Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
henrikkarlsson.xyz
henrikkarlsson.xyz
Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.
I have to use this trick to help manage my ADHD. Of course, just actually starting for 5 minutes is a challenge in itself but while medicated at least I can. Giving myself a time limit as an easy out works wonders, and after 5 minutes I'm probably going to keep going.
His response was profound to me: “instead of you reading it how you are, try to understand why the author spent their life, time, and effort to learn that material and then convey it to you. What made them fascinated in it?”
By flipping the script… changed my world
I’ll have to meditate on this a bit more. Thanks for sharing!
What's your current worldview relating to this and the issues you were having with it?
To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.
I remember when I started taking ADHD meds and I was like “wow I can focus now” and proceeded to focus with all my might on the wrong thing.
Exactly. Once I got diagnosed, the doctor wanted to remove the SSRI's that had been treating the side effects and not the root cause... but that happened too quickly in my case. I had constant episodes.
After a few months, I had to go back to them while I was still learning about everything, how I had to change habits, what would work now, etc.
Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it.
Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different.
Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed.
There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down.
This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7.
My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me.
That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff.
My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse".
https://bookshop.org/p/books/learned-optimism-how-to-change-...
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-now-habit-a-strategic-progr...
This is a scarily common problem. For some reason, a lot of primary care doctors are jumping straight to very high doses of Adderall.
Most patients love the feeling at first. They think they're going to conquer the world and that they've become an entirely new person.
The euphoria never lasts, though. When tolerance erases the euphoria they start complaining that their medication "isn't working any more".
The good practitioners will actually titrate upward: Start with a low dose, then incrementally increase it on future visits.
I’ve repeated this to my kids to the point it’s a meme in our house. I find it’s a nice short circuit to “I have no motivation”, b/c “Great, do {thing} and you’ll find the motivation!”
I try not to second-screen when watching movies or TV, and I'm pretty good at it. I know it's a very common thing for people to do these days and it honestly kinda bugs me because at least for me, TV and movies are a shared experience, but video games, at least the ones that I play, are almost always solo experiences.
Anyway, I feel like I just diagnosed myself with ADHD in writing this comment.
Now instead of choosing to open our phones, we have to actively choose NOT to let that muscle memory spring into the action of unlocking the phone. Seems bad.
I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.
Five minutes after warming up I've changed, in the gym and a couple of sets in. I quit maybe 1/20 sessions, and it's shrunk more over the years since, but it was an easy way to fool my brain.
I'm guessing this is different because the main threshold is starting to do the thing. Once you've started it's much less mental effort to keep going and just do the full workout.
Inertia is a good mental model for attention in ADHD. I sometimes tell people that my attention is like a large truck. It can be hard to get it started and up to speed, but once it's up to speed it's hard to stop.
Spending 5 minutes on something is a way of forcing yourself to get started. Once you're up and running it's will be hard to break your attention. For that reason, it's important to choose carefully which things you deliberately spend attention on if you have ADHD.
[0]https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jdvGsEdrpEEjMBJG5oRaH?si=g...
I was with a group of a couple friends who loved A Thousand Plateaus - we would read bits of it allowed together and laugh and generally have a good time talking about it. Probably the best way to have approached it.
Also on the advice of one of these folks, I read just the intro to ATP and then went for a walk outside without my phone or anything and stared into the woods while that clusterfuck of a concept-tangle just bounced around in my head. Then I slept on it, and later we started doing the group readings. Especially together with Guattari, it's almost more of a hallucinogenic substance than it is a book, and approaching it from all sides with a light heart is somehow helpful. Deleuze really doesn't seem interested in objections in ATP, he just wants to throw another concept at you and see if that one sticks instead.
I went on a binge of Byung-Chul Han last year, reading "The Crisis of Narration", "In The Swarm", "Psychopolitics", and "The Burnout Society". Really enjoyed all of them, and given how dense it can be I set myself to read them at least twice which I'm just finishing, was on the lookout for what else to read from him and was thinking about "The Disappearance of Rituals" as the next one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Recept...
When I was very young it merely competed with Miracle on 34th Street. And then it was just fucking everywhere. I’m not sure I’m entirely over hating it for never being off the air. Even though it’s been 15-20 years since they stopped playing it every hour of the day.
Now, just like It's a Wonderful Life, it's considered one of the best movies ever made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption#Criti...
Groundhog Day is like this too. Although it was a "modest" box office success its critical reputation grew massively as the years went by. To the point that again it's consistently on best-ever movie lists.
"[12 years later] Ebert raised his original score for the film from three stars to a full four stars [saying] that he had underestimated the film"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)#Post-rele...
It's befitting that watching Groundhog Day again and again makes you like the movie more.
Btw I mentioned It's a Wonderful Life's copyright situation in my original post.
I'm arguing that repeated TV runs allowed audiences and critics to deeply ponder and appreciate these films. Sustained attention over time, which caused a re-evaluation of their artistic merit.
