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.
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've been learning to draw lately and I was having some serious "getting started" issues every time. For me the trick was to not go "I will now practice drawing" but to go "I will now hold a pencil and browse through my old drawings". It ends me up holding a pencil and looking at a blank page.
I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties.
Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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!”
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've been learning to draw lately and I was having some serious "getting started" issues every time. For me the trick was to not go "I will now practice drawing" but to go "I will now hold a pencil and browse through my old drawings". It ends me up holding a pencil and looking at a blank page.
I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.
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.
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...
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.
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.
“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
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.
Lao Tzu didn't say this. It appears to date from the owner of a supermarket chain in the 1970s
Yes, it's a very ancient idea.
"As we think, so we become."
- Buddha
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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)
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 Russian, you "spare" attention by "making" it. The word 'уделять' shares the same root with the word that means - 'deed', 'doing', 'act' or 'affair'.
In German, you "direct" attention at something or "gift" attention to someone.
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.
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?
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
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
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
I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties.
Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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??
A little too hippie-like for my tastes, but an interesting message. Attention may impact long-term enjoyability of even simple things.
> 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.
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).
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 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?
... "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”.
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.
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.
Day 4/10 of Vipassana meditation. This is EXACTLY what happens.
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.
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.
>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.
This is really good and inspiring writing. I love it.
> 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.
He's right, but he approaches it from the boring physical materialist perspective. Wrong level of analysis.
Go on
Pure pretension.
Absolutely. One of the footnotes even uses the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field" as if that actually means something. Barf.
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.
Man choosing `.xyz` as a TLD in a world with corporate firewalls is such an unforced error.
Pull out your phone, silly