way the birds are moving and chirping.

> Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

> Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities.

The crucial event Abrams goes back to in order to explain the current detachment is the invention and spread of the alphabet, that is, the way of writing that is abstracted from natural symbols. Alphabetic literacy initiates a profound shift; McLuhan agreed. We begin to build an abstract world of ideas that is enormously powerful, and we also kind of lose touch with "reality."

> Plato, or rather the association between the literate Plato and his mostly nonliterate teacher Socrates, may be recognized as the hinge on which the sensuous, mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to orality gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy. [...]

> By continually asking his interlocutors to repeat and explain what they had said in other words, by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking, Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were accustomed. Small wonder that some Athenians complained that Socrates' conversation had the numbing effect of a stingray's electric shock.

The climbers I know love it almost like religious people love their faith. It does become a "lifestyle." They start saving up money for vacations in Spain and France and anywhere with big serious boulders. Some also get into spelunking. Most of these people that I know are otherwise academics and IT professionals, and climbing is a way for them to restore something ancient and combat alienation and burnout.

> Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses—once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary. [...]

> We may think of the sensing body as a kind of open circuit that completes itself only in things, and in the world. [...]

> The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.

Exercise for the reader: come up with a way to coexist with technologies and thoughts as if those things were landscapes, mountains, animals.

Go hiking. I do this a few times a week to get away from the desk. I still end up thinking the entire time, but my thoughts are much more positive. I end the hike feeling refreshed and happy every time.

You're dropping the truth here. Hope it doesn't go unnoticed.

I often think that everything is going to end. Especially when I'm up at night and playing video games, after a long day of work. Something about game worlds ending probably makes it more likely for me to have an existential angst, but the biggest reason is how much Judaeo-Christian RELIGION I have been exposed to and trying to find the truth among contradictory worldviews.

I am NOT depressed (at least in the colloquial sense of the term) since I definitely feel intrinsically happy most of the time when nothing special is happening. I don't really need anything except good health in order to be happy. However, I tend to take things to their logical conclusion way more than other people, and as a result I see both upsides and downsides most avoid talking about. My mind naturally tries to find the main factors to explain a phenomenon, rather than accepting what's told to me.

The thought that all this will come to an end is scary to me. It leads to a conclusion which I guess also comes out of depression: what is the point of it all? I can accomplish so much in this world and then if I die and everyone who experiences it will die, what's the point ultimately? If you knew the entire world was ending in 3 days due to a meteor, say, would you labor every day on a giant novel, no matter how good it is? If not, then isn't it all just a matter of scale?

Perhaps I have to learn to love the journey instead of the destination.

Perhaps I have to liken not being around in 700 years to not having been around 700 years ago. But life moves forward and now that I'm here, my self preservation instinct makes me dread someday not being around. Because while the world will continue, for me it may as well be a fantasy world.

Also I look around at the cultures of the earth engaging with computers and cellphones and promiscuous sex and all the other stuff. A lot of it is addictive and exciting, but once you wean yourself off of it you realize how non essential it is. So what is the point of any worldly things?

I must say, the fact that religions have existed stably for thousands of years, as well as various philosophies (Buddhism, Stoicism) seem to teach similar things. A detachment from the cares of this world, and a focus on something "greater".

But what if this is all there is?

And what if there is an afterlife and we spent our lives believing the wrong religion, and must face some consequences?

These are thoughts I find scary.

Especially the last one.

From reading the title, you would think that the article was going to speculate about cause, but it seems to completely ignore it and just beg the question. Does being neurotic give you a wandering mind?

There's little or no experimental evidence that "thought" causes anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism

edit: Wikipedia is scary specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_mental_causation :)

The writer seems to express the worry that one type of mind is more efficient when the going gets tough (i.e. initial description of the two characters). This is an entirely different question. The assumption that so-called "neurotic" minds, wondering or whatever, will have less adaptive reactions to the circumstances is false. It is regularly contradicted by reality (e.g. history). There is just no reliable prediction to be made about how someone is going to behave based on the criterion presented.

+1 for the first two paragraphs. Though I am not a psychologist I have seen your observation to be true in many cases. I would classify this line as gold "while my son’s mental life is closely connected to the outside world, my daughter spends much of her life inside her own head". I have never met a person who has many outward connections and is depressed the assumption is that those connections are real.

Is it possible to have both? Quiet your mind and be in the moment for physical stuff but call on its rumination powers to think when needed?

Wandering not Wondering, title is a typo.

Read the title thought it was silly, double check the link's title and yeah, typo.

Agreed, please fix the title who can, it's confusing. Thanks :)

"Small wander" that no one's caught it yet! :)

My mind wonders whether you actually meant "wandering"?

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