Category Archives: mind

5 Thoughts on the Conscious Mind in Martial Arts Training

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In recent years I’ve spent a lot of time trying to quiet the conscious mind in order to let the subconscious do what it does best. There’s a lot of terminology that’s used to describe the mind state in which one’s actions are effortless and one can adjust swiftly to unforeseen challenges: e.g. “in the zone,” the Flow, Zen mindset, and (in the Kotler and Wheal book I just reviewed) ecstasis. However, regardless of the name, one key to this state is a reduced activity of the part of the mind that’s self-critical and overly cautious, and that requires not letting the conscious mind do what it’s prone to do.

 

However, taking a course on mauythai advanced fundamentals recently has reminded me of the important roles the conscious mind plays in learning. The challenge is to use the conscious mind effectively–without letting it running amok.

 

The conscious mind is largely driven by anxiety about uncertainty. This makes the conscious mind a planner and worst-case scenario generator extraordinaire. (In meditation, I’ve begun to not only note what thought popped into my head before I dismiss said distraction, but I also have a classification scheme of kinds of thoughts, and “planning thoughts” are probably the most common type of thought to hijack my mind.) This planning / forecasting  proclivity can be beneficial if one is doing a job that requires such planning, anticipation of possible hazards, and the need to adjust to complex difficulties. However, it can also make one neurotic, overly risk-averse, and pessimistic.

 

So, here are my five thoughts on the conscious mind in martial arts training.

 

5.) Feed the right wolf:  There’s a well-known story about a Native American man telling his grandchild that inside each person there are two wolves at war, one good and one evil.

The child asks, “Which one wins?”

The old man replies, “The one you feed.”

 

This is a variation on the theme–not so much about good and evil as about positive and negative outlook. In martial arts training there are often competing emotional states. On one hand, there is often anxiety about either being injured or even about the embarrassment of being bested. (Surprisingly, it seems like the magnitude of the latter is often greater than the former.) On the other hand, there is an intense thrill that comes with making progress. For those who don’t understand how martial artists can put themselves through what they do, this is the part for which you’re probably not understanding the intensity of the high. When it clicks and you’re getting it right more often than you previously did, the feeling is transcendent.

 

So, when one sees either of these two feelings arising, choose the latter. If one notices the anxiety, remind oneself the promise of that awesome feeling of having it fall together.

 

4.) Scanning for lapses in form: The process of learning a martial art–like any movement art–is repetition of the movements until they become ingrained in one’s procedural memory. Early in the process, this feels clunky as one has to scan for imperfections in form with one’s super-intelligent but slow and cumbersome conscious mind. However, increasingly, the body begins to incorporate these movement patterns and they start to become second nature. The trick is to keep this in the moment and not let one’s thoughts linger on what one just got wrong, or any perceived ramifications of getting it wrong.

 

3.) Try visualization: This once would have been thought hippie guff, but now it’s entered the mainstream. Of course, the advice from #5 must be kept in mind. When I think of the technique of visualization, I’m reminded of a story that Dan Millman told about a girl that he was coaching in gymnastics. He came to check on her only to find her repeatedly cringing and grimacing. He asked what was going on, and she said she kept falling off the balance beam whenever she visualized her routine. It sounds silly, but attitude is a powerful thing, and I lot of people sabotage themselves in ways not much different from this. It’s your mind, you have the power to do the move perfectly every time, if you take the proper mindset.

 

2.) Conscious mind as governor of action and agent of trust: The subconscious mind can be feral. As one spars, one has to match speeds with one’s opposition so that learning can take place. While sparring looks reminiscent of fighting, the goal of sparring is learning, whereas the goal of fighting is winning (or–as a minimum in actual combat–not being destroyed.)

 

This is another role for the conscious mind. It can keep reminders to the fore to keep one’s movement appropriate to the occasion. It can inject an awareness that there’s a relationship of trust rather than warring competitiveness between. That one needn’t respond at the same magnitude that one would under attack.

 

1.) Dropping the Conscious Mind Out of the Equation: While the conscious mind is critical in the learning process, eventually one must do something that feels uncomfortable, which is shifting subconscious operations to the fore and quieting the conscious mind. Overthinking can be death in tests, competitions, not to mention, I’m told, actual combative situations. At some point you’ve got to have some trust in what you’ve trained to do up to that point. It might fail you, but not necessarily as spectacularly as if you let your conscious run amok, getting caught in a death spiral of self-criticism and futile guesswork.