Also Sony India is posting older movies on YouTube. I don’t know if there are gems in the rough there but they don’t seem to attract a lot of viewers.
https://youtube.com/@sonypicturesindia-english?si=G20TZ6NnVk...
You basically have 2 chances:
1: the media hits you like a ton of bricks and enraptures the audience from the start
2: you watch it a few times (or in TVs case you catch a few episodes), think about it, ponder the lore for a bit, and get invested over time
Outside of that, media will blow by you and never leave a mark.
Saw "Saving Arizona" right after losing my girlfriend. Saw every problem they had as tragic instead of comedy. Didn't like the movie. Some relatively short time later. Saw it again. I was my favorite movie for years after.
"Did he die in the end? Was it a dream sequence?" But no, both the intention of the creators, and by far the most common interpretation from viewers, is that it's all literal.
I tried watching Groundhog Day just once, and couldn't make it though it because (I assumed) it had aged so terribly.
Your comment made me reevaluate this though. I assumed the main appeal of these gonna was just nostalgia, and I've missed a key window, but perhaps it's the repeat viewings and predictability that make these films comfort food.
There's a simpler explanation, which is that different people like different things.
In my mid 20s I saw Casablanca and was not impressed.
In my mid 50s I saw it again and cried until I trembled. The 20 something me didn't get what the 2 main characters were giving up. The 50 something me with life experience of loves lost by choice and circumstance had a very different reaction.
> Leading up to its release, the film was test screened with the public. These were described as "through the roof", and Glotzer said they were some of the best she had seen
> nominated for several Oscars in early 1995
> It went on to become the top rented film of that year
It got critical praise but was a flop at the theater. The home video market redeemed it (haha) with audiences. From the article:
"Despite its disappointing box-office returns, in what was then considered a risky move, Warner Home Video shipped 320,000 rental video copies throughout the United States in 1995. It went on to become the top rented film of that year. Positive recommendations, repeat customer viewings, and being well received by both male and female audiences were considered key to the film's rental success."
All 3 movies (It's a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, and The Shawshank Redemption) had critical praise upon their initial release. Groundhog Day was even a solid hit. But no one could've predicted what they became later.
Some will find the desert father John Cassian[0] interesting in this regard. He uses the analogy of a water mill for the mind. You cannot stop a water mill from turning - the water keeps flowing and keeps turning the grindstone - so all you can do is choose what is poured into the grindstone. If you fill it with high quality wheat, you will have high quality flour. If you fill it with or add to it darnel, you will produce something toxic.
You reap what you sow, and if you sow your mind and your attention with filth, filth will sprout and spread and metastasize. Cultivate the garden of your mind wisely. If the mind drifts, pull it back. Let the good crop choke out any weeds in your mind.
This is why there is an ethics of thought and imagination. It is wrong to intentionally think certain things. Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. Indulging or pursuing bad thoughts corrupts you from the inside, and they prepare the ground for bad actions down the line.
(N.b., there was a link trending on HN a few years ago about a book of selections from Cassian's "Conferences" [1]. I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately.)
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
.
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
In my experience, the best approach is to maintain a neutral aspect and just let those negative or unhelpful thoughts go. Wave goodbye and allow your mind to naturally drift to something else.
- often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu
> 'And here they say that a person consists of desires. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
"As we think, so we become."
- Buddha
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
.
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
> on the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land.
> on the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee.
> my work helps me pay close attention like this. how can i experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku?
It's not a lack of mechanisms. It's buggy wiring in the brain where at some point in time t some substance or lack thereof forced the brain to reroute blood flow through "paths" that were less impacted by the bug.
if you can increase the blood flow through the originally responsible paths, you can recover any buried mechanism.
people with ADHD and stuff who had only slightly lower blood and or oxygen flow in the PFC, improve the negative symptoms of their ADHD as soon as normal levels of blood/oxygen flows through the PFC. this is true for any area in the brain*.
I'm sure there's studies on post-ischemic recovery that confirm all this.
Identifying entire paths through brain areas is no simple task, of course. But comparing "issues" to normal and extreme behaviors usually draws a more or less unambiguous graph.
*better blood flow and better oxygen supply usually mean better performance for any organism (or part of it)
I don't think there is any solid basis to say this.
There has been at least one study that linked greater differences between right and left prefrontal cortex blood flow, favoring the right, to greater ADHD symptoms.
> "higher levels of right relative rCBF and lower levels of left relative rCBF were predictors of higher severity of clinical symptom expression" [0]
But developmental differences are pervasively correlated, without contributing to common phenomena, even more so for proximate phenomena, because developmental signals have widespread cascades of impact throughout the body.
This makes the bar for causal claims very high.
There could be no functional correlation, just developmental correlation.
The difference could be causally reverse. I.e. differences in lateral PFC development generated the differences in circulatory recruitment, not the other way around.
Or there is some functional-physical causation, but ADHD is correlated with many other brain differences too. So is it significant?
Then, even if it were significant, Would reducing/increasing blood flow between the post-development sides really have net benefit now? Seems unlikely that any decrease anywhere, even with increases elsewhere, post-development, would be uniformly helpful.
