This did not go where I thought it was going, and I'm glad. I enjoyed the read. I'm not versed enough in psychiatry to validate the brain-chemistry stuff but my practical experience lines up.
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.
> "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 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.
Here’s a fun one I given many years ago: I had a friend/client who was professor. We’d talk about ADHD, issues, and other things. One day, I came to him saying, “a lot of times, I’ll read a paragraph 20 times, but not remember a single thing from it. It’s drudgery and almost painful to read it. It’s a fight.”
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?”
I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything.
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 think "just fine" would imply you can invoke hyperfocus whenever you want. In my experience, it happens with the most undesirable things at the most undesirable moments.
But I know so much about randomly WW2 battle and military boats and airplanes that was critical to know at 3am when I had a full docket of stuff to do the next day...
That seems to contradict my third sentence. Hyperfocusing does not mean choosing what to focus on. My point was, ADHD to me is not an issue in focusing. It's an issue with choosing what to focus on.
Understood, thanks for clarifying. In my case, my hyperfocus sessions (sometimes on useful, sometimes on useless things) are in between absurd levels of distractions so I can't totally relate.
I think that’s true. If I want to focus on the thing that is my current obsession I can invoke that focus whenever I want. Never mind if I’m at work, in the shower, or at a birthday party. It’s just not very useful to achieve the goals you probably have at those places.
Same. When I first started taking meds this was a hard lesson to learn. Yay I can actually focus on a task now. It just so happens that task needs to be whatever I'm doing when they start working.
> Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop.
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.
Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?
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.
> Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?
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".
Hyperfocus is an interesting one. You can now focus on a single thing so profoundly that you forget to eat or sleep. Slight caveat: you don’t have control over what you hyperfocus on.
Mitigation strategies start to look a lot different when you have a better sense of adjusted capability. I expected it to be something I felt when I started a task, or how I felt about starting tasks— like if you’re stronger it’s easy to sense that you can pick up heavier objects, and picking up heavy things doesn’t feel as burdensome. That’s not what it was like for me. It still feels just as shitty and annoying to do things I don’t want to do, but once you realize how much better you are at staying on task and doing the work to completion, and doing things that might have been a cognitive challenge before, giving up/avoidance doesn’t feel like the only choice anymore.
How do I get diagnosed with ADHD? My sister just recently got diagnosed in her 40s (in another country though) and I'm like, well maybe I have adhd too, but I don't know who to ask, and the online quizzes all seem set up to sell you stuff.
I took an online quiz, then told my doctor, then my doctor administered an online quiz to me and subscribed me Adderall. It has taken me a year and a half to make sense of what Adderall means to me but it’s quite helpful. I’m 40. I had never had stimulants like that before! Be careful with the euphoria. For a while my dose was too high and it felt great at first but I crashed on the weekends. Now I keep my dose lower and it’s helpful without being too much. Mindfulness and self control are important here.
Yeah honestly I have good self control for a lot of drugs, but this one was pretty tricky. It took me a while to realize what was happening. I had been on Adderall for almost a year when I started a new job at a fast paced startup, and only then did my usage patterns become an issue. My golden rule now is I only ever take the same dosage at the same times of day (morning and afternoon). For a while I took extra on busy days and this led to poor sleep, additional use subsequent days to keep up, and then a crash. The crash was characterized by feeling extremely sad to the point of ruining my weekends when it happened. Now for the past few months I’ve never exceeded my daily dose and I feel much better. Sounds like with this simple guidance and your mindfulness you will do great
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!”
It was such a delight to see someone finally getting the dopaminergic function right and not confusing dopamergic populations activity with perceptions of pleasure, but instead pointing to the modern understandings: they predict future pleasure. Glutamate (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) is the real "pleasure" chemical (among all it's various other uses).
I think they showcase the anticipation reward no? For example, a near-miss with slot machines spikes higher dopamine than actually hitting the magical 777. Can’t find source atm
That's interesting. I really enjoy playing video games, when I have time. There are games that I objectively find fun, like recently, Clair Obscur Expedition 33. But oftentimes I'd play with my full attention, trying to absorb the beauty of the world and the music, and then I take my phone out during a loading screen and now I'm "second-screening" with my news feed or HN. And I'm still enjoying the game itself, but I feel like I'm robbing myself of the experience because I am not giving it my full attention.
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.
I think there's something uniquely distracting about the constant availability of phones. We have muscle-memory now that can reflexively open a little hit of reward anytime we're in an idle moment.
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.
This is how I started working out regularly. "I can quit 5 min after warming up".
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.
> 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.
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.
Reminds me of The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. It's difficult to succinctly state the premise of the book, but in a way, I think its about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects
What serendipity! The latest episode of "Philosophize This!" is titled "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han".[0] I'd never heard of him before. Apparently his book "The Burnout Society" is recommended reading.
Philosophize this has been on such a cool track out of western canon and through more mystic/nondual flavored stuff, in a way that builds off of itself. I got Deleuze-pilled a few years ago, and have had fun listening to the whole progression lately. Interesting dovetails with the Alan Watts marathon I did for like a year or two haha
tl;dr read it with friends or drugs, or as a drug. Wild shit.