 

Since I’ve been watching quite a few muaythai fights recently at the Rangsit Boxing Stadium, I’ve begun to wonder just how useful corner advice is. I know that people think it’s beneficial because it’s done in droves. Not only is the fighter’s trainer trying tell them what to do, but also his parents, his siblings, his granny, and a hundred random people who may or may not have put money on him. It would be interesting to see a scientific study of how fighters performed who tuned everything out between rounds versus those who tried to take in all the advice. I tried to look up whether any such study had been done, but a cursor Google search came up empty.

 

What comes of all the corner talk?

What comes of all the corner talk?

BOOK REVIEW: Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

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Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and WorkStealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

“Altered states of consciousness” conjures visions of rogue scientists hitting hallucinogens and then sealing themselves up in sensory deprivation tanks until they either have a breakthrough or a breakdown. This book may touch on such activities, but it’s about something else. It’s about the states of consciousness in which the part of the mind that is critical, overly cautious, and always creating worst case scenarios fades into the background, allowing one to be more effective, happier, and to drop one’s neurotic tendencies. Kotler and Wheal refer to this as ecstasis, borrowing from the Greek word meaning “to get outside oneself.” They differentiate it from the Flow of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with which it clearly has overlap. (One of the authors, Kotler, wrote a great book on the exploitation of Flow by extreme athletes entitled “The Rise of Superman.”) [I’d love to see a Venn diagram of how they see these states overlapping, but—alas—one isn’t provided, though there is some discussion of it.]

 

The book is organized into three parts. The first part consists of three chapters and it both explores what ecstasis is and why it’s so hard to find. The story of how the Navy SEALs designs training to build group Flow states on command is illuminating as is the second chapter’s discussion of how Jason Silva found ecstasis through freewheeling philosophizing. The third of the chapters describes three prominent barriers to achieving these states of mind. These barriers are among the reasons for the rarity of these altered states even though they’re available to everyone.

 

The heart of the book is the second part which describes four avenues by which people pursue these altered states of consciousness: psychology, neurobiology, pharmacology, and technology. The chapter on psychology uses a dialogue series between Oprah and Eckhart Tolle as a stepping off point, probably more because of what it tells us about the scale of yearning for ways to get outside of one’s head than because of the dialogues’ value in facilitating that condition. Positive psychology as recipient of a mantle once held by religion and spiritualism is an important theme in this chapter.

 

The neurobiology chapter isn’t just about the biology of the brain and nervous system; it’s about the integration of brain and body. In it, we learn about how expressions, postures, and gestures can influence our state of mind.

 

Many apparently believe that the story of pharmacology is a much bigger part of this book than it actually is, but it’s a part that’s hard to ignore. As one who seeks non-pharmacological approaches to Flow (I’m more about yoga, meditation, and movement) I still found this chapter fascinating, and perhaps most so in its discussion of other species’ pursuit of chemically induced highs [particularly that of dolphins.]

 

The technology discussed covers a range of approaches from biofeedback devices designed to help one navigate one’s way into the zone, to gear to help one engage in trigger activities at lower risk. For example, the mix of defiance of gravity and high-speed gliding experienced wing-suiting seems to be a potent trigger for ecstasis. It also seems to kill anyone who keeps doing it long enough. So the question is whether one can create the sensation and still achieve the trigger without inevitably experiencing an untimely demise.

 

The grimness of that last paragraph is an apropos lead-in to discussion of the book’s final part, which considers how one can organize one’s pursuit of ecstasis without running into the many pitfalls that coexist with it—from becoming a pleasure junky to dropping out of life to killing oneself. The first of three chapters in the final part discusses the Burning Man festival phenomena in great detail as well as other avenues by which people find themselves drawn into the pursuit of altered consciousness. The next chapter describes how both government and commercial firms have sought to exploit the bliss of these altered states. The last chapter is about how to merge daily life and pursuit of ecstasis in a balanced way so one avoids becoming a pleasure junky who runs his life aground on rocky shoals in pursuit of the next ecstasis fix.

 

The book is endnoted, and has some nice ancillary features—a number of which are available online with the link being given at the back of the book. An appendix that I found interesting was one entitled “Notes on Inside Baseball.” This section discussed a number of controversies that were outside the scope of the book, but which readers might wish to research in greater detail.

 

I found this book to be highly engaging. The authors use the narrative approach throughout to keep it interesting, while at the same time conveying complex ideas in an approachable fashion. They scour many disparate realms in search of this altered consciousness, and so there’s never a dull moment.

