PROPORTIONAL MANIPULATION

December 27th, 2019

Losing a sense of proportion makes navigating incredibly difficult.  To get a sense of this, just think about the person who draws a map of your town or city.  Imagine if that person had drawn the map in accordance to their experience of the place.  Their own home would probably be quite big, and the route between that home and where that person works would be prominent and detailed, and perhaps a few hangouts and houses of friends would also be large, but what about all the places our cartographer hadn’t been?  These might only get the most cursory treatment, if any at all.  Now how useful would this map be for a tourist?

It’d be terrible, and potentially even useless.

The structure of the brain demonstrates a similar distortion with the somatosensory cortex and the motor cortex.  These are the parts of our brain that register sensations, physical orientation and movement.  In the fields of study that involve these brain regions a distorted homunculus is used to illustrate the proportional attention our own brain pays the body.

These homunculi look like action figures whose bodies are tiny, but equipped with gargantuan hands, huge heads and budging mouths, lips and tongues.

The motor cortex in particular devotes an absolutely enormous amount of real estate to the hands.  And this makes sense if you consider how drastically humans have altered the natural environment, and you realize that this has been accomplished almost exclusively through our use of our invaluable little platoon of fingers and opposable thumbs.  More brain space is devoted to a single hand than the rest of the body below the neck and wrists.  This distortion is useful since it’s far more important to have an accurate idea of what’s going on with your hands than it is say, a random patch of skin on the side of your thigh.

We all have an intuitive sense of this – just think of all the movies where a character takes a moment to realize they have a wound in their midsection or leg, as opposed to the instances when you get a tiny paper cut on the tip of your finger. 

The sliced finger registers a lot more pain because in some sense it’s a more important part of the body from a utility standpoint.  We don’t use a random patch of skin on the side of our thigh all the much when it comes to getting a sense of the physical world around us.  Our hands, however, are vital.

We experience a similar and far less valuable distortion.  Given all the topics that we think about, or might think about, each one registers some sort of emotion.  Some emotions are fairly insignificant, and then there’s other topics that trigger an immense emotional balloon that can expand to overwhelm our sense of reality. 

Most modern experiences of fear fall into this second category.  We feel enormous amounts of fear that eventually prove to be fairly useless.  Often we look back and think

“why was I so scared?  It didn’t matter anyway..”

This is an emotional distortion, and it’s part of an emotional system that’s most likely outdated and ill-fitted to it’s modern context.  While fear may have been very useful 100,000 years ago, it functions now, primarily as a maladaptation that hampers creativity and potential.

Things like jealousy and anger, which are perhaps a subset of fear probably also qualify as a maladaptation in today’s world.  The behavior that we partake in when anger or jealous almost never registers a positive change in our life, while in past millennia, these probably had important, if not vital roles in survival.  Regardless of the details of the past, it’s easy to see the relative uselessness of such emotions today.

Our emotional homunculi is an awkward creature in a society full of creature comforts.

But luckily, unlike our somatosensory cortex or a our motor cortex, the emotional distortions and proportions upon which most of our behaviors springs can be drastically edited.

The mere awareness of an emotion is enough to get a handle on its out grown proportion.  With a mindfulness practice, our perspective gains an ability to toggle the size of the context.

When something triggers an emotion to suddenly spike out of proportion with the situation, our perspective can “zoom-out” in a sense, counteracting the distorting view of reality created by a lens of emotion.

OUR OWN PLACE

December 26th, 2019

It’s no secret that most meetings are considered useless by the people attending those meetings.  And yet it seems to be the default tool of productivity for many corporations.  If it’s not actually effective as a productivity tool though, what exactly is going on?

If we think of the only real other group setting, that of a social group gathering, we might wonder in a similar way.  Socializing is, apparently to initiate, nurture and grow our relationships.  The group setting might be great for meeting and beginning relationships, but how effective is the group setting when it comes to the aim of deepening a relationship? 

Group settings often require a common point of distraction, like a sports game, or a board game, or a contentious topic to banter and argue about.  The sort of fulfilling conversations that deepen relationships don’t really happen in group settings.  They happen with fewer people around, in private.