And finally, increasing blood flow is completely different from a re-balance.
Increasing blood flow, or simply increasing oxygen in available air, improves the function of almost everything in the body. Everyone will benefit from more oxygen to the prefrontal cortex, up to a point.
> I don't think there is any solid basis to say this.
The history of eugenic programs as well the blocking of male/female sex hormones to inhibit sexual development or for transitional purposes should reveal a solid basis. Brain/body are capable of recovering close to a genetic baseline, at least up to some age.
> developmental signals have widespread cascades of impact throughout the body.
I read too little about that in edge cases, but in brains and bodies that developed normally, these changes are ever so slight that, as is commonly known, radically changing diets and lifestyle can recover the genetic baseline. Physical and psychological manifestations and changes are bio-chemistry and neuro-chemistry, and I do mean the one-to-one match as much as the correlates.
Bad posture ruins the kinetic chain as much as it impedes systemic metabolic logistics (blood circulation, lymphatic transport, ...). And if it happens too early and goes on for too long, the developmental differences to the genetic baseline become pervasive.
But bad posture isn't ADHD or anxiety or temporal lobe epilepsy, for example, for which people with ADHD have a higher susceptibility for, all due to Neuroplasticity aka neural adaptation.
But the intensity of any phenomenon depends to at least some more than "just barely" (3-5%) relevant degree on lifestyle and the psycho-social environment. Psychological traits are more nurture-dependent than physical traits but physical traits (can) have a massive influence on psychology, a lot of which can be attributed to how the environment perceives qualities and behaviors. For people with different sub-types of ADHD, this can either mean worlds-apart to their genetic baseline or just slightly off enough to be a tad bit bitter.
This was a lot but here's what I'm getting at:
> Seems unlikely that any decrease anywhere, even with increases elsewhere, post-development, would be uniformly helpful.
Any increase towards baseline is beneficial throughout the entire affected graph of neural structures, as well as proximate ones.
I assume there are fMRI studies on specific cognitive performance during ischemia and post-ischemia. Their findings should confirm that recovery from damage due to long-term hypodensity and decreased perfusion but that is also quite normal as any recovery from injury comes with a restoration of functionality.
The reason I am mentioning ischemia specifically is that brains don't stop working just because some part suffers from a reduction in blood flow. But ischemia can last for a very long time, especially if undiagnosed.
Developmental signals and ischemia are, of course, two entirely different things but the connection I see is the part where the brain reroutes neural signals simply because it's an innate mechanism, not an adaptive response. [citation needed, but I believe I read something about earlier this year. I am not uncertain.]
While ADHD is "a genetic thing", it can also be the consequence of lifestyle and "psycho-social" environment aka nurture, without any part of the essential genetic component. But the intensity or severity of positive and or negative ADHD symptoms is mostly the result of lifestyle and nurture, for which the impact(s) of drugs, diet and environment are proof.
So while it's absolutely true, that
> developmental signals have widespread cascades of impact throughout the body,
there is definitely
> functional-physical causation,
that is significant.
> The history of eugenic programs as well the blocking of male/female sex hormones to inhibit sexual development or for transitional purposes should reveal a solid basis. Brain/body are capable of recovering close to a genetic baseline, at least up to some age.
Showing that some effect can result from some cause is not sufficient to show that it does result from that cause. To be honest I don't even follow exactly what claim you're making here. But even if you show that e.g. certain mental problems can result from reduced or increased blood flow to certain areas of the brain, it does not follow that that is always the cause.
You're resting big confident assertions on "I read this somewhere, go look it up." In fact biology and mentation are complex and we don't have the whole picture. It's easy to put together whatever "just so story" you want by rearranging fragments of evidence, but it doesn't make it true.
Definitely something I should have cleared up: it's utterly useless to claim or proof that some mental problem is caused by some reduction in bloodflow in some part of the brain, but I believe it is beneficial to know, if you are afflicted, that it's an area worth investigating, rather than assuming that your personality, your brain or your mind lack innate, exogenous mechanisms to deal with anxiety, depression and or other stuff.
> You're resting big confident assertions on "I read this somewhere, go look it up." In fact biology and mentation are complex and we don't have the whole picture. It's easy to put together whatever "just so story" you want by rearranging fragments of evidence, but it doesn't make it true.
Science philosophy starts somewhere. I'm sure at least some of it started in garages =]
This cannot possibly be assumed when talking about physiology already known to be atypical.
And specifically, assuming that reducing blood flow one place, and increasing it in another place, post-development, will predictably be a benefit is ... I have no words.
Your whole comment is full of this type of worse than weak reasoning.
should have made it clear that I did not mean decreasing in one place while increasing in another but increasing throughout all proximate areas.
> Your whole comment is full of this type of worse than weak reasoning.
Agreed, should have tagged it #sciencephilosophy or something ... I was thinking out loud. But there is merit. I am not uncertain any studies can prove me entirely wrong. But I understand why such a discussion might be a waste of time.
