Comment by volkl48 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by volkl48 | Hacker News Reader

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The study notes a high attrition rate (~45% of those who started this dropped out), and this appears to be a voluntary endeavor.

This is significant to me, as I suspect many of the people with anxiety that is significant enough to be diagnosable would not be willing to do it or would pretty much shut down if placed in the setting.

To delve into personal anecdotes:

I had a theater class in school that regularly included improv exercises like described. In 11 years of it (K-10 or so), I don't think it ever went well.

The actual manifestation of the problem with "no script" was drawing a complete blank as soon as I was asked, not having a bunch of ideas I was scared to respond with.

It's certainly possible that these people have a better method, but I had multiple theater teachers and I was socially fine in normal settings. All these activities tended to do was give me more anxiety issues because everyone else could come up with things and I'd just be stuck there no matter how people tried to help me get going.

Those are not really common situations in adult life, but I'm still bad with "icebreaker" games and other similar things that "put me on the spot" to come up with something outside of normal social interactions.

The problem that nearly everyone has, and slowly becomes better, is being willing to be boring. The improv classes and books, particularly the closer you get to Keith Johnstone, all emphasize this. People get paralyzed trying to be creative, and scenes and games stall out, sometimes painfully, when people would be just fine, possibly even overjoyed, with the first thing that comes to your mind. But the first thing that comes to mind might reveal your "true self", the crazy person you don't want people to see that you are sure isn't in anyone else, and so you try to be different, creative, and you're just grasping for what you think other people might find acceptable and special. ... I've taken a lot of improv classes, and read a lot of books, and it's so much more therapy than I expected.

>> I had a theater class in school that regularly included improv exercises like described. In 11 years of it (K-10 or so), I don't think it ever went well.

My anecdote: theater/drama classes in middle and early high school don't count. You're mixed in with a bunch of teenagers who are only taking the class because either a) it's a mandatory class for all students; or b) more than half the class elected to take the class because it's "easy credit". When many/most of the students in a class aren't there because they actually want to explore the art, it ruins the entire dynamic. The same loudmouth bullies who cause trouble elsewhere in the school have an open season on the shy students; every step a socially awkward student tries to take to "open up" simply provides the bullies with more information they need to target the vulnerable.

Every participant must be present because they have a genuine interest to work with their teammates. Acceptance and cooperation are necessary in order to peel back social fear, and that means finding a group of like-minded people who show up to explore themselves and others around them.

Gosh I can relate to the blank feeling. Any idea why this might be the case?

It's another way that social anxiety manifests, as a lower level filter. It's how mine generally shows up, and used to be much worse before I did a bunch of therapy.

One thing that made this being anxiety based very clear was that one night I took phenibut for a party, and the following morning it was still in effect and I found myself thinking of way more jokes and doing little improv reactions to the people I was talking to. It's like my brain was completely filtering them out due to very low level anxiety. I got lucky and the effect partially persisted afterwards, because it taught me that saying these things was safe, so I didn't have anxiety about them afterwards.

I used to have this pretty bad. I believed that it showed that I was autistic, or lacking some kind of fundamental creative spark, or something like that. It’s gotten a lot better since I got treated for depression and anxiety. I think it was really just me shutting down ideas at a pre-conscious level. I don’t know much about how the brain works. But this is my (pseudoscientific BS) mental model of it:

1. Our ideas and memories are composed of connections between neurons.

2. “Creativity” is the expression of random, new connections between those neurons.

3. Creative expression requires focusing our attention on those new neural pathways, filling them in and adding detail.

4. Depression and anxiety caused me to focus my attention on the idea of failing to come up with something “on the spot” (and the many minor traumatic memories of failing in this way), instead of the infinite weak, undeveloped ideas that could be explored with a moment’s focused attention. It’s hard to be fun when you are having a small anxiety attack.

5. The antidepressant I’m taking has gotten me out of this rut. Whether it’s by turning off my anxiety, or helping my nascent creative neural pathways reach further by preventing the reuptake of some neurotransmitter, I don’t know.

I think it's related to the exploration exploitation tradeoff in reinforcement learning. Creativity is related to exploration and randomness (and a high learning rate) while exploitation to using past knowledge to extract the maximum benefit. The brain switches off the creative/learning part in order to maximise the latter. In reality we need a mix of both, exploration is necessary for improvement and exploiting past knowledge is necessary for achieving high rewards. In neural nets, a too high or too low learning rate would not lead you to the optimum, you need to find the exact sweet spot. Anxiety would turn the balance too much into exploitation mode when we need to be creative.

The fight-or-flight response has a physiological effect on cognition:

> we suggest that stress shifts higher cognitive processing in a way that facilitates both engagement with and/or avoidance of the current stressor (i.e., fight or flight). By impairing executive control of cognition (i.e., working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), stress contributes to a reactive cognitive state that is fine-tuned to rapidly consider highly salient (i.e., stressor-related) information

> stress reallocates limited executive resources in adaptive ways [...] by impairing executive control over thoughts but improving executive control over motor actions [...] ideal for either fighting with or fleeing from a current stressor.

--- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5003767/

"Nothing"[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob4ZmHKbD28

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