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.
Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"?
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.
Given your interest in BCH, you may enjoy Non-places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Augé. BCH draws on a lot of Augé's ideas from this book in Psychopolitics. It is obtuse and either poorly-translated or badly-written but the ideas are excellent.
I wonder if this explains the popularity of It's a Wonderful Life. The story is well-known at this point. It was a box-office flop when first released, and fell out of copyright because the studio couldn't be bothered to renew it. As a result it played repeatedly on TV around Christmastime every year. The repeated exposure to this film, presumably also associating it with other pleasant holiday memories for audiences, transformed its reputation. To the point that it's now considered one of the best films of all time.
Huh, I would guess there's a different mechanism at work. In my experience, movies playing on TV during the holidays tend not to get people's deep, persistent, undivided attention.
Part of the reason why it was on 24 hours a day for 20 years is that something got fucked up with the copyright and TV channels were using it as free filler.
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.
The Shawshank Redemption has a similar story. Didn't do well when released. Its video release fared a little better, maybe because people could re-watch it at home. Then Turner picked up TV distribution rights cheaply and showed it again and again.
Now, just like It's a Wonderful Life, it's considered one of the best movies ever made.
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"
You cannot attribute their success simply to repeated TV runs though. Some films are just not that appealing for the cinema, more art than entertainment, and slowly convert each viewer into a fan until it joins the collective consciousness as a classic. It's a story that all of these have in common - some level of critical acclaim before release, flops at the cinemas, slowly builds up a reputation.
> You cannot attribute their success simply to repeated TV runs though
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.
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.
It's funny - I watched the Shawshank Redemption for the first time a couple years ago, after hearing forever about what a great film it is, and thought it was so lackluster I wasn't sure if I was missing something.
"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.
Same here. I'd never seen parts of it on TV or anything until I watched it for the first time, since I'd seen it was ranked #1 on IMDB. There wasn't anything about it that made me feel like it was the best movie ever. The plot was very conventional, the shots were fine, the performances were pretty good - it seemed like a 7-8/10 movie, there are lots like it. Then I watched Lawrence of Arabia and 2001 and I got the "best movie ever" kind of feeling from them - great cinematography, big themes, bombastic soundtracks. But I can see why Shawshank could be the least controversial movie of all time, it's fine at everything and that helps when there are so many people ranking it.
people are different people at different times in their live as well.
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.
Your summary of the reception of The Shawshank Redemption doesn't seem to fit the wikipied article you linked to
> 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
"Best movie" lists tend to have films with both critical acclaim and audience appeal.
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.
“Watch your thoughts,
they become your words;
watch your words,
they become your actions;
watch your actions,
they become your habits;
watch your habits,
they become your character;
watch your character,
it becomes your destiny.”
A similar idea from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ~7th century BCE
> '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.
Thanks, i was about to share the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha. … allegedly), which perhaps would have been better than the misattributed quote in my initial comment:
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.
That's the default mode network. People that struggle with anxiety and rumination, as per the author's second section, lack the endogenous mechanisms to interrupt the default mode network.
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)
> 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.
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,
> > 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.
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.
> Showing that some effect can result from some cause is not sufficient to show that it does result from that cause.
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 =]
> Any increase towards baseline is beneficial throughout the entire affected graph of neural structures, as well as proximate ones.
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.
> assuming that reducing blood flow one place, and increasing it in another place
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’m not backing that comment claim, but from recent research I’ve been doing.
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
The only part of this that rhymed with something I'm aware of is growth in the PFC in practicing meditators and a relation to improvement of ADHD symptoms among other things, though I don't recall whether it was a good study or not. I think I read that more than a decade ago.
That's changes in brain chemistry via lifestyle changes.
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.
My symptoms didn’t improve that much when I was an endurance athlete. Most of the improvements could be adequately explained by the hedonic treadmill. I could suffer longer.
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 ...
This was a great essay, and as someone who struggles a lot with hyperawareness OCD, I cried reading it.
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.
Sure. What you focus on will consume your mind and grow within it. The bad variety is often called dwelling or rumination.
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.)
> Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts.
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.
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.
When I travel for work, being in meetings all day and in an unusual place can be draining. Many years ago, I developed the habit of when I get back to my hotel room:
* 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.
Some years ago, I snagged a great deal on some Sennheiser HD600s. After also acquiring a Schiit stack (Magni + Modi) and finding high-quality audio sources, I would close my eyes, lay down on the couch, and just listen...actually, I'll call it perceive the music. No other audio experience compares, just like a huge screen which fills your vision is truly the best way to experience a movie.
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.
I’ve been producing music as a side interest for a long time, and I learned early on that to really hear what’s going on during a mix I have to close my eyes and wait about 30 seconds for my ears to “open up”. My visual sense overrides the soundstage — I can make some technical choices about frequency masking and so forth, but I can’t fully hear with eyes open.
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.
Sounds like concentration meditation. (The Buddhists call it "samatha")
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.
There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on it and meditation can't do that.
or maybe it would reveal to the meditator that consciousness is nonlocal and what we perceive as our self is an illusion created by the systems of symbols and language which overlays our perception and through which existence filters and there is no self there is no other there is one whole and it is all conscious
It's a presumption that the universe is not a product of the mind. Without which you can not establish that the 'secrets of the universe' are not inside the mind.
