The Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
hbr.org
hbr.org
* Wikipedia provides a good summary of replication attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
* Slate covered the topic here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
* And here is a recent, large replication study: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/174569161665287...
As a result, I would hesitate before using "ego depletion" as an excuse for rationalizing a lack of self-control (eg. giving into "cheat foods" or being irritable/impulsive). Whether or not "ego depletion" is real, science has not yet adequately validated the theory.
Moreover, there is a risk to accepting the theory as true: because one believes in "ego depletion," one can rationalize a lower degree of self-control, which may have been higher otherwise. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think it is fair to assume that, given the current research, "ego depletion" is no more than a reasonable hypothesis. It is possible that willpower may not fit the "finite resource" model at all.
Not only that, but think of all the cultures/jobs where it is normal for people to work much more than the typical 40 hour work week we are accustomed to. Do 18 year old Vietnamese fishermen working 80 hour weeks suffer from "ego depletion" the same way 18 year old college students do in the US? Probably not. It may be an element of our culture / upbringing that we put more emphasis on leisure, and not some psychological or neurological "need".
One of the factors of ego depletion is decision fatigue. If the fisherman does not fish that day, he and his offspring go hungry, and if that decision is repeated they will starve to death. So not really a decision, not one that a rational being would make. If the web developer goofs off on reddit today, instead of looking for new contracting work he won't go hungy.. He can probably coast for a little bit.. Actually, he could potentially just go on welfare, but then he'd have to live in a worse part of town. If he moved in with friends he could work less hours a week and have more leisure time, etc. Lots of choices to make.
Novelty is another ego depleter. The fisherman has done it day-in-day-out for years, probably his father and grandfather as well. It's muscle memory and he's on autopilot. The web developer is constantly novelty fatigued, learning new clients' environments and the latest web framework fads which change month by month. His day has no routine.
As a contractor it is much more difficult for me, and probably I'm the most lazy and restless after coming off a project, with a decent balance in the bank. I am much more focused and mentally sure when the bank balance is low and I'm chasing down business because if I don't find something it'll get uncomfortable quick.
Contrast that to when I was in the gulf of Papagayo, miles from shore, on a small sailboat in the middle of a storm. There was no ego depletion. I never thought 'well, should I continue battling the sea to keep this boat afloat and going to my destination?' There's no ego there, only survival.
Does the Vietnamese fisherman have the harder life by most metrics? Absolutely. However there are downsides to the modern western world.
I don't think cold water is actually bad for digestion.
The idea that you should intertwine focused thinking with unfocused thinking (and/or relaxation) was the subject of Daniel Kahneman's excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow.
Our brains have evolved to minimize energy use and all the faculties they manifest: attention, will-power, imagination, creativity, critical-thinking, decision-making etc are parts of a finite budget of energy (glucose), and other resources like metal ions, enzymes & RNAs.
Thinking of will-power as an unlimited resource is a vestige of spiritual-thinking which denies the mechanistic nature of the brain.
There's another way in which will-power is constrained though: the inherited set of parameters that control the rates of production of neurotransmitters. Some people simply cannot ever achieve the levels of focus that others can, no matter how hard they try.
In terms of parameter inheritance - is there science on this? Are some humans predisposed to have less will power than others?
It makes about as much sense as believing that your leg muscles are at risk of being depleted, and deciding to avoid exercise for that reason.
It's up to you to decide whether each situation is closer to "training for a marathon", or "too tired to do stuff".
If anything, ego depletion proposes that intellectual work is more like exercise than we might otherwise think.
It turns out that I get more done, run faster, and find both intellectual and physical work much easier when I've taken excellent (rather than merely okay) care of baseline needs like sleep, nutrition, exercise, and household chores.
Willpower as a finite but manageable resource is a much more useful belief than willpower as a character trait.
If the focusing drains energy from the mind, it's the wrong kind of focus. Real concentration (buddhists call it samadhi) doesn't come from forcing your other parts of mind to do what "you" (the small, narrative mind-process) want, but rather to unify the whole mind around single intention. This state is not only stable, it's more efficient, because there's just one thing to do rather than tens of conflicting intentions.
It's more efficient and calm than Default Network Mode, which is basically a garbage can for the mind.