The group setting is primarily – it seems – a tactic to feel less alone.  While groups can be incredibly effective and productive, the vast majority of meetings and social gatherings only seem to be undertaken in order to immerse everyone in the feeling that there are people around.

As the numbers around us dwindle, things get more specific and interesting.  The sort of depth that can occur between two or three friends is simply impossible in a larger group where different dynamics come into play.

There’s something somewhat desperate about the vast desire to socialize, and it may simply be that we see others yearning for the same thing, but more likely this has to do with an inability to direct solitude in a fulfilling manner rather than any real tangible or psychological benefit that comes from the company of a group.

Similar to the reason people prop up in order to sidestep an honest consideration of practicing meditation, the avoidance of solitude is often rooted in a fear of what someone might find when left alone with themselves. 

Undistracted by a movie, or a book, or any of the usual delights, what is left for a person?

It’s worth noting that our worst punishment short of death is solitary confinement.  We’ve somehow trained each other to think that being alone is something terrible, and we are so convinced of this that it’s leveraged as a kind of torture.

But is this realistic?  Is it that unbearable to spend time with one’s own thoughts?

Without training, perhaps.

Without a real understanding of the benefits, probably.

With a fear of solitude running wild, then certainly,

as Milton once wrote:

“The mind is it’s own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Simply put, we are capable of torturing ourselves, using nothing but our own mind.  This everything tool can of course be inverted and we can bask in a personal paradise if we so aim.

Given this, it’s interesting to wonder if the common wisdom about socializing and company and spending time in groups really holds any real water in the weight of its argument.

Is it possible that we actively hold one another back from our own personal paradise?

Certainly.

Can it pay off big time to go against the crowd? 

Certainly.

Might this issue of solitude packaged as loneliness might be one of the areas where the wisdom of the masses has it exactly wrong?

Well, it’s certainly hard to figure that out with so many people around.

DRAFT ZERO

December 25th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Aliyah Shaeffer, you can connect with her on Twitter @AliyahShaeffer

Speech and writing are not the same thing.  Though each can be superficially converted into the other by transcription or reading, the act of writing and the act of simply talking produce different outcomes.

We need only think of the difference of reading a speech vs. talking about a subject impromptu.  Or we might compare the first draft of a piece of writing with the final draft.

But even this last comparison isn’t necessarily a fair one.  Any first draft isn’t even that, once actually written.  Draft zero occurs in the mind, and currently we cannot capture thoughts as fast as we have them.  With the act of writing, sentences can easily change in the mind as they are slowly brought out onto the page.  Our mind runs over the tail end of the sentence in several different ways as the actual writing pulls it out of the ether of consciousness and nails it down in some tangible way.  Or of course, there are the false starts which are unavoidable in speech and talk but merely warrant a rapid fire punch of the delete key.  Even with this first draft, we are already editing, albeit on the fly.

What speech and writing do have in common is that we don’t exactly have an idea what words will tumble out of our mouth or onto the page.  It’s a bit like going to a movie.  We might have seen the trailer and have a vague, somewhat emotional feel for what is going to happen, but the details from moment to moment, from word to word, are a surprise. 

For example with this episode, the topic has been on tumble-dry in the brain for a couple days, and the conclusion which these words are leading up to was certainly the only concrete aspect of consideration up until the actual act of writing.  The concept of a  Draft Zero emerged somewhat on it’s own, and it seems to have a nice ring to it, indicating that private ethereal realm where our thoughts compose themselves.

The crowning feature of writing addresses our terrible biological memory.  Just think for a moment of the times during conversation when the topic has veered off on a tangent and neither person can remember exactly what they were talking about a minute or two earlier.  Or even more insidious is the gaslighter in an argument who uses the poor human memory against their opponent by misremembering an earlier point in a way that benefits their own aims. 

Very few, if any of us can remember a conversation word for word for any meaningful length of time.  Speech disappears almost as fast as we produce it, creating only faint ripples in the mind.  We remember tiny blips of conversations, general gist’s, and maybe a quote here and there.  We’re probably even subject to the peak-end rule, which dictates that our memory of anything is primarily determined by how it ended and the few peak-emotional moments during the course of the event.

But

Writing affords us a perfect memory, and the reflective benefit of such tractable fidelity of thought cannot be understated.  We can experience a piece of writing over and over with no lapse of memory as we might when we try to think of a conversation we had a week ago.