He seems to have hyperphantasia, judging by every example of mental images he described. It's not a requirement, as the example from the other person on the beach didn't need it to feel that level of self-feeding joy.
But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?
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.
In Japanese (注意を払う), you pay attention, much like in English. However, the verb 払う also means "to sweep away" or "to clear" suggesting a sense of effort or focus in clearing distractions to direct attention
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)
Ha, I was just recently thinking about what you do with attention in different languages. In my native Bulgarian (обръщам внимание) you “turn” your attention as in you “direct” it. Same word for when you turn a page. Like you have but a single attention and it’s up to you where you direct it.
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.
What German phrase did you have in mind? Because the idiomatic translation of "to pay attention" is "aufpassen", which literally translates to something like "pass on" or "fit on".
You can't rip apart that word into "auf" and "passen" and then individually translate them literally. The result seems nonsensical. I would say "aufpassen" is literally "be attentive" / "be watchful".
Edit: "to pay attention" is literally "Aufmerksamkeit zollen"
> You can't rip apart that word into "auf" and "passen" and then individually translate them literally.
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.)
In Russian, you "spare" attention by "making" it. The word 'уделять' shares the same root with the word that means - 'deed', 'doing', 'act' or 'affair'.
Absolutely mind/world-expanding. Thanks for sharing. The Swedish version reminds me of (the now "disgraced" but his Proust book is cool journalist) Lehrer's chapter on Virginia Woolfe in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, where he claims that "attention _is_ consciousness" in Woolf's then-novel stream of consciousness style in To the Lighthouse.
I don't know about this. Paying attention to how your anxiety feels is a powerful way of noticing that it is just an experience like all other experience and there is a great freedom in realizing that you are not the anxiety, you are merely experiencing anxiety.
I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about.
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.
Yeah now I read this I think the author doesn't mean paying attention to the anxiety as much as he means reinforcing the anxiety by identifying with whatever thoughts it brings up.
The quote about the trip to the beach, and his description of his reverie during the musical performance are familiar to me - those are psychedelic experiences.
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 wouldn't call them psychedelic per se, or even really a "Jhana" requiring deep concentration. Feeling joy as a result of focusing on something beautiful/interesting is just a fundamental part of being human.
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.
What does "loop on itself" mean in this context? The article repeats it 5 times but I can't find a thesaurus definition, and it's unclear to me if the author means it as a synonym repeat or *self-amplify or something different.
My impression was that the author was referring to *self-amplifying like a positive feedback loop.
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.
> What does "loop on itself" mean in this context?
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..
This blog post, and the one it references, on the jhanas[1], belong to this weird genre which is basically in the vein of Buddhist writing, but without more than a passing reference to Buddhism, its scholarly tradition, its terminology, or its taxonomy. Here's Nadia:
> 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.
This article discusses attention in a very immediate sense, but I think most of the points also apply to long-term attention.
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.
The writing feels odd in a sort of off putting way. Maybe too much vividness and a kind of pseudointellectual vibe. Or like a bit egotistical? I don't know if that's what you're getting at, but it's what I was getting from it.
I feel like software would be a better place if more of us had discovered a sport of some kind early.
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.
It's sort of an interesting but the use of the term attention seems "over determined" (used to mean several not identical things) and "looping" is fuzzily defined (the main clue of seems analogy with "good sex", sex where you're engaging your entire body and being - a subject that apparently gets people's interest, yeah).
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.
The article doesn't attempt to define any terms or reference the actual literature, just throws random "good sounding" crap together as if it's valid. I mean they unironically use the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field." Seriously? Lmao.
The part about good art not being about communication is just plain wrong. Good artists (and yes you can argue that art is subjective) spend thousands of hours studying the fundamentals—perspective,light,colour,value,proportion,anatomy, not to mention the dexterity to making a line—so that they can communicate to the viewer in the best way that suits the piece of art.
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.
Missed solving of riddles. Also why programming is fun as you try to solve the problem wrap your head around it immerse yourself in problem space and at the end you get to solution that usually is a pleasant sensation.
Given that the heart is generator which drives electrovolt oscillations through the nervous system and the fat of the brain, and that the extracerebral field created by the electrovolt potentials in the tissues of the brain is nonlinearly related to the electrical activations through the axons and dendrites in the tissues of the brain,
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?
Paraphrasing the model's reply to force myself to learn:
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.
Looks like we need to come up with some sort of attention wasabi in our ultra modern short-video world. Any Psy professionals in our midst? What would a good attention wasabi look like??
This is a very valuable insight, and it is at the core of the ancient greek way of looking at time as either horizontal (chronos, our normal sense of time moving forward on an X axis, moment by monent), or vertical (kairos, wherein transcendent meaning arises).
I notice this on IG. Spend enough time on IG, and you have pretty much seen all the advertised memes, etc. Do this over years, and it just starts to loop on itself, the same memes, the same attempt at reactions, etc.
completely relate to how panic attacks are often caused by simply overthinking about having one, which causes more symptoms to arise, which leads to more panic...feedback loop. Interesting read.