You don't even have to get into buddhism, there's a lot that science already knows about eg. the flow state, which is a mini-samadhi. Also, Judson Brewer discovered that DNM is not fundamentally 'default', as it doesn't activate for long-term meditation practitioners. Such people (some of them really high functioning) report that great thoughts just come to them out of nowhere. Clinging to the thought forcefully only reinforces the illusion that 'we' are thinking it, which is not true and counterproductive, as it obstructs the dynamics of the mind. Just let the mind figure the problem out and let you know when it's done. DMN is an impostor that pretends that everything done by the various diverse mind processes is done by the narrative fiction centered around the feeling of 'I'. It's not, it's highly distributed, there's no driver and no center.
The more we think otherwise, the more force we have to put to make the mind obedient.
In my experience, flow state tends to be toxic and socially harmful with time. After weeks of practicing, once you're in, there is no easy way to exit it without sleeping (in the morning you're at risk falling in there again). I discussed this effect elsewhere and it confirmed. Sometimes I forcefully retain my mind in normal mode with "expensive" focus, because further plans require to be communicable and alive. It is not "for free" to me in neither way.
Am I using it wrong? Is meditation and samadhi a better version of the flow in this regard?
Samadhi is completely different - referring to a deep meditation state without particularly concentrating on anything.
Flow results from deeply being engaged in something or concentration.
I like how Tucker Peck (https://meditatewithtucker.com/, recommended, he has an online group) phrased it: when there's samadhi with not enough sampajanna, you're happy asshole. When there's sampajanna without samadhi, you can clearly see what's going on, but you can remain sad (not enough flow-induced pleasure, leaving the mind not strong enough).
In such case there's just enough mind unification to create the pleasure from the flow state, but not enough to expand the awareness and notice wtf is going on around (and for the mind to notice introspectively what it's doing).
Maybe you could try to be continuously aware of the pleasure (or rapture, to be more precise - piti) in your mind, and how the mind is clinging to it. It leads to realising that the rapture is still quite a growse and still somewhat stressful state of mind (it feels a bit like happy anxiety) and with time causes the mind to let it go and leave just the mental pleasure (sukha) or at least to make the piti component more integrated and refined. That's the idea of the Jhanas progression, but not many people know that samadhi is equally possible in day-to-day life, not just with eyes closed. Good for you :)
BTW please take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, I'm not hugely experienced.
PS. A great piece about it: http://dharmatreasure.org/wp-content/uploads/Meditation%20an...
I've decided to roll with the punches and just work all-day, but take more days off. That way I can just go straight from flow to bed (with a few walks throughout the day). But I'll try to make sense of the sibling comments as well. Or maybe I just need to get better at napping again (right after work - a great reset button).
If you have links to other discussions of this, please share :)
If that's the road to samadhi, inherently it's long and maybe painful - because our intentions depend on our memories - and a single intention means something like clearing or integrating all of the other intentions/memories. Or is there possibly a different way to achieve that?
On the other hand, i believe the view from neuroscience is that meditators created a network that can silence the default-mode network on command, and than the task-mode network automatically becomes the only one activated, hence focused on a single intention. So maybe that's the shortcut, maybe it could be accesseible by science ?
And BTW: Judson brewer recently published an interesting paper, showing how EEG could enable neurofeedback on deep brain structures related to meditation("effortless awareness") - which could have significant practical implications for meditators:
http://web.stanford.edu/~msacchet/pdfs/16_vanLutterveld_NI_i...
I'm currently trying to get into meditation, and that "silencing the default-mode network" part is really really hard.
Wow, did you get this idea now, just by thinking about consequences of centering around one intention? Because it's not obvious and to some extent definitely true. Yes, there is a stage of integration where 'difficult stuff' comes up in the mind. In Culadasa's stages of concentration development it corresponds to stage 4 mostly (laid out in details in his Mind Illuminated book).
However:
- When you're doing it right, it's happening almost automatically, there's often pleasure of concentration that eases things significantly, and the relief that comes up... it's worth it. With time you almost yearn for such difficult things to come up from the depths, knowing the relief and completely new perspective that the integration will bring about.
- Saying that "I don't want to integrate the difficult parts" is a bit like "I don't want to be completely happy". Unifying the mind is like unifying the world - no conflict, completeness, content, everything you want and love is right there with you.
- Integrating the difficult parts is not just getting over them. Sometimes it results with ability to transform difficult relationships, to forgive, to reach deeper levels of communication with eg. difficult parents etc. What's mind changing is world changing.
With all that said there's so many examples of meditation gone wrong, of doing things that are counterproductive etc. - there definitely are less and more smart ways to do it. And hopefully the marriage of Buddhism and the Western thought will result in further advances.