 

I’d recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about how to shut down that perpetually critical and gloomy part of the brain so that one can achieve one’s optimal potential.

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5 Untruths Worth Pretending Are True

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pretend_play_preschool

 

William James famously suggested that the path between emotion and expression wasn’t a one-way street. In other words, it’s not just that having an emotion causes us to express it through facial expressions and body language, but also that by assuming a given expressions we create the corresponding emotional state. James might have gone a little far in proposing the emotion can’t exist devoid of its expression, but he came by the belief that you could get to emotion through expression honestly enough.

 

I read about how James, suffering a bad cases of the blues, asked himself what would happen if he behaved as though he was in a happier state of mind. He decided to carry out this experiment, and he soon found himself in a much better mental state. This got me thinking about what else one might pretend that would yield positive results.

 

It should be noted, that there’s been a lot of research on this topic, and it’s been dubbed the “as if principle,” though colloquially people talk about it as “faking it till you make it.” Some of you may be familiar with this idea from the study showing that adopting a Wonder Woman stance made subjects feel more confident. If not, Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk can be viewed here.

 

So, here are five ideas–true or not–that are worth believing:

 

[Note: You’ve got to pretend as if you were a five-year old. Don’t bring those pathetic and puny adult imaginations.]

 

5.) I’m happy:  Starting with the self-ruse most widely known and which James brought to our attention. You may have heard the following advice: if you’re ever feeling down, stand up and pump your fists in the air at an upward angle such that one’s body forms a “Y” (or an “X if you want to keep your feet wide.) This is a hardwired victory behavior written into our evolutionary coding, and it’s hard to be depressed while doing it.

 

4. Oneness / Unity:  Try pretending that you’re connected to everything in the universe. The experience isn’t uncommon with mystics and meditators, as well as those in the Flow. This is an attempt to work it around from the other direction.

Now, some mystic-scientist out there is going to say that this isn’t an untruth because there’s evidence that we are connected to everything, citing quantum entanglement and such like. Maybe so, but as there’s no reason to believe we have a sensitivity to happenings at that quantum state, the pretending is still necessary. (i.e. Even if such entanglement exists, we can no more sense it than we could recognize if a force of 1-trillionth of a gram touched our skin.) Evolution doesn’t grant us capabilities beyond what are needed to survive to procreate, and so I’m doubtful that we have some untapped power to sense quantum entanglement lurking within us.) The oneness we feel has to do with the part of the brain that tracks the “I v.) not-I” divide fading out of operation–rather than an awareness of some web of subatomic entanglement.

This self-subterfuge is a way to simultaneously put one’s worries in perspective while not becoming demoralized about being an insignificant speck in a vast universe. One is an infinitesimal speck in an infinite universe, but one is tied into the universe such that one is simultaneously an infinite universe.

 

3.) Chi / Prana: I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that the immaterial energies of Eastern traditions (Taoism and Yoga, respectively) exist. However, I wouldn’t argue that there’s no benefit from imagining them to exist.  There seems to be little doubt that visualizing the flow of these energies can have benefits–regardless of whether they’re the traditionally advertised benefits or not. Even if you don’t succeed in pulling energy into one’s body directly, sans the middlemen of food and oxygen (so one can live off the dew on a single ginko leaf–ala “Kung Fu Panda”), visualization is good for the brain and the invigorated feeling one creates in pretending chi exists can’t hurt.

 

 

matrix

2.) “There is no spoon:”  This, of course, comes from the movie “The Matrix” in which a young sage / savant attempts to teach the protagonist, Neo, how he can bend a spoon with his mind. The upshot is that one doesn’t try to bend the spoon, one realizes that the spoon is a figment of the imagination.

The idea that we are part of a simulation may turn out to be less far-fetched than it seems. I cite, for example, the TED Talk by physics Nobel Laureate George Smoot.

At any rate, the virtue of the thought exercise of pretending this is true is two-fold. First, one can ask whether one would lead the same life and give events the same weight if one was to discover that one was living out a simulation designed to advance the understanding of some entity (e.g. an alien race, a colossal supercomputer, etc.) Second–and more importantly–one may become more attuned to the fact that one’s own mental / emotional world is full of dream-like simulations. One’s brain is designed to anticipate worst-case scenarios, and it’s exceedingly good at fabricating scenarios that taint our perception of the world with anticipated negative possibilities–most of which will never come to fruition. There are many variants, attributed to various speakers, of the following Mark Twain quote:

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

 

 

1.) There is no I:  A core tenet of Buddhism is that there is no self. Depending what a self has to be to exist as an independent entity, science may yet converge on a similar conclusion. The self seems, at best, to be an emergent property. In the Anil Ananthaswamy book I recently reviewed, it’s compared to a center of gravity. There’s no molecule that can be called the center of gravity, it’s a property that moves around as the body does. It’s definable, but not in terms of a specific location or physical existence.