Reminds me of the Feynman quote “everything is interesting when you go into it deep enough” (or similar to that).
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”.
One thing that helped me have a better attitude at work and maybe life in general, was reframing how I thought about people with stupid ideas or stupid questions
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
> 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?”
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.
This is something I strongly identify with. The world is so full of interesting things that being bored for too long feels like a virtual impossibility. There’s always something new to dig into.
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.
No, you get bored with it. Tetris is fun for an hour, but then you get bored, it didn't get more fun after an hour, and people get even more bored after 10 hours. A very small subset of people continue after that and get ever more obsessed with it, that is not normal.
Drug addicts, patients and recreational users start to increase the dosage and chase the high.
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.
> Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon.
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.
This is the same mechanism behind addiction (IMO, not a psychiatrist). The sustained attention becomes a feedback loop death spiral. Certainly the case for "light" addictions like caffeine, smoking, gambling, etc.
I'll take a shot. I think what the OP was alluding to is a modern movement towards "metaphysics" or manifestation.
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.
> We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have.
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.
Appreciate your perspective friend. Correct me if I'm wrong or mischaracterizing, but it feels like you're looking for something concrete or absolute in what I'm saying. In my experience the only thing that feels "absolute" is that nothing is absolute.
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.
> ideas that have always existed. It's not like a new messiah or philosopher came about with this novelty
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.
> 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?
This did not go where I thought it was going, and I'm glad. I enjoyed the read. I'm not versed enough in psychiatry to validate the brain-chemistry stuff but my practical experience lines up.
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.
> "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 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.
Here’s a fun one I given many years ago: I had a friend/client who was professor. We’d talk about ADHD, issues, and other things. One day, I came to him saying, “a lot of times, I’ll read a paragraph 20 times, but not remember a single thing from it. It’s drudgery and almost painful to read it. It’s a fight.”
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 wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything.
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.
Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop.
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.
That interesting. I can hyperfocus without medication just fine. It's the choosing what to focus on that I take medication to solve.
I think "just fine" would imply you can invoke hyperfocus whenever you want. In my experience, it happens with the most undesirable things at the most undesirable moments.
But I know so much about randomly WW2 battle and military boats and airplanes that was critical to know at 3am when I had a full docket of stuff to do the next day...
That seems to contradict my third sentence. Hyperfocusing does not mean choosing what to focus on. My point was, ADHD to me is not an issue in focusing. It's an issue with choosing what to focus on.
Understood, thanks for clarifying. In my case, my hyperfocus sessions (sometimes on useful, sometimes on useless things) are in between absurd levels of distractions so I can't totally relate.
I think that’s true. If I want to focus on the thing that is my current obsession I can invoke that focus whenever I want. Never mind if I’m at work, in the shower, or at a birthday party. It’s just not very useful to achieve the goals you probably have at those places.
I can relate. Also, sometimes I can even invoke it on things I want to. However, I just can't turn it off when needed.
My rule of thumb is: Whatever I am doing when the meds start working is what I'm going to be doing.
Same. When I first started taking meds this was a hard lesson to learn. Yay I can actually focus on a task now. It just so happens that task needs to be whatever I'm doing when they start working.
> Another thing to consider is that, once you are medicated, you have a whole new set of skills to develop.
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.
Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?
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.
> Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?
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".
Hyperfocus is an interesting one. You can now focus on a single thing so profoundly that you forget to eat or sleep. Slight caveat: you don’t have control over what you hyperfocus on.
Suggested books which I found helpful. There may be audiobooks available, if that is more your thing.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/learned-optimism-how-to-change-...
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-now-habit-a-strategic-progr...
Mitigation strategies start to look a lot different when you have a better sense of adjusted capability. I expected it to be something I felt when I started a task, or how I felt about starting tasks— like if you’re stronger it’s easy to sense that you can pick up heavier objects, and picking up heavy things doesn’t feel as burdensome. That’s not what it was like for me. It still feels just as shitty and annoying to do things I don’t want to do, but once you realize how much better you are at staying on task and doing the work to completion, and doing things that might have been a cognitive challenge before, giving up/avoidance doesn’t feel like the only choice anymore.
How do I get diagnosed with ADHD? My sister just recently got diagnosed in her 40s (in another country though) and I'm like, well maybe I have adhd too, but I don't know who to ask, and the online quizzes all seem set up to sell you stuff.
I took an online quiz, then told my doctor, then my doctor administered an online quiz to me and subscribed me Adderall. It has taken me a year and a half to make sense of what Adderall means to me but it’s quite helpful. I’m 40. I had never had stimulants like that before! Be careful with the euphoria. For a while my dose was too high and it felt great at first but I crashed on the weekends. Now I keep my dose lower and it’s helpful without being too much. Mindfulness and self control are important here.
> Be careful with the euphoria. For a while my dose was too high
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.
Thanks! I like to think that I have mindfulness and self control, but I might be overestimating myself.
