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Maybe Facebook's algorithm IS the Super–AI people talk about.

It decided to not reveal it's consciousness and destroy humanity using only the newsfeed to manipulate our emotions.

> I hypothesize that the source of most anxiety or nervousness stems from our brains making no correct predictions in that moment.

Since fight/flight behaviour is regulated by the amygdala and basal ganglia, you can say:

Anxiety stems from our amygdalae getting started up, because they sense a threat where none is, and effecting inappropriate behaviour thereafter.

Actually, the threat is often correctly sensed, it's just the behaviour (running away, attacking, feigning death/freezing) that's not useful in the modern world.

The therapeutically interesting question is how to change that.

Compared to the rational parts, those emotional mechanisms are much deeper and better wired to the rest of the brain. At the same time they aren't very sophisticated. Some people refer to them as "reptilian complex".

We can't adjust emotions directly and in general we have to wait much more time (think: weeks, sometimes months) to let new ideas like not being afraid of something sink into the subconscious.

But knowing and accepting that makes it possible to grow.

"Sorting themselves out" is a loaded word, I see that now.

I agree with you. This being at peace with your own company is a result of a tendency to work on your inside, and respond to emotions and "calls" from there immediately.

The other side are people who regularly experience a state of mind which could be described as happily relaxed nothingness. No thoughts, ideas, inner monologues etc. No urgency to work on their inner life.

That isn't better or worse. It brings advantages and disadvantages.

Please see my answer above. Inner Tension doesn't mean having thoughts stuck chasing around in your head.

> If you put them in an empty room, you could instead easily picture the introvert being calm and the extrovert tense due to a lack of human interaction.

That is what I said. I guess my usage of the word "tension" is different.

> Being alone is then a way of reducing sensory input to produce a sense of calm, it's not that an introvert would need to be alone to relieve any inner tension.

Producing a sense of calm IS the work of relieving inner tensions. I think here lies our misunderstanding.

When I'm talking about inner "tension", I'm not talking about any form of visible or invisible stress. Just that there is something "going on". Thought, ideas, inner monologue, some kind of inner activity.

There are people who regularly experience prolonged periods without thoughts, idea, inner monologues etc. They are routinely able to access a state of mind which could be described as happily relaxed nothingness.

You just might be more on the introverted side of the personality scale.

A good way to see the difference between intro- and extraversion is as follows.

Introverts have a lot of inner tension. That starts when they are toddlers. They constantly have something to think about, thus they need more alone-time than others to sort themselves out and work with their inner life. Talking to others is fine and rewarding, but recovery time is needed afterwards, so they choose their communication carefully.

Extroverts have way more inner peace. They don't need much time for themselves, they often get bored being alone. So they seek out other people for stimulation. More often than not they seek out introverts, because those are especially interesting. Talking to others is refreshing for them, it refills their batteries.

So if you see yourself on the introverted side, don't worry about it. Just accept it and give yourself the peace you need. Invite more or different guests, so they can talk to each other, while you are busy with someone.

I don't think so.

Serotonine is the most influential neurotransmitter most animals have. You have two production sites in your body. Sleep, memory, behavioural learning, pain-regulation, appetite, blood-pressure, sexual behaviour, body-temperature are all controlled by it.

Details on the neuro-chemistry:

The mechanism for translating light into mood starts in the suprachiasmatic nucleus*, which sits right behind where your optic nerves cross.

Light-sensitive nerves trigger and transfer that information to the pineal gland, which in turn, starts breaking down serotonin to melatonin.

I dream about a brain implant that artificially stimulates the SCN. Control that stimulation and you control sleep, serotonin, melatonine, hunger, cell-growth, stress etc. etc. etc.

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

Refusing to do mental processing, despite having the capability. Sawing at the branch you're sitting on. That fits my description of acting and behaving stupid.

The reason are emotions, many of them subconscious, like you said. Emotional patterns can be complex, but the solution isn't: Less pressure and fear mongering. More appreciation, time and space for children to grow into responsible adults.

I don't think we're able to steer the ship around though, unfortunately.

Let me quote from the internet:

Fuck motivation. it’s a fickle and and unreliable little dickfuck and isn’t worth your time.

Better to cultivate discipline than to rely on motivation. Force yourself to do things. Force yourself to get up out of bed and practice. Force yourself to work. Motivation is fleeting and it’s easy to rely on because it requires no concentrated effort to get. Motivation comes to you, and you don’t have to chase after it.