More importantly is the fact that such writing can be our own thoughts.  We all have a somewhat strange tendency to think that we have solid identities that persist through time, and these identities are composed of values which embody prescriptions of action based on what we think of the world.  This might be true for some people, but it is more likely to be true for those who have devoted time and energy to the study of their own thoughts.

To put it mildly, most people don’t even know their own thoughts.  They just experience them as they happen.

But those who write not only discover what they really think about things, but the ability to reread what one has written allows a person to disagree with their own position with a level of resolution that simply doesn’t exist given our feeble working memory.

Tinkered Thinking, for example, has had almost no planning for it’s 600+ episodes.  Only mere keywords to provoke exploration have served as the basis and seed for these episodes.  What has emerged in the process, such as the developing Rivalnym framework, the analysis of Money, the increasing focus and analysis of Questions, and more – all of these were surprises until they were written down.

Writing is ultimately much like any endeavor: you won’t know what you’ll find until you get going.

Tinkered Thinking began with a simple question:  is it possible to write about the same general topic everyday for 20 minutes?  The original goal was just a year, but after 600 days, a light obligation has turned into a valuable necessity, one that provides a tiny sense of accomplishment, no matter how failed or wasted the rest of the day seems.  The simple exercise has opened up realms of conceptual imagination that before only felt as though they might be there.  The writing actively maps these imaginary areas, making them real, if only by virtue of being black marks on a page.

People certainly sell themselves short on what they think they can do.

The writing version of this would be that people underestimate their own capacity for thoughtfulness and imagination, whether that be fictional novels or novel ideas, so much more exists within a single perspective than even that perspective can realize without actively turning inward and bringing out that inner world: 

With writing, we map ourselves onto the real world.

Our thoughts then become a piece of reality that we can work with, and change, and by so doing, we change ourselves.

RULE OF THUMB - FRESH START

December 24th, 2019

There’s a simple rule of thumb about whether you should call it quits for the day, when the frustration is too great, the problem too convoluted, the work simply not moving.

Is the problem mental or physical?

Or rather, are we failing to make progress because of our emotions?  Because we feel defeated or stupid or aimless?

Or is it because we keep trying to rub the headache from our temples, keep yawning, and squirming, and reaching for the coffee?

If the problem is a mental and emotional one, then keep pushing.  Don’t give in to the fresh start.

If the problem is legitimate physical exhaustion, then just go to bed.

When you’re truly in the flow, you’ll stay up without realizing it.

When the body needs rest, it’s most likely the brain that needs the rest.

Sweet dreams.

MEDITATION: COMPOUND PRACTICE

December 23rd, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Sam McRoberts.  You can connect with Sam on Twitter at @Sam_Antics

This episode begins with a description of pyramids that at first may seem off topic and perhaps even convoluted.  There are a couple rudimentary drawings accompanying this episode on tinkeredthinking.com that might help if the physical descriptions begin to feel as though they are describing la-la land.  Do remember though, this is ultimately about the long-term effects of consistent meditation.  If a few minutes of description feels a bit much, then perhaps the episode might be best taken to heart.

There are two ways to build a pyramid.

To be clear, let’s put aside the veritable monument of human argument about what might have happened in Egypt a few thousand years ago.

Rather let’s examine the feat in a far more simplistic way, the way a child might when a toybox full of blocks is at hand.

One way is to plan out the whole thing.  Determine the height you want and from that determine how wide the base needs to be and then start from the bottom by laying a huge flat base and then slowly working up one level at a time until the entire thing is finished.

The other way is to realize that a pyramid is somewhat fractal in nature regarding the way you can build it.  Without diving too deeply into a strict definition of fractals, we can look at a large pyramid and see that there are potentially many much smaller pyramids inside of it.  We can even see this as a concentric phenomenon, like an onion.  Peel back a layer of an onion and it still looks like an onion.

The second way to build a pyramid is to build the smallest most basic pyramid.  A child with some blocks would use maybe 5 to accomplish this.  4 placed in a square as the base and a second level consisting of just one placed on top in the center of this 2 X 2 square.

We might term this the minimum viable success when it comes to building pyramids.