> This cannot possibly be assumed when talking about physiology already known to be atypical.
I don't understand. If reduced bloodflow is known to be the cause for atypical physiology, then the opposite is certainly also known.
I understand that -q doesn't necessarily mean p, but in the case of reduced bloodflow we have proof, don't we?
There's a little lump in my lag that causes reduced bloodflow if I don't do certain exercises or movements, which causes a bit of lag. If I do the movements for a bit or several times per hour, no lag. That is true for a considerable percentage of the population.
But it isn't. Correlation isn't causation. There are so many possible relationships between somewhat correlated things like this.
The difference in blood flow could reflect less need due to upstream ADHD impact bottlenecking something else. Adding more oxygen there would be no different than the benefits of more oxygen anywhere.
That is just one of dozens of alternatives to your - straight from circumstance to explanation - leap of imagination.
There is a reason why we value science, despite it being an unnatural and difficult way to think for many. And often frustratingly slow. (Given science is a new idea, we have no specific evolutionary support for it.)
In contrast, "Plausible" reasoning is trivially easy, but is a disaster in terms of reliability. (Not being pejorative, but the other word for argument by seeming plausibility is "bullshit". We all have done it. For some people it's habitual, even motivated.)
I don't understand. If it IS the cause, hypothetically speaking (or in one of the rare cases when it is confirmed to be the cause), then it's not correlated; even though in--let's say, all--other cases, it is just a correlation.
> Adding more oxygen there would be no different than the benefits of more oxygen anywhere.
More blood flow and oxygen in my leg does add to my overall performance, if my leg had reduced blood flow and oxygen supply before the increase but if my biceps is suffering from low blood flow and low oxygen, increasing both right in biceps increases it's functionality and performance to a much larger degree.
> could reflect less need due to upstream ADHD impact bottlenecking something else
That is rerouting and reinforcement played out over time. You probably heard how some left-handed kids, to this day, are forced to--or at least rewarded for doing it--learn to write with their right hands. What happens in the brain, given that their genetic baseline dexterity is much better in their right hand and their brain thus prefers using it for writing and other fine work? [I should absolutely cite research here asap. I'm still treating these conversations like a noob, even though I could support arguments using good old Baconic ways. Forgive me.]
> That is just one of dozens of alternatives to your - straight from circumstance to explanation - leap of imagination.
Most certainly. I always loved it when Dr. House had to test one theory after the other. He and his team didn't fall back on imagination of course but often enough, the connections between symptoms, information and established causes and correlation required logical abduction.
> Not being pejorative, but the other word for argument by seeming plausibility is "bullshit".
I'm not sensitive and I like being wrong more than I like being right.
"We" need more fMRIs, though.
On a side note: Your comments did stimulate a desire to properly formulate a hypothesis based on tangential evidence from relevant (fMRI) studies. But there is no one to hold me accountable and once I'm done with PreCalc, I will move on to Biology and Chemistry basics, because I hope that the increased blood flow I achieved in the area around my parietal and temporal lobe will finally let me haul my broke ass back to university ... after, well ... too many years. (I could do the whole "fake it till you make it" being a grown up thing and JUST GET A JOB - but I don't like fake shit and once you get something to do what you want it to do, all the effort was worth it and there is ZERO reason to "adapt")
That is circular reasoning, the way you are using it. Logically “if” makes sense. But when you go from “if” to effectively treating something as if "it IS" true or likely to be true, that’s jumping into an almost certain deep deadend pit with both feet, and then not looking up.
If you have a way to test a possibility, then do it. Otherwise, don’t get trapped in it.
Moving forward requires we all put currently untestable ideas on a shelf and continue undelayed. Preserve the potential usefulness of the idea, without turning it into a trap. Let it accumulate with many others. Where it is available to be reactivated, edited, or contribute to better ideas down the road.
The less stuck we get on one idea, the more complementary ideas and triangulating perspectives we accumulate.
So don’t let yourself get entangled in single possibilities.
Hone your thinking for long term effectiveness. Let shiney things go quickly.
(As the wise but brutal poets say when they have written a wonderful passage they treasure, if doesn’t quite fit the current work: “kill your darlings!!”)
The strength to do this avoids self-created brakes, and will compound your progress in life.
—-
I have ADHD. It’s not ever going to be corrected. ADHD permeates the brain.
It could not be removed or negated, without destroying my strengths and who I am.
I will always be vulnerable to inward and downward spirals.
But learning to cope, creating fallback habits and strategies, and developing support, all help tremendously.
I relate to wanting to solve things, and solving myself is always an attractive problem. The number of systems I have optimistically created to “fix” my own unhelpful patterns is endless. Most don’t work, but I don’t stop (or stop enjoying) trying.
But the best way I have found to improve is to work on things that are not about me, and let my efforts to make more progress on something else lead my progress on myself. The signal is much clearer. Internal progress and external productivity are much more likely to be real.
That provides the best and most reliable feedback. Reality outside myself.