Yeah honestly I have good self control for a lot of drugs, but this one was pretty tricky. It took me a while to realize what was happening. I had been on Adderall for almost a year when I started a new job at a fast paced startup, and only then did my usage patterns become an issue. My golden rule now is I only ever take the same dosage at the same times of day (morning and afternoon). For a while I took extra on busy days and this led to poor sleep, additional use subsequent days to keep up, and then a crash. The crash was characterized by feeling extremely sad to the point of ruining my weekends when it happened. Now for the past few months I’ve never exceeded my daily dose and I feel much better. Sounds like with this simple guidance and your mindfulness you will do great
That's awesome! Thank you for the tips!
Makes me happy to help. Good luck.
“Action comes before motivation.”
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!”
Great suggestion. "Just do it" usually just works.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
It was such a delight to see someone finally getting the dopaminergic function right and not confusing dopamergic populations activity with perceptions of pleasure, but instead pointing to the modern understandings: they predict future pleasure. Glutamate (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) is the real "pleasure" chemical (among all it's various other uses).
I think they showcase the anticipation reward no? For example, a near-miss with slot machines spikes higher dopamine than actually hitting the magical 777. Can’t find source atm
That's interesting. I really enjoy playing video games, when I have time. There are games that I objectively find fun, like recently, Clair Obscur Expedition 33. But oftentimes I'd play with my full attention, trying to absorb the beauty of the world and the music, and then I take my phone out during a loading screen and now I'm "second-screening" with my news feed or HN. And I'm still enjoying the game itself, but I feel like I'm robbing myself of the experience because I am not giving it my full attention.
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.
I think there's something uniquely distracting about the constant availability of phones. We have muscle-memory now that can reflexively open a little hit of reward anytime we're in an idle moment.
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.
If you’re second screening a movie you need to stop that movie and delete it from your library.
This is how I started working out regularly. "I can quit 5 min after warming up".
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.
> 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.
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.
Reminds me of The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. It's difficult to succinctly state the premise of the book, but in a way, I think its about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects
What serendipity! The latest episode of "Philosophize This!" is titled "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han".[0] I'd never heard of him before. Apparently his book "The Burnout Society" is recommended reading.
[0]https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jdvGsEdrpEEjMBJG5oRaH?si=g...
Philosophize this has been on such a cool track out of western canon and through more mystic/nondual flavored stuff, in a way that builds off of itself. I got Deleuze-pilled a few years ago, and have had fun listening to the whole progression lately. Interesting dovetails with the Alan Watts marathon I did for like a year or two haha
I've struggled to read Deleuze in the past; do you have recommendations? I find summaries interesting, but the texts themselves impenetrable.
tl;dr read it with friends or drugs, or as a drug. Wild shit.
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.
That's a great episode, thanks for your suggestion.
Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"?
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.
Given your interest in BCH, you may enjoy Non-places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Augé. BCH draws on a lot of Augé's ideas from this book in Psychopolitics. It is obtuse and either poorly-translated or badly-written but the ideas are excellent.
I wonder if this explains the popularity of It's a Wonderful Life. The story is well-known at this point. It was a box-office flop when first released, and fell out of copyright because the studio couldn't be bothered to renew it. As a result it played repeatedly on TV around Christmastime every year. The repeated exposure to this film, presumably also associating it with other pleasant holiday memories for audiences, transformed its reputation. To the point that it's now considered one of the best films of all time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Recept...
Huh, I would guess there's a different mechanism at work. In my experience, movies playing on TV during the holidays tend not to get people's deep, persistent, undivided attention.
Part of the reason why it was on 24 hours a day for 20 years is that something got fucked up with the copyright and TV channels were using it as free filler.
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.
The Shawshank Redemption has a similar story. Didn't do well when released. Its video release fared a little better, maybe because people could re-watch it at home. Then Turner picked up TV distribution rights cheaply and showed it again and again.
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.
You cannot attribute their success simply to repeated TV runs though. Some films are just not that appealing for the cinema, more art than entertainment, and slowly convert each viewer into a fan until it joins the collective consciousness as a classic. It's a story that all of these have in common - some level of critical acclaim before release, flops at the cinemas, slowly builds up a reputation.
> You cannot attribute their success simply to repeated TV runs though
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.
I think about music albums on cassette that I listened too in the car. I enjoyed some of those deeper tracks after repeated listening.
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...
I'm a fan of this theory.
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.
I've had other experiences
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.
It's funny - I watched the Shawshank Redemption for the first time a couple years ago, after hearing forever about what a great film it is, and thought it was so lackluster I wasn't sure if I was missing something.
"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.
Same here. I'd never seen parts of it on TV or anything until I watched it for the first time, since I'd seen it was ranked #1 on IMDB. There wasn't anything about it that made me feel like it was the best movie ever. The plot was very conventional, the shots were fine, the performances were pretty good - it seemed like a 7-8/10 movie, there are lots like it. Then I watched Lawrence of Arabia and 2001 and I got the "best movie ever" kind of feeling from them - great cinematography, big themes, bombastic soundtracks. But I can see why Shawshank could be the least controversial movie of all time, it's fine at everything and that helps when there are so many people ranking it.
> 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.
people are different people at different times in their live as well.
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.