Pretending there is no self may help put many worries into perspective. Like #4, it may also help one feel more connected to a larger world. But most importantly, it may help one to turn off those parts of one’s mind that are prone to self-loathing, self-denigration, or just self-consciousness.

 

Happy pretending.

nightsky

BOOK REVIEW: The Man Who Wasn’t There by Anil Ananthaswamy

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The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the SelfThe Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

What is the self, and is the self a distinct entity as we feel it to be? Those are questions that philosophers and theologians have been debating for centuries, and they’re the questions at the heart of this book. Ananthaswamy takes a crack at answering by looking at several of the ailments and mental phenomena that seem to steal or morph what we think of as the self.

 

While there are many distinct views on the self, the predominant view has always been the one guided by the way it feels. And it feels like there is some non-material entity—call it a soul, a spirit, a consciousness—that resides in the body though is–in certain extraordinary circumstances–detachable from the body (e.g. death.) This gave rise to a widespread belief that while our physical bodies may have a shelf-life, this non-material bit is eternal—or at least not governed by physical laws.

 

However, as science has illuminated the workings of the brain, it looks more and more as though this “non-material entity” is, in fact, an emergent property or illusion that derives from the activity of our material brain / nervous system. One of the phenomena that a materialist explanation would have once had great difficulty in explaining is the out-of-body experience [OBE.] Historically some may have written these off as fraud, but the cases are common enough and described similarly enough that that strains credulity. However, we now have strong reason to believe that the OBE is a specific kind of hallucination, and that reason is that OBEs can now be consistently induced by neuroscientists applying an electrode to a specific point on the brain. As for the old schools of thought, it seems that the Buddhists were by far the closest when they suggested that there is no self—that it’s illusory.

 

Ananthaswamy’s book consists of eight chapters. Each of the chapters addresses a particular ailment or phenomena of the mind that has something to tell us about what the self is and what it isn’t. If a specific injury, ailment, or consumption of a chemical cocktail makes one feel as though one has lost part of what it feels like to be a person—then we may get some idea where the self resides or where the series of neural activities that feels like a self resides. (Spoiler: There is no single spot in the brain where the self or sense of self resides.)

 

The first chapter gets straight to the heart of the matter by describing Cotard’s syndrome, a disease in which a person swears that he or she doesn’t exist or is dead. This affliction seems to attack the most fundamental sense of self—the gut feeling that one is a distinct living being. Another way that we think of ourselves as that distinct living being is through our life story. Chapter two looks at how diseases like Alzheimer’s shatter this sense of self-hood.

 

Another basic level at which we feel the self is in its correspondence to the confines of our body. However, not even this physically rooted approach to self is unassailable. One may be familiar with cases of phantom limb syndrome in which amputees feel a lost limb. Incidentally, this is another reason people have felt there was a soul—one that didn’t know the body was amputated and kept its original non-material shape, an idea that V.S. Ramachandran’s work showed was likely not the case. Ananthaswamy, however, focuses on an ailment that is the exact opposite of phantom limb syndrome, those who feel that one or more of their limbs are foreign entities. This is where the book’s reporting is at its most intriguing as the author manages to speak with a doctor who does amputations for such people at no small risk to his medical credentials.

 

In chapter two, the author investigated the self as a collection of memories—in other words, the things one has done. Chapter 4 explores people who don’t feel a connection between the actions they are performing and the self even as they are performing said actions. The cases discussed involve patients with schizophrenia.

 

Chapter five examines depersonalization syndrome. With this syndrome, there’s an emotional disconnect which people feel as being in a dream, but during the patients waking life. The chapter focuses on two cases which give different means by which this can occur. One was an individual who was abused as a child, and the ailment seems to have been a defense mechanism to disconnect from the trauma. The other was chemically induced—though, disconcertingly, the effects went on long after all of the drugs should have been out of the woman’s system. Chapter six explores another set of afflictions involving stunted emotional response, and those are the autistic syndromes. The principle case involves a high functioning Asperger who was intelligent enough to learn how to respond even though he had no emotional cues. A quote from that individual that sums up his experience of the world nicely is, “I love my sister, but it’s done purely at a cognitive level. I think love for her; I don’t feel love for her.”