That doesn’t mean going into an area related to oneself is wrong. But when the focus is on fixing yourself, instead of making progress for others, "feedback" becomes a source of subjective spirals, inviting mazes of wishful thinking. Quicksand for the ADHD.
Don't focus on fixing yourself, harness your strengths to do something productive, and you will naturally accumulate the personal tools that help you do that and more, along the way.
Your naturally unrelenting curiosity, care, interest and motivation are advantages many normies don't have. You are an idea factory and hopelessly creative. You have more wood behind your arrow. But to learn to shoot far and straight, to achieve something in the real world, you must seek and aim for targets well beyond yourself and your bow and arrow.
That will guide you to unique areas of self-improvement that fit you and your quests alone. And not waste any of your time on the many ways we genuinely appreciate others for being better than us.
Those are just my thoughts in the moment. You know yourself better than anyone else.
> That provides the best and most reliable feedback. Reality outside myself.
Guess you were lucky to find your awakening consciousness in a reality that is worth mentioning. I wasn't. My family is worth being kept a secret. But that epiphany came a little too late.
> I have ADHD. It’s not ever going to be corrected. ADHD permeates the brain.
There once was a guy who could only kick a ball with his right foot. It was never corrected. But he learned to kick the ball with his left foot anyway. He became one of the best. ( I might have switched right and left, but given the context, it barely matters. ) He became one of the best, ... not the least because a certain kind of growth hormones helped him a) fulfill certain conventionally established standards that were worked out by a community of 'economists' ( whatever the fuck that is ) and medical professional and b) outgrow developmental signals.
So, ... you are not "just" ADHD, ... you are above your genetic ADHD baseline. Meaning, despite the pure influence of your developmental signals, you have benefited from either your psycho-social environment alone or and or a chemical substance that entered your metabolisms just in time ...
My ADHD brain is lacking non-essential and essential amino acids/minerals,I think that comment stated the brain then rewires to compensate for the lack of nutrients. Thats what I’m taking.
I’ve been taking Spirulina as my booster to help fill in my nutrition deficiencies and then I’ve been feeling better leading me to get past the anxiety and rumination.
Richard Feynman wrote about it, that you can be hypothesized and want to do something and know you can, but you don’t or just can’t.
The article is great. One thing I’ve been doing is trying to make Arts and Crafts again.
I’m starting to incorporate Ai and my family to show what we can do. Then it’s starting to lead to everyone documenting their days with voice notes and more conversations
> Study - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7995246/ > Study - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6309508/
I have some others that I'm reading that I can also share if you are interested.
This is the spirulina I have been taking: https://www.amazon.com/Premium-Chlorella-Spirulina-250-Table...
I started taking it over 8 years ago, took a break for a year, and then restarted by taking 2 doses and another later in the afternoon if I ran earlier. I can sweat heavily and will sweat out amino acids.
Meditation, if practiced at least adequately intense, creates a time interval that is entirely different to anything an ADHD mind is accustomed to. Meditation is not a dream, not the Default Mode Network under control. You are awake, "lucid", not rooted in your imagination or some other cognitive style/process resulting from "hyperlight association" or similar common phenomena.
fMRI studies in general but definitely those related to cognitive performance during and after recovery from ischemia.
Also: studies on sexual development, the inhibition of sex hormone metabolisms.
And I'm quite certain that some of Michael Levin's research could provide some bits, too. But I am not sure what keywords I would start with.
You went up from your baseline.
> Most of the improvements could be adequately explained by the hedonic treadmill. I could suffer longer.
That's chemistry in body and brain. There were changes.
Can be mitigated via drugs and increasing thresholds with, as you did, training, which results in decreased stress hormone levels from lower forms of physiological and psychological stress, better lactate metabolisms (not sure it's an actual metabolism, but better fitness results in higher storage capacities for lactate and quicker recovery), etc.
And endurance literally means your body and brain can suffer/sustain higher levels of stress due to fatigue and damage because the mechanisms causing "overflow" and "breakdown", "total collapse", even if it's just for the sake of reducing subsequent damage, are balanced by their biochemical counterparts and, again, higher storage capacities for pretty much everything body and brain produce while generating, transforming, exerting energy and all the exhaust ...
First on a positive note, the example about attention on sex and arousal feeding back on itself and deepening the experience is well described and easy to relate to. But I think the "deepening an experience through attention" phenomenon applies in so many other domains as well - Sustained attention on a film or video game world, deep uninterrupted creative work for many hours, etc. It's a wonderful positive feedback loop.
It is somewhat similar to how when sitting in silence outside for a long period of time you begin to become aware of more and more subtle details of the experience that weren't immediately accessible. Almost like you're turning up the sensitivity knob on things.
Unfortunately as the author describes, the attention feedback loop can become unpleasant and even torturous when it is directed on negative sensations. For me it has been various things at different stages of my life - muscle tension, breathing, eye floaters in my vision, etc. The same process plays out - Sustained fixation of attention on the sensation increases your sensitivity to it, meaning you notice it more and it bothers you more, meaning you pay more attention to it, and it gets out of control.