I'm almost sure that neurofeedback will be of some help - we learn so much quicker if we have tight feedback loops, with immediate feedback it's almost like a game. Even in the paper you cite, the best results were achieved during the 'free play' phase, were one could play around interactively with the graph.
In the meantime I recommend Culadasa's method because it's very precise, driven by joy and the articulate, clear style expands to the whole community, which can be helpful when someone gets stuck.
>> Wow, did you get this idea now, just by thinking about consequences of centering around one intention?
Thanks, but not really, i already knew that meditation raises strong emotions that might need integration.
>> I recommend Culadasa's method because it's very precise , driven by joy
Thanks. That's a good recommendation. BTW, if i follow his method and stop at the right stage, i can fully proect myself from deep emotional work ? because it really doesn't fit my life currently.
From the website I am practicing mindfulness throughout the day since I have my Apple watch (through the breath app). I think mindfulness would be good for hackers. On physical tasks you could lift weights but on mental tasks your goal is probably reducing anxiety or frustration. Or preserving flow (Podmoro supposedly does this but I could never get into it).
On the other hand if I get a good flow going and I am uninterrupted I will probably forget to check HN and I will continually work until I do get stuck even if that happens.
Using self-discipline techniques help in the short term, but in the long term I find them harmful. Because after a while of dedication, I feel exhausted and kinda burnt-out.
It's true that working for the time you allocated removes guilt. It's true that setting aside a fixed amount of time for working makes you more efficient.
If I could only find a way to sustain this kind of movement. One thing I've seen working is listening to easy-listening music. After quieting down my brain, I have much more self-discipline and focus.
Whenever I'm in an impossible procrastinating mood (and I feel that this is what is: a mood) I put e.ggtimer.com to the minimum amount of time I really think I can put together. Usually by the timer is gone I have to reset it and keep working. If I'm really getting into a good place, I increase the time, if it seems I'm going to be done soon, I decrease it.
Reasonable expectations.
> Using self-discipline techniques help in the short term, but in the long term I find them harmful.
This seems a case of Stockdale's Paradox: http://ndoherty.com/stockdale-paradox/
I researched the topic but couldn't understand the connection with me finding self-discipline techniques harmful.
Should I not lose faith and try to find better ways to get my life in order?
Moreover, there's the: don't think about an elephant right now => you just thought of an elephant, "problem". That is, the more you've been thinking about the problem a certain way, trying to force yourself to think differently only reinforces the original line of thought, leading back to the same local minima.
Thus, IMO the more likely mechanism that walking away from a problem and coming back to it later leads to a better solution, is more that you get a better random restart, and you have time to forget the prior line of thought, so you're more likely to think differently / explore a different branch of the search tree.
I don't think it's much like a minima, because I can go home, run some errands, cook dinner, surf the internet, read, etc, but when I'd come back the next morning I'd be just as stuck as the day before. For me it wasn't until I explicitly tried to do nothing (i.e. wander, as opposed to distracting yourself with other tasks) that I made progress.
(of course this is just anecdotal experience – not trying to frame this as The Way but found it interesting that there's some research about it)
This doesn't explain the many times (at least in my case, for example) where a solution pops into your head before you "restart." In other words, your mind seems to be working on the problem even if you're not consciously working on it / haven't consciously restarted.
Secondly, when the solution pops, my next thought is frequently "why didn't I think of this earlier?", meaning that the solution is quite obvious in hindsight, meaning had I just approached the problem slightly differently in the beginning, I wouldn't have to search very deep. So the solution didn't pop into my conscious thought because I've been mulling it over subconsciously, but rather the intrusive thought forced the problem back into foreground, but with a slight twist, and that quickly lead me to come up with the solution on the spot.
For intrusive thoughts where that didn't happen, I simply don't remember.
TBF, I admit I'm using a lot of weasel words, but I think it's possible to make my hypothesis more rigorous. Then you can design an experiment to falsify it, but I'm too lazy, and I'll leave that to real scientists. :-P
Others have studied this, including John Cleese, as detailed in his lecture on Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EMj_CFPHYc
How can the Harvard Business Review publish this kind of hocum without flagging it as an advert?
This also develops the skill of forcing analogies, which helps with keeping an open mind.
The quality of the meals I'm sending out (plating and decoration wise) is nowhere near as good as it is on Mondays.
I need more chef's :-p
Don't make conclusions. Only ask questions and observe. This stuff cannot be explained. And it cannot be logically thought about. It must be seen and experienced.
Don't doubt what i have to say. Go check for yourself.