 

The penultimate chapter is where the author describes case of OBE and other hallucinations in which the self seems to migrate, split, or wander. The final chapter continues examining the self free of the body by considering cases of epilepsy. Epilepsy can have many powerful mental effects. One may be familiar with the many cases of “spiritual awakening” that have been attributed to temporal lobe epilepsy. And some have speculated that Joan of Arc, St. Paul of Tarsus, and Mohammed all suffered from epilepsy. Ananthaswamy also presents cases of people on psychedelics—most famously Aldous Huxley.

 

There’s an epilogue that both tells us what the Buddha had to say about self during his first sermon at Sarnath, and sums up what’s been learned about what the self isn’t and what it seems to be. The book is annotated, but there are no graphics or other ancillary matter. It’s really not needed as the focus throughout is narrative, the telling of fascinating cases that illuminate the experience of the self. I appreciate that the author went out and sought some unique cases. I read a fair number of pop neuroscience books, and there are a few cases that get rehashed ad infinitum (Phineas Gage, H.M. etc.) It’s not that Ananthaswamy doesn’t go retell a few of the classics, but he also does some original investigation. The chapters on depersonalization disorder and amputation show this distinct touch.

 

I’d highly recommend this book for those who want insight into the nature of the self from a scientific perspective. I’ve read many books that touch upon the subject as part of a broader theme, but this is the first I’ve read that focuses entirely on this subject from a scientific rather than philosophical or spiritual perspective.

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BOOK REVIEW: Incognito by David Eagleman

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IncognitoIncognito by David Eagleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

This is the book that started me on a fascination with the science of the subconscious mind. In it, Eagleman explains that our subconscious mind has a much bigger role than our consciousness lets us believe. We feel that the conscious mind is in charge of the whole enchilada of our mental being, but in reality the conscious is often late to the party while still managing to weave a narrative about how it saved the day. The conscious has an important role, but one much more limited than it seems, but because consciousness Is the frame through which we are aware the world, it’s easy to miss how much the subconscious handles.

 

The book is organized into seven chapters. The first chapter sets up the notion that the mind is like an iceberg, the subconscious is the more massive portion that lies below the waterline, and the conscious is the peak that lies above.

 

The second chapter explores the interface of the senses and the mind. We think that our sensory experience of the world is like looking through a spyglass, but it’s much more a secondary rendering—subject to editing and corruption. Eagleman discusses many illusions that serve to show us that our sensory experience is not as true as we feel it to be.

 

Chapter three investigates why it is that in some cases the more we think about a task the worse we do with it, and how biases show up even among those who swear they don’t have a racist notion in their body. A number of interesting cases, such as chicken sexing, are used to convey where our conscious mind is of no use to us. Anyone who’s practiced a martial art is aware that sometimes thinking is death.

 

The fourth chapter explains concepts like instinct and our perception of beauty and attractiveness. It’s entitled, “The Kind of Thoughts That Are Thinkable,” and that gives some insight into the theme.

 

The next chapter covers one of the most important ideas of the book, that our brains are not all on one page on any given idea. This is one thing that our conscious mind dupes us into believing, that we have a certain belief and that we are uniformly of that view. In fact, our reasoning and emotional systems often have quite different perspectives on a matter. As I mentioned earlier the people who think they don’t have a racist notion in their body. In one sense, they are correct in that they can reason that it’s illogical to think of people differently based on skin color, but such a person still often shows a marked bias when asked to make associations that are made more quickly when they are not at odds for the subconscious.

 

Chapter 6 gets into the policy ramifications of what has been discussed to this point. If decisions aren’t a product of the conscious mind, then are we right to send people to prison for crimes that they didn’t consciously decide to commit and couldn’t have consciously overruled? The case of Charles Whitman who took up a sniper position in the University of Texas clock tower in 1966 takes center stage in this discussion. Whitman suffered a great change of behavior that was posthumously (by autopsy) linked to the development of a tumor. Eagleman proposes that the traditional question of blameworthiness is the wrong one.

 

The last chapter reflects upon what it means to be a human person in light of a mind arising from material activity. A central idea is the self as an emergent property rather than the “thing” we feel it to be.

 

The book presents many monochrome graphics of various types to support the text. It’s also annotated and has a substantial bibliographic section.