The difficulty I experience is that this attention is unwanted and yet I feel my mind focus on it almost automatically. Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them, which I'm still working on.
But it is helpful to see the positive flip side of the coin too - Our minds are capable of deep focus and deep attention, which can increase sensitivity and let you see increasingly subtle details of experience, making you a better appreciator of art and life, a better creator, a better listener and friend, etc.
That sounds a lot like meditation.
There's something deeply connecting (and often very moving) about listening to a record and having your attention forced on it. So much that I usually start by thinking "I hope they turn it up," and by the end, when it has your sole focus, it's almost deafening.
* Turn off all the lights
* Lay flat on my back in bed
* Put on headphones
* Listen to a few songs and give them my full attention
It very much helps me unwind after a long day. But it's also astonishing how much more I hear in the music itself when I do this. I remember the first time I listened to Portishead's "Wandering Stars" this way, I could immediately hear the slight push and pull where the organ riff isn't exactly on beat. I'd never noticed that (consciously) before.
Virtually all people on the planet perceive the world with their eyes but push the other four physical senses into the background. There's good reason for this reality, of course: of our five physical senses, the eyes are capable of providing the richest information. And yet, most discussion around increasing perceptual abilities are vision-centric. Learning to perceive with your ears, smell, touch, and taste in addition to eyes should also be learned.
Similarly, it places you in a room, turns off the lights, and you listen to an audio performance. Though it is more soundscapes interlaced musically than the Pitch Black Playback's focus on albums.
But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?
and to be honest, for me, turning great music into a mental movie seems to be almost missing the point, I prefer experiencing it as music
Tangentially trying to imagine not being able to visualize mental images is really hard.
In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
In Korean 신경 쓰다 literally means "to use nerves." The idea of investing mental energy into something
In Finnish, you fasten or attach attention (kiinnittaa huomiota)
In French (correct me if I’m wrong) you “make” attention, « faire attention ». Like there’s unlimited amount of attention and you can always make more.
Edit: "to pay attention" is literally "Aufmerksamkeit zollen"
Sure, just like you can't separate "pay attention". Both are idiomatic. But you can separate "aufpassen" into "Paß auf". (For the benefit of non-German lurkers, "Paß auf" is a command to pay attention.)
The literal analogue to "pass on" or "fit on" is "anpassen"; "auf" generally means "over", "on/to the top of".
Which phrase would this be?
But ”have” attention exists for both of those as well. ”Ha fokus”.
I can get psychdelic vision at will being sober (OEVs), mainly looking at grass (with other images it's more difficult). It's produced by sustained attention. It doesn't come with any other psychdelic effect, so it doesn't seem too valuable.
I agree I would have loved more of a hard / concrete definition oriented approach to the whole piece but everything they were saying really resonated at least in terms of my personal experience. I haven't ever come across a writer focusing on this. It was really unexpected / refreshing. It's already is reshaping little moments in my day like hugging my son just now. Very unexpected transcendental value for an HN skim while ignoring a boring zoom standup. The truth is out there.
Personal computing and the growth of the internet are an example of something looping. They reinforce and amplify each other's impact and value.
What it means is understood by looking at its converse - panic attack. Wherein, anxiety stirs some negative thoughts which stirs even more anxiety which stirs more negativity and so on until the system seizes - or that has been my understanding of it.
Here, positivity feeds joy which feeds more positivity etc..
You could drop acid and take a walk on the beach and see the ocean that way and feel those things and cry about it. You could get stoned and put on your favorite album and slip into a vivid daydream, directed by the music as a soundtrack.
I agree with the author that intense focus can make something more mundane feel special, like intensely focusing on the act of eating an apple, but being moved by walking on a beautiful beach in the evening seems almost expected?
I did do mushrooms frequently at a young age (like a couple times a month from 16-18) so maybe that tweaked something in my brain, but I feel like I slip in "Jhana" all the goddamn time haha. I was tearing up staring at the trees blowing outside while waiting for my dentist a couple days ago.
I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it.
In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a spiral of reinforcing thoughts that increase my anxiety.
Paying attention to the feeling, not the thoughts, lets me break the spiral and attempt to free my thoughts. The feeling can linger for some time though, given its a chemical process to flush it all out from the body. During that period it's more likely I might end up thinking about the topic again so it's precarious still.
Which definitely doesn't help the anxiety.
> The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator.
She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana."
It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry.
Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong.
> I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities
You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism.
My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.
Our behaviors are determined by habit far more than anything, willpower is seldom enough to result in behavioral patterns over time. Even things like the career we chose become habit; pivoting from technology to horticulture will not happen if you cannot change your daily habits to go from thinking about technology to thinking about horticulture.
Sports understand overtraining. It even means much the same as in AI circles.
The trick isn’t avoiding measurement. The trick is staggering out use if any measurement. Today we are working on speed drills. Tomorrow we work on form. Ans in a couple days we work on endurance. Nobody but software developers are trying to work on their sprinting every goddamned day.