Your summary of the reception of The Shawshank Redemption doesn't seem to fit the wikipied article you linked to
> 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
"Best movie" lists tend to have films with both critical acclaim and audience appeal.
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.
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
- often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu
Lao Tzu didn't say this. It appears to date from the owner of a supermarket chain in the 1970s
D’oh! Should’ve done my research—It sounds so believable. Thank you for the correction.
No problem :) It does sound believable.
A similar idea from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ~7th century BCE
> '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.
Yes, it's a very ancient idea.
"As we think, so we become."
- Buddha
Thanks, i was about to share the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha. … allegedly), which perhaps would have been better than the misattributed quote in my initial comment:
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.
Source: https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/
Yes, exactly!! I use art-making to direct my attention in the same way:
> 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?
[1]: https://lucaaurelia.com/about
I enjoyed your words and pixels!
That's the default mode network. People that struggle with anxiety and rumination, as per the author's second section, lack the endogenous mechanisms to interrupt the default mode network.
> lack the endogenous mechanisms
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)
> 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.
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.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11725823/
awesome, thanks.
> 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.
> > 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.
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.
> Showing that some effect can result from some cause is not sufficient to show that it does result from that cause.
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 =]
> Any increase towards baseline is beneficial throughout the entire affected graph of neural structures, as well as proximate ones.
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.
> assuming that reducing blood flow one place, and increasing it in another place
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.
> If reduced bloodflow is known to be the cause
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.)
This seems like a strong claim, and I've never heard of it before. Can you provide sources?
I’m not backing that comment claim, but from recent research I’ve been doing.
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
that's not 'research'
What would you call it?
Trying things.
Anecdote.
The only part of this that rhymed with something I'm aware of is growth in the PFC in practicing meditators and a relation to improvement of ADHD symptoms among other things, though I don't recall whether it was a good study or not. I think I read that more than a decade ago.
That's changes in brain chemistry via lifestyle changes.
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.
I'm sorry that I don't have the time to look further. But tangential sources could be
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.
My symptoms didn’t improve that much when I was an endurance athlete. Most of the improvements could be adequately explained by the hedonic treadmill. I could suffer longer.
But you did not suffer from a reduction to your genetic baseline.
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.
I’m talking about pain/annoyance threshold, not general neurochemistry.
> pain/annoyance
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 ...
This was a great essay, and as someone who struggles a lot with hyperawareness OCD, I cried reading it.
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.
> Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them
That sounds a lot like meditation.
I can relate to the muscle tension. No amount of stretching is sufficient, and ignoring it seems to cause it to grow in intensity.
Sure. What you focus on will consume your mind and grow within it. The bad variety is often called dwelling or rumination.
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.)
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm
[1] https://a.co/d/cbxYLo7
Reminds me of the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha from ~2500 years ago. … allegedly):
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.
Source: https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/
> Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts.
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.
If you're near any of the cities they run events in, I highly recommend https://pitchblackplayback.com/
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.
When I travel for work, being in meetings all day and in an unusual place can be draining. Many years ago, I developed the habit of when I get back to my hotel room:
* 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.
Some years ago, I snagged a great deal on some Sennheiser HD600s. After also acquiring a Schiit stack (Magni + Modi) and finding high-quality audio sources, I would close my eyes, lay down on the couch, and just listen...actually, I'll call it perceive the music. No other audio experience compares, just like a huge screen which fills your vision is truly the best way to experience a movie.
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.
I’ve been producing music as a side interest for a long time, and I learned early on that to really hear what’s going on during a mix I have to close my eyes and wait about 30 seconds for my ears to “open up”. My visual sense overrides the soundstage — I can make some technical choices about frequency masking and so forth, but I can’t fully hear with eyes open.
If this intrigues you, and you are in the Bay Area, I would recommend checking out Audium.
https://www.audium.org/
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.
This weekend and next week they will be playing David Bowie's 'Live At Montreux' at Lobe in Vancouver. Lobe is a unique room with the speakers installed in the floor and ceiling. https://lobestudio.ca/new-events/david-bowie-live-at-montreu...
Sounds like concentration meditation. (The Buddhists call it "samatha")
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.
There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on it and meditation can't do that.
or maybe it would reveal to the meditator that consciousness is nonlocal and what we perceive as our self is an illusion created by the systems of symbols and language which overlays our perception and through which existence filters and there is no self there is no other there is one whole and it is all conscious
It's a presumption that the universe is not a product of the mind. Without which you can not establish that the 'secrets of the universe' are not inside the mind.
I dunno man, name a scientist who doesn't concentrate.
He seems to have hyperphantasia, judging by every example of mental images he described. It's not a requirement, as the example from the other person on the beach didn't need it to feel that level of self-feeding joy.
But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?
I have aphantasia, and I can definitely get deep into music
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
I think aphantastic people would be able to but using an inner monologue/internal text? Or even just the feeling and concentration on that feeling?
Tangentially trying to imagine not being able to visualize mental images is really hard.
Reminds me of https://nadia.xyz/jhanas
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.
which is linked in the article
> In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention.
In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
In Japanese (注意を払う), you pay attention, much like in English. However, the verb 払う also means "to sweep away" or "to clear" suggesting a sense of effort or focus in clearing distractions to direct attention
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 Turkish, you give attention, expending your mental capability.