 

I’d recommend this book for anyone interested the nature of the subconscious mind. Eagleman uses interesting cases to demonstrate his points. This makes it quite readable while conveying some challenging ideas.

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5 Ways to Manage Your Email & Social Media Addiction

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Addiction? That seems harsh. It feels like I’m equating a person who has his phone in hand several times every hour with a heroin junky or a nymphomaniac. But, the difference is in the word “Manage.” I wouldn’t write a post entitled “How to Manage your Heroin Addition.” I’d write one called, “Quit that Shit Before it Kills You.”  I’m not suggesting that one needs to do away with checking email and social media. These are great tools that allow us to be much more productive (potentially.)

 

Still, if we’re honest about it, most of us at some point get caught up in the compulsive checking of emails, social media, internet feeds, click-bait sites, sale pages for online retailers, and stats pages. There’s no denying it. A pile of evidence has accumulated about the extent to which people are dismayed by their own e-world activities. I just started reading Kotler and Wheal’s “Stealing Fire” (out February 21, 2017) and they site a study that found that about 2/3rds of those surveyed admitted checking their status page when they woke up in the middle of the night. It might seem off topic for book about altered states of consciousness to report on such matters, but its not because it’s all about the pursuit of a neurochemical bump. (Also, as I’ll discuss, a major problem of this addiction is in keeping one from slipping into the Flow with one’s work, family, or hobby activities.)

 

So, below are five methods I’ve found useful in my own on-going struggle with this addiction.

 

5.) Set a timer:  The problem with this addiction is that when one falls into habitually checking one’s status, one isn’t able to stay on task, and that means that one won’t achieve that elusive state of optimal performance called Flow. One needs time to immerse oneself in a task.

 

When I’m writing and editing, I set a timer, and until it beeps I do nothing off topic. I don’t make it some Herculean effort. I use 60 and 90 minute intervals. After the alarm rings, I can check email, do Tai Chi, get a cup of coffee, or work on my handstands. A longer time period may be more–or less–beneficial for you. (Isaac Asimov was said to only take a break after 5,000 words, but few writers have that in them.) The point is to make it long enough that one can get into a focused state of mind, but not so long that you become distracted and run down.

 

 

4.) Know your high energy period: This point relates to the last because it’s about blocking one’s productive time, and putting the more Flow-demanding activities when one is at one’s best. e.g. Are you a lark or an owl? (i.e. morning person or evening person.)

 

For example, I’m a morning person. This creates a potential problem. While I find it easy to get up with the sun, I’m at risk of saying, “Oh, I’ll just check emails, Facebook, my blog stats, a couple YouTube channels, and then I’ll get to work.” Then it’s noon, and the hours in which my mind was at its very best are gone. From 7pm until I go to sleep is when I should check these feeds because by that time my mind isn’t good for editing or writing tasks that require a high level of attention to detail.

 

 

3.) Go Cold Turkey [for a few days]: Sometimes it’s easier to make changes when one is forced by circumstance to quit. Then one can be more conscientious in resumption of the activity in question. (Moving to India helped me break a lot of bad habits.) If nothing else, this will help to give you confidence that the Earth won’t roll off it’s axis just because you aren’t checking on it twice an hour.

 

I can offer two examples from my own life. Every year my wife and I go on an extended trek in a place where there are no bars and saving batteries is essential. The past couple years, this has been in the Himalayas because we’ve been living in India, but anywhere remote will work. I also did the Vipassana Meditation Course last year. (If you’re interested in the latter, you can read my account of it here.)

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2.) Meditate: Why? Because when you start meditating regularly, you tend to do less and less out of mindless habit. You become conscious of what you’re doing, and that’s the first step to making changes. You also start to become attuned to those very subtle dopamine bumps, and in that way you  aren’t fighting it the impulse blindly. The high of the click is infinitesimally more subtle than taking mind altering substances, and so it’s easy for this all to take place below the waterline (analogizing the mind to an iceberg but instead of the majority of the mass of ice below the waterline, it’s the conscious mind above and the subconscious below.)

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1.) Substitute: In the immortal word of the rock band “The Who.” If your problem is so extensive that it does more than block your attempts to hit the Flow, you may need to find a healthier alternative to wean yourself away.

 

What does one look for in a substitute? If it’s going to fill the same space, it requires immediate feedback and a mix of “fails” mixed in with “successes.” These are the components that make the e-world so addictive. We know immediately whether we got something or not, and that keeps us clicking–not unlike the famous rats that would keep pressing a button for pleasure even to the point of forgetting to eat.