We are the insane ones.
I think there's a standard and clearer explanation of what the author describes. A rich, satisfying experience comes from a melding of "goal focus" and expanded awareness. IE, Pleasure in some complex process involves reaching for a set "foreground" goal while keeping an awareness of entire "background" situation that prevents from fixating on the immediate goal. You can qualities of rhythm, self-similarity and etc into this "recipe" to describe rich satisfying experiences of multiple sorts (Art, sex, dance, conversation, [insert your favorite thing]).
The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly goes into this stuff in long but still fuzzy detail.
Are there electrical cycles in the brain (and thus feedback and probably spiking) or does the charge distribute through the brain in a DAG directed acyclic graph?
Are there stable neural correlates to ear worm or rumination or flow states, for example?
Is sustained charge necessary for data persistence in the brain, as it is for RAM?
The brain is observed to be cyclical with feedback cycles. (Biological neural networks thus cannot be sufficiently modeled with DAGs. RNN Recurrent Neural Networks do model cycles.)
The brain is actually its own generator.
The oscillations of the brain are measurable with e.g. EEG; and are distinct from the heart, which is measurable or imaged with ECG, for example.
Long term memory depends upon synaptic plasticity, which does not require continued electrical charge, though short term memory does depend upon neuronal oscillations which depend upon continued electrical charge.
The DMN Default Mode Network in the brain is observed to be less active in so-called flow states; and more active during daydreaming, ear worm, rumination, and self-reflection. The DMN is probably feed-forward too.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/
There are others.
I can’t tell if Henrik is okay and just a very vivid writer, or… not.
There's something of a neural "fire together, wire together" explanation for this general phenomenon, no?
Jhanas (when in the positive direction), and dukkha or suffering (as caused by tanha or tension) when applied in the negative direction.
I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.
Which I think is related to what you’re saying. Looking more closely at something and paying more attention can both unveil what’s “beneath the surface”.
Instead of dismissing them or getting super annoyed (which still does happen, not going to lie), I ask myself the question “what do they know or not know that is making them say that? Why are they thinking about it this way?”
The answers aren’t always satisfying and a lot of the time they really are just stupid/annoying questions or ideas, but approaching it with curiosity means that finding out at least satisfies that curiosity and is its own mini reward
The real benefit though is that it’s simply made me a better listener and in turn a better communicator
Great approach.
One of my favorite things to do when I'm answering or asking a question is always adding "what am I missing?" Because sometimes I'm missing something and it never hurts to ask.
Early on in my career, I thought a lot of technical topics wouldn’t be interesting. Especially things that aren’t new.
Yet, when one gets down into it, mundane things end up being quite interesting. Even unit testing!
Surely this principle has limits!
It’s kind of uplifting in a way. The only depressing part is that one life isn’t nearly enough time to go through it all.
It's like being a kid again and finding fascinating new facts around every corner.
Others don't chase the high at all, but remember the state of mind and simply tune their brains to respond with said high on command whenever the chemistry in the brain fulfills the conditions, which can happen without taking the drug at all.
I don't see a loop there; I see different levels of awareness, consciousness and needs.
It's also what I think when I hear Hofstadter or (high-)functioning people talking about being "strange loops". ... use some of your opportunities, peace of mind and resources to sue people (you can probably come up with entire lists...) and the "strange loop" will break immediately.
Some people edge for days, others had to use various toys and stimuli before getting off since youth.
High school tier literature.
From the daydream that is described thereafter, “guided hallucination” would seem more fitting.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, just that what is being described is different from meditation.
Sustaining the attention on an art piece unlocks things that you missed the first time due to having an untrained eye, much like reading a good book.
I noticed this as well. One time many many years ago, I was in grad school and doing research until later in the evening, and deliberately delayed dinner until I got home. I was anticipating a nice meal and decided to do some house cleaning and some misc chores. Knowing I had the meal "on the other side" made me do the chores with gusto and a certain "sharpness" that I usually didn't have.
Think about the world you see and live in. Someone created the monitor you're looking at that you're reading my comment. Someone created the keyboard you're working on. Someone created the machines to manufacture these things. And so on.
It started with a concept, an idea. It didn't just appear. We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have. This applies to everything. What our decisions are. Should I eat McDonalds today or have fish and salad?
We are, in a sense, wizards in this world. We create what we focus our mind on. Where we direct our focus and our intent we can see desired outcome. If your desire is to make a billion dollars, no one is stopping you. You are the only obstacle.
What I'm saying won't resonate with a lot of people, but in my experience, this message isn't for everyone. I'm a software engineer who has learned to appreciate the spiritual world as much as I appreciate the science. The two can live in harmony (as it used to, read about Tesla and Newton's metaphysical works -- they were manifestors as well).
This was a little all over the place, but it's meant to be a sampler platter of metaphysical ideas.