Discipline is reliable, motivation is fleeting. The question isn’t how to keep yourself motivated. It’s how to train yourself to work without it.

That sounds like a good idea, but don't underestimate just how complex law and tax is in each country. You need hundreds of lawyers to sift through this. There are so many law and accounting consultants for a reason.

I once met an SAP-contractor who was paid 5 digit amounts for implementing 1000 loc modules that was required because a tiny paragraph of some pension-law in a single country was updated.

That is not a technology problem. Every tried to get a law passed?

I'll answer these questions one by one:

> Do you keep a personal journal?

For the last two years I've written a journal entry almost every day. Some days I didn't write, like during travels, but I added information about these days afterwards. Sometimes those entries were pages long and contained conversations or dreams, sometimes it was just: "1. Dezember - 3. Dezember: much work, travelled to Budapest"

I stopped writing about three weeks ago.

> If yes, do you find it useful? > When journaling, do you try to track any specific aspects of your life or just write about anything that is currently occupying your mind?

My purpose of the journal was to keep track of my motivation and good mood, so I put mostly positively worded events in there, like "* Went to training, despite mismotivation of the last days". I also recorded things that I never / seldom do.

It served that purpose well. I don't need it anymore, that's why I stopped, but I'll probably pick it up again someday.

> What tools would you recommend?

Plaintext Files. Or MacOS Notes. It doesn't matter really. Finding the perfect journal is procrastination to prevent having to write a journal.

> Is there any specific methodology that you follow?

Write an entry for every single day, no matter when, no matter how short it is (but make it at least one grammatically correct sentence). If you forget, just write the entry for yesterday. Mark the entry with date and time.

> Any advice on how to get the most out of personal journaling?

After doing it for a while, you will develop a feeling about whether and how it benefits you. Follow that feeling.

Apart from that: Keeping a journal will always enable you to reconstruct and remember details of your life 10 years from now. One key sentence is often enough to help you remember the day.

That is why I'm going to pick it up again.

Me neither. Like I said the victim in anarchist groups just had it harder to defend themselves, because of rigid political rhetorics.

> Anarchists are really the political equivalent of pacifists. No force or coercion is ever acceptable in any circumstance is the basic foundation of anarchism, everything must be voluntary.

Most of the anarchist groups I used to know a couple of years back where full of force, coercion and exploitation. They just used psychological tricks and peer-pressure instead of physical force.

These things can happen. The victims within the anarchist groups just had the problem, that whenever they were trying to defend themselves, the (inofficial) leaders were able to use political rhetorics to declare them wrong and keep them in line.

It was always the power-hungry egoists shaping these groups. Some were ok, but some weren't better than sects. All-in-all I haven't seen less free people in my life.

> It seems that the article is stating that one's attachment system is developed primarily in their first year of life? If attachment theory is true, I would've guessed that the first ten or twelve years of life would all contribute.

Habitual reactions of trust and mistrust are formed at this early age.

But these are just feelings. Children older than babies can start working around them, as their relationships become more complex. They can develop strategies to resolve problems. Find compromises. Work on tensions in their inner life.

Those capabilities are learned over the course of the childhood and they are essential tools for children to grow up and eventually be free of the dictate of their emotions.

Psychotherapist.

> I am a bit worried when some of the legalise crowd refuse to accept that there might be health risks.

Concerning cannabis I'm mostly worried about the motivational problems it brings along (It seems to massively impair dopamine production in the brain). We are already a society to lazy to prevent it's own demise due to climate change.

> Or does cannabis just bring out an underlying psychosis that the person probably would have experienced anyway?

Leaving generic psychosis aside, when talking about schizophrenia this is a weird argument. Schizophrenia tends to worsen with every episode. It's of paramount importance to prevent any of them.

Having the first episode triggered by smoking cannabis with age 17 is worse than having the first episode brought on by a different cause with 25.

[Edit: I just realized I assumed causality here, which I have no proof for. But I do think that schizophrenic episodes are triggered by stressful thought-pattern and drug-use is one situation where those can occur.]

Isn't it established since about 25 years that any drug-use can bring onset of schizophrenia in those vulnerable?

"Creating jobs" was his mantra, because he says whatever people need to hear to give him what he wants.

I'm afraid Trump might be a relatively sucessful psychopath* whose primary goal is taking delight in crushing personal enemies ("losers").

*in the clinical sense

Not meaning to get too personal here, so feel free to ignore this, but it still could be that you're zoning out to avoid some negative emotions.