What’s interesting about this, and how it relates to something like meditation is how the size of the jump changes when we go to the next complete pyramid that we can build on top of this first basic one.

If a child were to add to this tiny pyramid in order to make it bigger, the jump is far bigger than we might at first think.  First the child would add a row of blocks around the base, creating a new perimeter, which would be an additional 12 blocks.  And then blocks would need to be added to the next layer which currently only has 1.  This would be an additional 8 blocks.  This creates a foundation that can then support an additional layer of 4 on top of it and then a final pinnacle once again of one block to make it a complete pyramid.

Think of this for a moment.  The most basic pyramid is 5 blocks.  4 on the first layer and 1 block on the top.  The next legitimate pyramid we can build on top of this basic structure is a pyramid that is suddenly double the height, 4 layers tall and it requires and additional 37 blocks on top of the original 5 for a total of 42 blocks.  This is a massive jump.

If we were to go through this process again, the pyramid would rise two levels but this would require 51 additional blocks! more than doubling the total amount to 93.

We could have started with a base level of 36 and then added a second layer of 25, but if we think of each block as a unit of time, then putting these all into place means it’s going to be a long time until we see something that looks like a complete pyramid.  Whereas by making the smallest pyramid possible first, it only takes 5 blocks and we see a pyramid very quickly.

As with the practice of any skill where we can become better, its possible to recognize a similar trend with the results that we get based on the time and energy we put in.  The first ten hours of practice can get you something like that first basic pyramid in terms of ability.  And then practice can often feel like it’s plateaued.  As though no real improvement is happening, and then all of sudden it feels like a breakthrough has occurred and our ability has matured.  It’s as though our constant pyramid building has suddenly resulted momentarily in the shape of a bigger complete pyramid.  But we continue to practice and more time and effort passes before we see the same thing happen again on a new scale.

With meditation, particularly with mindfulness practices, it’s generally accepted that 3 to 4 months are required before results start to show up.  Many certainly report a honeymoon period during the first few weeks, though it’s quite possible this is more excitement about embarking on a new endeavor than it is any real tangible result from meditation.  FMRI scans also seem to indicate some truth regarding this 3 month trend.  Changes in brain structure remain unnoticeable until at least 3 months of daily continuous practice.  We might think of this milestone in a practice of meditation as that first basic pyramid.

Let the imagination follow this analogy further and we might wonder what that second pyramid would look like in terms of “results” regarding meditation.  As we saw with our child building the pyramid, it’s quite a jump between that first one and the second, and this might make the analogy quite apt for meditation. 

Well regarded figures in the field of meditation like Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein, have reported that things like anxiety and depression decrease significantly over time, or that one’s relationship to these emotional experiences changes so drastically that any practical description might as well report their disappearance. 

While this result is anecdotal, and doesn’t seem to have any hard science to back it up, it does seem to be widespread and nearly uniform among those who maintain a practice for many years.  This writer, for one, can add to such anecdotal evidence by saying that something fundamental regarding negative emotions starts to undergo a profound shift after a period of 2 or 3 years of consistent daily practice.

After enough practice and time, something like ambient anxiety, or the likelihood of anxiety to suddenly spike simply begins to fade and eventually they dissolve entirely.  The emotions that do crop up seem as though they have higher resolution, with more specificity, and something like anxiety in retrospect takes the character of an unresolved cloud that had more to do with a confusion as to what was really occurring rather than a genuine reaction to our experience of reality.

Meditation, in this sense, really is an example of results that only come with consistency and patience.  Just as the scenic route is fundamentally at odds with the concept of the shortcut, we have to put in the time to reap the benefits here.

Pushing beyond these practical benefits allows the mind to enter an entirely new definition of progress.  As opposed to the anticipation that comes with the pleasure of seeing a full pyramid finally materialize again after so long, progress begins to take on a fractal nature.  With enough of a pyramid built, the placement of each block looks as though it completes an entirely new small pyramid embedded in the larger one.

Tangible goals like those initial markers of progress like increasing focus and attention or decreasing anxiety and panic attacks - these dissolve as the moment gains a higher and higher resolution.

Consistent effort eventually pays off, but if continued, the consistent effort eventually resolves into it’s own reward until there is no difference between practice and the reason why we sit down to practice in the first place.