Do thoughts exist in an ethereal world, or are they just arrangements of chemicals and charges in the brain? I've never seen "ether," and nobody's ever found a structure in the human body that interfaces with it. There are no structures causally implicated in quantum wave function collapse, either—the microtubule hypothesis is quite pseudoscientific, I'm afraid. "Do I have McDonalds today, or fish and salad" is a decision made at the cellular level, not the subatomic.
This feels like a very disenchanted worldview, but the missing mystery you're reaching for is phenomenology, not idealistic metaphysics. The evanescent world of thought encoded within the chemicals and charges of our brain has its own self-referential structure which pays dividends to direct experiential analysis, which this article does engage in.
Incidentally, metaphysics is a very broad branch of philosophy which encompasses both materialist and idealist conceptions of the world. You're talking specifically about manifestation/"the law of attraction," which was originally associated with the New Thought religious movement, although it's percolated out into broader pop culture through books like The Secret.
The words I'm using are the best I currently have to describe ideas that have always existed. It's not like a new messiah or philosopher came about with this novelty. It's something innate to all who possess the creative mind. And this is the root of maybe what I'm talking about (I'm still a student to all of this); every human possesses the ability to create.
Is it chemical? Is it God? Is it Tinkerbell's magical dandruff sprinkling into my head? Maybe it's both chemical and God. Maybe all of the above. How it happens is still up for debate, sure. But let me segue for a moment.
If you follow the progress of AI (I'm assuming you must), there is an ongoing debate of AGI/Superintelligence. OpenAI, Google, et al are promising their abilities to invent new medicine or invent some new art form. They will be novelty generators. I feel quite skeptical of this.
Right now, LLMs are incapable of novelty -- ie, it can only compose existing ideas, it cannot invent some new genre of music or new style of art. If it appears new it's only because that's what it was taught and it's more remixing. And sure, there's argument to be made that remixing is a form of creativity. However, it is not the decider of what is creative or not. The human on the other end prompting it makes that decision. THAT is an act of creativity.
Again, arguments to be made that if all it takes is an observer and a set of criteria then that must mean the AI agent we designed to generate and select images for some marketing campaign must be sentient right?
Maybe. Maybe not. As far as I know, these models do not have an internal motivation. They don't spend time replying to other people on forums with their perspective for.. who knows what reason. And if they do, it's because they have a programmed directive to do so.
The human is the one with an internal universe that span the colorful spectrum of experiences that is referred to as "qualia". Our experiences shape us and the world that we know. Our decisions are based on these experiences. Of course, I'm not deluded that the reality of the world we live in doesn't have have constraints: hunger, loneliness, desire, etc. We needed primal instincts to survive.
But once those needs are met, who are you now? Just a series of chemical reactions? Repeating that survival loop? This is where the ethereal comes in.
> I've never seen "ether," and nobody's ever found a structure in the human body that interfaces with it.
Many humans have been interfacing with the "ether" for thousands of years. You interface with it when you practice creativity. Many musicians talk of how sometimes a song just appears to them. I'm sure you'll find ways of explaining this way, but in my opinion, there's a deeper mechanism that we're unaware of or aren't ready to know yet.
TL;DR - practice creativity.
Self-help books about manifestation tend to nebulously describe the "law of attraction" as a principle that has always existed and which great people throughout history have understood, but the movement associated with it is a modern phenomenon. The Wikipedia page "Law of attraction (New Thought)" [1] is a good starting point, if you're curious.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_attraction_(New_Thought...
> And if they do, it's because they have a programmed directive to do so.
Are we not programmed? Our brains were developed through evolution, not engineering, but we still eat when we are hungry. That's a directive that was embedded in us during the process of our development. Why should creativity have a supernatural component when the source of our behaviour, evolution, is anything but?
> The human is the one with an internal universe that span the colorful spectrum of experiences that is referred to as "qualia".
We certainly feel as if they are colourful, but we would, wouldn't we? They have to be, to fulfil their evolutionary purposes. Fear compels us to run and hide. If it didn't feel overwhelming and powerful, it wouldn't work. And if it didn't feel unique, then it would be redundant. Imagine if lust felt like fear: we would either flee reproduction or embrace danger.
Qualia are the abstractions of our senses. They feel present and vivid because they are the fabric of experience, but that doesn't imply anything beyond the physical. If we created an intelligent robot and programmed it to be compelled to flee when it detected danger, how do you think it would describe the experience of detecting danger and feeling its mind transform into a mode that compelled it to flee, that made staying still seem unbearable? Powerful, ineffable, invigorating, unpleasant? It would probably sound something like a person describing fear.
> Many musicians talk of how sometimes a song just appears to them.
Sure, but that's not magic. It's just an idea moving from the unconscious parts of the brain to the conscious. Why shouldn't the "deeper mechanism" simply be the parts of our minds that we are not consciously aware of?
Sure, subconsciousness. No need to invent the whole extra magical worlds.
Concentration causes your perception to penetrate things. What you observe dissolves, its former appearance a mere veil, parted, to reveal another appearance. And then that veil is parted. And so on.
The process could be described as a penetrating, blooming or revealing.