Ha, I was just recently thinking about what you do with attention in different languages. In my native Bulgarian (обръщам внимание) you “turn” your attention as in you “direct” it. Same word for when you turn a page. Like you have but a single attention and it’s up to you where you direct it.
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.
In German, you "direct" attention at something or "gift" attention to someone.
What German phrase did you have in mind? Because the idiomatic translation of "to pay attention" is "aufpassen", which literally translates to something like "pass on" or "fit on".
You can't rip apart that word into "auf" and "passen" and then individually translate them literally. The result seems nonsensical. I would say "aufpassen" is literally "be attentive" / "be watchful".
Edit: "to pay attention" is literally "Aufmerksamkeit zollen"
> You can't rip apart that word into "auf" and "passen" and then individually translate them literally.
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.)
I would translate "aufpassen" more with "to attend" or "to watch over".
The literal analogue to "pass on" or "fit on" is "anpassen"; "auf" generally means "over", "on/to the top of".
"jemandem Aufmerksamkeit schenken", "Aufmerksamkeit auf etwas richten"
In German, you “give eight”. ;)
This made me laugh :D!
In Russian, you "spare" attention by "making" it. The word 'уделять' shares the same root with the word that means - 'deed', 'doing', 'act' or 'affair'.
No, it's a different etymological root. A better translation would be to say that you give a share of your attention (делить's meaning is to divide).
Ah, right. I completely missed the difference between 'делать' and 'делить'.
Absolutely mind/world-expanding. Thanks for sharing. The Swedish version reminds me of (the now "disgraced" but his Proust book is cool journalist) Lehrer's chapter on Virginia Woolfe in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, where he claims that "attention _is_ consciousness" in Woolf's then-novel stream of consciousness style in To the Lighthouse.
This is buddhism and mindfulness in a nutshell. The only thing about your existence that does not change is that which is aware.
In Swedish it's "var uppmärksam" which is more like "be attentive" - same as in English. They just use the adjective form more.
> In Swedish, you “are” attention.
Which phrase would this be?
”Vara fokuserad” I think. Or ”vara koncentrerad”. Maybe ”uppmärksam” is a better translation of the word?
But ”have” attention exists for both of those as well. ”Ha fokus”.
If it is similar to german, then it would be that you are attented.
Huh, I never placed my heart to it
Mandarin Chinese: 注意 (zhùyì) - "note/record intention" Spanish: prestar atención - "lend attention" English: pay attention - "give/spend attention" Hindi: ध्यान देना (dhyaan dena) - "give meditation/focus" Arabic: انتبه (intabih) - "be alert/awake" ...
https://pastebin.com/3ghPnjb9
I don't know about this. Paying attention to how your anxiety feels is a powerful way of noticing that it is just an experience like all other experience and there is a great freedom in realizing that you are not the anxiety, you are merely experiencing anxiety.
I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about.
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.
Yeah now I read this I think the author doesn't mean paying attention to the anxiety as much as he means reinforcing the anxiety by identifying with whatever thoughts it brings up.
Which definitely doesn't help the anxiety.
The quote about the trip to the beach, and his description of his reverie during the musical performance are familiar to me - those are psychedelic experiences.
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 wouldn't call them psychedelic per se, or even really a "Jhana" requiring deep concentration. Feeling joy as a result of focusing on something beautiful/interesting is just a fundamental part of being human.
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.
What does "loop on itself" mean in this context? The article repeats it 5 times but I can't find a thesaurus definition, and it's unclear to me if the author means it as a synonym repeat or *self-amplify or something different.
My impression was that the author was referring to *self-amplifying like a positive feedback loop.
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.
Mentioning this and "hot" in the same sentence put me in a very Marshall McLuhan context.
Personal computing and the growth of the internet are an example of something looping. They reinforce and amplify each other's impact and value.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects
> What does "loop on itself" mean in this context?
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..
I understood as self-amplify, like a feedback loop
He’s talking about spiraling or virtuous/vicious cycles, as relates to your hormones.
Case in point
This blog post, and the one it references, on the jhanas[1], belong to this weird genre which is basically in the vein of Buddhist writing, but without more than a passing reference to Buddhism, its scholarly tradition, its terminology, or its taxonomy. Here's Nadia:
> 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.
[1]: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas
This article discusses attention in a very immediate sense, but I think most of the points also apply to long-term attention.
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.
This comes across as manic. It reminds me very much of the types of themes and prose my diagnosed roommate would create.
The writing feels odd in a sort of off putting way. Maybe too much vividness and a kind of pseudointellectual vibe. Or like a bit egotistical? I don't know if that's what you're getting at, but it's what I was getting from it.
Happiness is the expectation of upcoming good things
I feel like software would be a better place if more of us had discovered a sport of some kind early.
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.
It's sort of an interesting but the use of the term attention seems "over determined" (used to mean several not identical things) and "looping" is fuzzily defined (the main clue of seems analogy with "good sex", sex where you're engaging your entire body and being - a subject that apparently gets people's interest, yeah).
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.