 

Some people may work on games that will help build their brain. (Warning: just don’t trade one unproductive addiction for another.) I’m an advocate of working on physical activities (e.g. trying to develop new capabilities in calisthenics or yoga), but these often involve a demoralizing amount of fails to reach the optimal level (the optimal being that one has enough fails to keep it from being boring but not so many that one is brutalized.)

POEM: Mind Gravity: or, The Heft of Mental Putrefaction

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depression-in-bed

Gravity pulls her head down into the pillow.

Like tar through a garden hose, thoughts flow.

Thoughts weighty, not freed of mass and matter.

As stuck in time and lost to reason as the Hatter.

Thoughts arise because they’re lighter than air.

Hers fell sodden, a lead balloon in the state fair.

The infection arose from a single putrid notion.

One drop floating free to fester across an ocean.

That she wasn’t enough. Enough for whom? Enough for what?

Unanswerable questions that congealed into a sluggish pus.

They say truth has weight, but truth lifts one to fly free.

What pulled her head to pillow was the mass of negativity.

As her thoughts hardened into a slag, devoid of truth or reason.

She summoned the strength for a search in her final season.

She scoured the four corners of the Earth for a fabled cure.

But it lie in a place close at hand, but vastly more obscure.

5 Books to Introduce You to Your Subconscious

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In a world free of frontiers, the subconscious mind is the final frontier.

 

Below are a few books that I found useful. The hyperlinks forward to my review on GoodReads or the book’s GoodReads page.

 

Also, I’ve included three honorable mention books that I haven’t yet reviewed, but which seem both relevant and intriguing.

 

5.) Brainwashing by Kathleen Taylor: What makes some minds more malleable than others and how are minds bent to a given purpose? In learning the answers, one discovers that the bases of our beliefs are often more deep-seated than one might believe.

brainwashing_taylor

 

 

4.) Sleights of Mind by Macknik & Martinez-Conde: Magicians and mentalists are notoriously skilled at exploiting the chinks in the armor of  our minds.

sleights_of_mind

 

 

3.) Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow: Physicist and pop science writer, Leonard Mlodinow, explores the many ways in which our behavior is more influenced from the back of the house than we feel to be the case.

subliminal

 

 

2.) The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: This is my nod to the fact that the Western scientific community isn’t the only entity that has something useful to say on this subject. Tibetan Buddhists have a long tradition (arguably predating Buddhism and into the Bon-era) of dream yoga (lucid dreaming) and our dreams offer the greatest portal to the subconscious.

tibetanyogas

 

 

1.) Incognito by David Eagleman: Eagleman tells us that our conscious mind represents the tip of the mental iceberg, and he explores the many ways in which we are subject to the vagaries of what exists below the surface.

incognito_eagleman

 

 

Here are a few others.

 

The Man Who Wasn’t There by Anil Ananthaswamy: I just finished this book. In it, the author investigates whether there really is  such a thing as the self by studying a number of diseases and phenomena of the mind that look like negations of self. (e.g. Cotard’s Syndrome in which people insist they are dead, depersonalization disorder in which life seems a dream in a literal rather than poetic sense, out-of-body-experiences in which there is a hallucination that one is outside one’s body, etc.)

 

The Attention Merchants  by Tim Wu: I haven’t read this one yet, but it’s said to be good and is about how our programming is exploited to keep us clicking. If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t seem to just drop social media even when it seems like a phenomenal waste of time–why it exerts such a strong pull–this book delves into what proclivities of the mind have been seized upon.

 

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal: I’m about 1/3rd of the way through this one. It has some overlap with the Wu book. In it, McGonigal asks why games have so much appeal–even to the extent of becoming addictive. As with why we keep clicking, the answer has a lot more to do with the primitive parts of our mind than the high tech subject matter might suggest.

BOOK REVIEW: The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

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The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the WorldThe Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

This book combines travel writing with pop science discussion of what makes people happy (or unhappy.) Weiner travels to ten countries in pursuit of happiness, and reflects upon the cultural components of bliss.

Some of the countries, like Switzerland and Iceland, rank among the world’s happiest in international surveys. Some of the countries, such as Qatar and America, have every reason to be happy, but aren’t necessarily as blissful as the rest of the world would expect. Some of them, like India and Thailand, have good reason to be unhappy, and yet they manage to be global exemplars of happiness [at least within certain domains.]