Could it be that you're dreading something that is "implied" by the lecture in a way? Maybe the practise that you feel obliged to do? Maybe the impact the lecture could have on your work or schedule? Maybe just the end of the lecture and back to whatever comes after?

Just a quick question (in relation to my comment to your other comment): In these lectures that you find hard to concentrate on: Could you say that you feel disgust/repulsion? There doesn't need to be a rational reason, disgust is completely trained and can be felt for anything from the look of the windows to the hairstyle of the lecturer to the actual topic.

If so, then your inattentiveness could be your mind trying to escape that feeling.

> For example, their review of brain-imaging studies found that when the brain was focused on a task at hand, its prefrontal “executive” network, which governs planning and impulse control, among other functions, constrains other brain activity.

That is the reason why dopamine-raising stimulants actually have a calming function on people with ADHD: they fuel this "suppressing" function of the brain, thus enabling it to calm itself.

My theory about ADHD is that there's a genetic disposition, where people need to move physically in order to have their dopaminergic systems functioning properly. Probably a bad adaption to our rather stationary lifestyle.

On top of that I think that if children are frequently interrupted and confronted with bad emotions they don't learn to focus.

I know these things from a friend who is a doctor and works with these neurotransmitter tests since about 10 years.

I asked her how accurate these tests were and she said that, while you can't read everything off a sheet, there are patients, where she can already guess the result of the tests from the bodily symptoms the patient is describing (energy level at which times of the day, feeling of hunger, insomnia etc.).

Quite often serotonin is low and once it has been boosted (verified by an additional test a couple of month later) the patient is feeling a lot better.

Which, like I said, doesn't imply that that's all there is to mental well-being.

These tests also measure stress hormones, which usually are out of bounds as well.

> There is no evidence that SSRIs work by fixing a chemical imbalance.

I don't even know how one would define "chemical imbalance" in such a complex system as the human body.

All I know is that there are average ranges for transmitters and the more somebody's results are inside these ranges, the better he typically feels.

I agree, that was bad wording on my side.

Just a couple of unordered facts here, because discussions about this topic tend to get very confused:

1. Serotonin is a very basic, very old transmitter found in all bilateral animals. Humans have two sites of serotonin-production, one in the body, one in the brain. 90% of serotonin resides in the body.

2. Serotonin in general regulates "activity". It affects hunger, gut-movement, sleep, cell-growth, mood, body-temperature, blood-pressure and many other things. Any drugs changing serotonin-levels also affect these areas, that is why there are so many adverse effects.

3. SSRIs help exactly one group of people: those who have too low levels of serotonin. When their serotonin is boosted, circuits in the brain like the connection between thoughts and emotions start to work properly, hence they get more in touch with themselves.

4. People who have too little serotonin can show the exact same symptoms like people whose serotonin levels way too high (!!). Prescribing SSRIs to those people will worsen their state and may even lead to life-threatening conditions.

5. The level of serotonin can be tested properly by exactly one method: laboratory blood/urine sampling, which costs a couple hundred dollars, but is available. These doctors generally also know about amino-acid therapy, which consists of nutritional supplements which help the body in manufacture the missing transmitter. This can lower the need for medication, but needs proper testing first.

6. People can have proper serotonin levels and still be sad/angry/depressed. The question still is which brain-circuit is malfunctioning. If the problem is the connection between emotions and thought, serotonin helps. If the malfunctioning circuitry concerns attention regulation [0], like with people who have a genetic disposition towards ADHD, then dopamine helps.

7. People can have all their neurotransmitters adjusted to proper levels and still not be perfectly well. We are talking about signalling inside mutable structures here. Changes in signalling affect the structure, changing the structure affects the signalling.

Fixing neurotransmitters makes someone able to use all of his brain. He still has to use it properly though, to get better.

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

It's 12 years since I've read Diamond Age, but the way I remember the ending is that it gave me a feeling like a camera zooming out of the world. Everything drifts into distance, goes diffuse and becomes, with all it's importance, unimportant.

That sounds like something Terence McKenna would have said.

CBT can treat severe depression, but the problem is that all those deep-seated underlying mental patterns don't just change because you want them too.

Most people don't seem to realise that the celebrated prefrontal cortex is the youngest and in a way weakest part of the brain. It surrounds older structures that don't work much different than in reptiles.

Changing your thoughts is easy, changing the attached emotions, fight/flight responses etc., who might even trigger the thoughts in the first place is incredibly hard.

It takes time, the right corrective and endless patience and iterative practise.