The article doesn't attempt to define any terms or reference the actual literature, just throws random "good sounding" crap together as if it's valid. I mean they unironically use the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field." Seriously? Lmao.
The part about good art not being about communication is just plain wrong. Good artists (and yes you can argue that art is subjective) spend thousands of hours studying the fundamentals—perspective,light,colour,value,proportion,anatomy, not to mention the dexterity to making a line—so that they can communicate to the viewer in the best way that suits the piece of art.
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.
Missed solving of riddles. Also why programming is fun as you try to solve the problem wrap your head around it immerse yourself in problem space and at the end you get to solution that usually is a pleasant sensation.
Given that the heart is generator which drives electrovolt oscillations through the nervous system and the fat of the brain, and that the extracerebral field created by the electrovolt potentials in the tissues of the brain is nonlinearly related to the electrical activations through the axons and dendrites in the tissues of the brain,
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?
Paraphrasing the model's reply to force myself to learn:
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.
Attention probably does not exist as a reduction. Noticing does and has different regularities from the intent we enforce into attention.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/
There are others.
Looks like we need to come up with some sort of attention wasabi in our ultra modern short-video world. Any Psy professionals in our midst? What would a good attention wasabi look like??
This is a very valuable insight, and it is at the core of the ancient greek way of looking at time as either horizontal (chronos, our normal sense of time moving forward on an X axis, moment by monent), or vertical (kairos, wherein transcendent meaning arises).
> When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was.
I can’t tell if Henrik is okay and just a very vivid writer, or… not.
I notice this on IG. Spend enough time on IG, and you have pretty much seen all the advertised memes, etc. Do this over years, and it just starts to loop on itself, the same memes, the same attempt at reactions, etc.
im sorry for your loss
Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more
[1] https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/
Including, interestingly enough, attention itself!
There's something of a neural "fire together, wire together" explanation for this general phenomenon, no?
Nice, very cool.
Jhanas (when in the positive direction), and dukkha or suffering (as caused by tanha or tension) when applied in the negative direction.
How can you do this in the spirit of what the author is talking about if you have some kind of chronic pain?
completely relate to how panic attacks are often caused by simply overthinking about having one, which causes more symptoms to arise, which leads to more panic...feedback loop. Interesting read.
... "and bloom" is a key missing part of the title.
I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.
Reminds me of the Feynman quote “everything is interesting when you go into it deep enough” (or similar to that).
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”.
One thing that helped me have a better attitude at work and maybe life in general, was reframing how I thought about people with stupid ideas or stupid questions
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
> 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?”
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.
Never realized Feynman said that but have discovered it true myself.
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!
> Even unit testing!
Surely this principle has limits!
This is something I strongly identify with. The world is so full of interesting things that being bored for too long feels like a virtual impossibility. There’s always something new to dig into.
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.
The thrill of discovery lies in the details of the mundane.
It's like being a kid again and finding fascinating new facts around every corner.
No, you get bored with it. Tetris is fun for an hour, but then you get bored, it didn't get more fun after an hour, and people get even more bored after 10 hours. A very small subset of people continue after that and get ever more obsessed with it, that is not normal.
Day 4/10 of Vipassana meditation. This is EXACTLY what happens.
Drug addicts, patients and recreational users start to increase the dosage and chase the high.
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.
This is really good and inspiring writing. I love it.
>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...]
High school tier literature.
I got more of a LinkedIn vibe. "I am good at sex, here's my take on Eastern philosophy".
I couldn't relate either but that doesn't make the article bad.
Goes well with the rationalist/Bay Area-audience in here.
> Art is guided meditation.
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.
congratulations you’ve discovered meditation
So true, my dog loves chasing her own tail.
Weird unnecessary title editing, the “and bloom” part is necessary to the title. Sometimes I don’t know if the title editors here are just bored.
The original title is 6 chars too long for HN.
Attention leads to consciousness, consciousness leads bliss. This is the whole goal of yoga, meditation and eastern spirituality.
> Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon.
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.
Who has time for sex? Gotta grind your leetcode 996 for the next promo, that Bay Area house payment got to come from somewhere.
Pure pretension.
Absolutely. One of the footnotes even uses the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field" as if that actually means something. Barf.
This is the same mechanism behind addiction (IMO, not a psychiatrist). The sustained attention becomes a feedback loop death spiral. Certainly the case for "light" addictions like caffeine, smoking, gambling, etc.
He's right, but he approaches it from the boring physical materialist perspective. Wrong level of analysis.
Go on
I'll take a shot. I think what the OP was alluding to is a modern movement towards "metaphysics" or manifestation.
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.
> We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have.
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.
Appreciate your perspective friend. Correct me if I'm wrong or mischaracterizing, but it feels like you're looking for something concrete or absolute in what I'm saying. In my experience the only thing that feels "absolute" is that nothing is absolute.
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.
> ideas that have always existed. It's not like a new messiah or philosopher came about with this novelty
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?
> there's a deeper mechanism that we're unaware of or aren't ready to know yet
Sure, subconsciousness. No need to invent the whole extra magical worlds.
Man choosing `.xyz` as a TLD in a world with corporate firewalls is such an unforced error.
Pull out your phone, silly