Then there are a few nations that have unique relationships to happiness. Bhutan has a national policy on happiness [plus it’s a Buddhist country, and Buddhism probably offers the most skillful explanation of what it takes to be happy of any world religion.] Moldova provides a counterweight as it’s one of the least happy countries in the world. Weiner visits the Netherlands in part because one of the biggest academic centers studying happiness is located in Rotterdam, but it also offers an opportunity to study whether the country’s unbridled hedonism (drugs and prostitution are legal) correlates to happiness. That leaves Great Britain, a country known for wearing the same happy face as its sad, terrified, and enraged faces.

I’ve been to half of the countries on Weiner’s itinerary, and—of the others—I’ve been to countries that share some—though not all—of the cultural constituents of happiness. (e.g. I haven’t been to Qatar, but I’ve been to the UAE. I haven’t been to Moldova, but I’ve seen somewhat less grim Eastern European states. I haven’t been to Switzerland or Iceland but I’ve been to cold countries in Western Europe. I haven’t been to Bhutan, but I’ve been in areas where Tibetan Buddhism was the dominant cultural feature.) This allowed me to compare my experiences with the author’s, as well as to learn about some of the cultural proclivities that I didn’t understand during my travels. And I did find a lot of common ground with the author, as well as learned a lot.

I found this book to be interesting, readable, and funny. Weiner has a wacky sense of humor that contributes to the light-hearted tone of the book—perfect for the subject. That said, some people may be offended because the author doesn’t pull punches in the effort to build a punchline, and this sometimes comes off as mocking cultures. However, in all cases—even that of Moldova—Weiner does try to show the silver lining within each culture.

The paperback edition I read had no graphics or ancillary matter. There are no citations or referred works (except in text), and the chapters are presented as journalistic essays. The chapters largely stand alone, and so one could read just particular countries of interest. He does refer back to events that happened in earlier chapter or research that related to another country’s cultural proclivities, but not often. The first chapter, on the Netherlands, would be a good one to read first because he describes many of the scientific findings on happiness in that one.

I would recommend this book for anyone interested in what makes some places happier (or sadder) than others.

View all my reviews

5 Tips for Introverts

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5.) Eye contact: Train yourself to be aware of eye contact. Eye contact doesn’t come naturally for an introvert. It’s common to not only avert one’s gaze, but to zone out in the process because one’s mind is trying to anticipate the direction of the conversation and formulate a replies. There’s not enough consciousness left for monitoring the visual stream. This has a number of side-effects such as:

-missing non-verbal cues

-appearing uninterested

-staring in the wrong direction (crotches, cleavage, Hells Angels, etc.)

Just don’t let the pendulum swing too far such that one stares like a homicidal maniac.

 

4.) Scheduling: Bracket social and /or noisy events with quiet time. It’s not just social activity that can be draining for the introvert, being in environments with high levels of sensory stimulation will run down one’s energy even if one isn’t interacting socially. Living in India, I find that sometimes just walking down the street and minding my own business wears fairly rapidly. In moderated doses, these sensory-intensive situations are enjoyable and beneficial, but the secret is to avoid redlining. Extended periods of high stimulation may result in you being grumpy and / or dull.

 

3.) Readings: Come on, you’re an introvert, you know you love reading. There are a number of books that have come out in recent years to help introverts both better understand introversion and to learn to arrange their lives in a manner optimized to it. I’ll mention two of the more well-known ones.

The first is The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney. I mention this one first because it was the first book I read on the subject, and it transformed my thinking about what it meant to be introverted. Though I’m an introvert, I didn’t really understand introvertism until I read Laney’s work.

introvertadvantage_laney

 

The more well-known and critically acclaimed book, however, is Quiet by Susan Cain.

quiet_cain

 

2.) Introversion ≠ Shyness: Know the difference between introversion and shyness (social anxiety.) Introversion has long been considered synonymous with shyness. Even many psychologists and mental health professionals seem to believe they are one in the same–or at least they did until the recent spate of books, TED Talks, etc. It’s true that many people are both shy and introverted, but it’s more complicated than that. One can be extroverted and shy. Talk about a raw deal. The shy introvert faces forces pulling them in one direction. The shy extrovert is being pulled in two different directions at once.

 

1.) Embrace it:  Accept your introverted nature. Given an extrovert bias, there’s a proclivity for introverts to wish they were extroverted or to even try to force themselves to be so. This is a recipe for disaster. I discussed the difference between introversion and shyness above, shyness is something that one can work on reducing through visualization, mindfulness, and–most importantly–practice interacting, but introversion is hardwired.