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Your brain runs your body using something like a budget
- charlieflowers 6y agoThis is a perspective on mental health I've never heard before. Interesting.
- trevyn 6y agoIt's a pretty trendy perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
- tasogare 6y agoI live with a chronic condition that is slowing my metabolism and I don't think that metaphor is really apt. If it were an energy budget I could cram it in a few hours, or doing only a few things and feel well all the day. This is not how it works, it's more like a hard cap on the number of hours a day I can do things, and a cap in the intensity as well. What I noticed recently is that it creates a very effective negative feedback loop: since keeping things going on is taking all my energy already, I have no energy to consult with would improve the situation.
- cheschire 6y agoDoes the budget metaphor work better for you if you consider your chronic condition to be alimony?
- lazyasciiart 6y agoI don't think it would. It sounds more like each additional simultaneous spoon costs more effort than two spoons at different times. A cash flow issue, where you only have one spoon available each (time unit), spoons saved from the past are worth less and you can borrow spoons from the future at a high rate to be paid back within the day.
- toddh 6y agoMaybe a way to think of it is that energy is not a part of your discretionary spending budget?
- winter_blue 6y ago> Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times. No. This is such a dreadful, and terrible and empty perspective that disembowels life of deeper meaning and of true purpose. It’s another one of those sad perspectives that tells people that they are nothing but automatons, that their lives are fundamentally meaningless, and that they are a product of “accident or chance”. It’s a highly depressing, and a dark and empty way of looking at life. (For full disclosure, I’m a Christian and believe in God and in a higher purpose for all that exists in this universe.)
- trevyn 6y ago>their lives are fundamentally meaningless Yes. >they are a product of “accident or chance” Yes. >they are but MeetMe automatons Hahahahahah no, only if they choose to be. Deeply understanding the implications of points 1 and 2 give you the freedom to not put up with bullshit, and can lead to, dare I say it, salvation? Where science and religion merge into a coherent whole is the true kingdom of heaven.
- ElectronShak 6y agoChristianity, in the mind of God, is NOT religion. Read the New Testament.
- trevyn 6y agoI'm curious about what you're saying, but I do not currently have the time budget to read the New Testament. Could you explain?
- winter_blue 6y agoI think he’s alluding to thaw idea where Christians call a Christianity a relationship with God (and not a religion). In my opinion though, the relationship nature of Christianity holds up well both in the Old Testament and New Testament.
- nek28 6y agoIf interested to dig in further I recommend Antonio Damasio's work. I think his is the main contribution to this new way of thinking about the mind's connection to the body.
- rexpop 6y agoOne the one hand, I take some satisfaction when this kind of self-care housekeeping occupies my mind in times of distress, but on the other hand, the fact that my brain is so capable (and then some, unconsciously) doesn't necessarily imply that these are my brain's exclusive capabilities, and so the title (and the thesis) aren't usefully accurate. > A bad stomach ache that follows an indulgent meal may send us to the gastroenterologist, but if we experience that same ache during a messy divorce, we may head to a psychotherapist instead. This certainly echoes my experience, but can just as easily speak to the difficulty of deduction.
- dane-pgp 6y agoI found that discussion of the gastroenterologist and the psychotherapist odd too. The writer says: > In body-budgeting terms, however, this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful. But surely going to a gastroenterologist for help with your (non-existent) divorce or a psychotherapist for (unnecessary) diet ideas, means you are not fixing the underlying problems. That just suggests that obscuring the distinction between mental and physical is not so helpful.
- closeparen 6y agoI remember reading somewhere that one of the main risk factors for depression is living in a culture where being depressed is a thing that people do. Other cultures are not immune, but they might instead get e.g. stomachaches.
- jtsiskin 6y agohttp://archive.today/dox09 http://archive.today/dox09
- Philser 6y agoThanks a bunch
- toshk 6y agoIt seems we like to put mental models of things we easily understand and can control on our complex human body which we don't understand. The brain like a computer, the body has a budget. If only biology was so simple, or well maybe it's better, it seems a lot more robust and dynamic then our straightforward human creations. Anyway moral of the story if you are tired or stressed take some rest.
- skohan 6y agoI think the brain-as-computer metaphor is actually a really poor one. Our conscious, linguistic mind is a lot like a single-threaded computer, but the brain as a whole has a lot of fundamentally different properties, and the metaphor often leads us to misleading conclusions.
- prox 6y agoAbsolutely. Our body works with lots of gradients, that’s what I know. I once talked to a human movement specialist, and he told me you could study the nervous system all your life and still not know everything. Same for a lot of other systems in your body.
- sfvisser 6y agoIf you’re comparing hardware you’re probably right. Our big blob of neurons has a completely different mode of operation compared with the silicon circuits in the computers we know. However, if you go higher up the ladder of abstraction the story changes I think. Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary. We can talk about systems and sub-systems, foreground and background jobs, interfaces and telemetry, sequential and parallel processing, latency, efficiency versus accuracy, overfitting, etc. The underlying implementation might be completely different there are similarities and thinking about them can be useful.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoYeah, approximately nobody thinks that the brain is literally a CPU.
- anonytrary 6y agoArticle was really interesting until final few paragraphs revealed that it was about "how to gaslight yourself". That said, it is important to have a checklist of basic needs that you constantly remind yourself to recalculate. If you aren't getting enough sleep, and experience symptoms of depression, the first solution is to try and get more sleep. Never sulk in your condition. Iterate and see if it helps, and repeat.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoSo the main point of the article is that mental and emotional processes, especially stressful, take a toll on the body, in terms of energy and other resources used up? How do you live a good life past like 10 years old without knowing this? Isn't this a basic understanding of your own body that you get after your first stressful moments and notice that you don't feel as sharp or energetic, even though you didn't do anything physical? Isn't that the same exact thing that all the doctors talk about whey they say "less stress" to recovering patients etc.? What is the new thing here?
- throwaway56034 6y agoWhat you've written is indeed obvious, but IMO that wasn't the point of the article. Consider this quote: "Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood." IMO the point she tries to convey is that the budget doesn't track actual, objective resource use, which also means that individual budget constraints are not only constrained by the actual physiology, i.e. with training (mindfulness and so on) one can move the baseline and thus e.g. stress resistance. Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoThat's most likely true, and there are probably a lot of people like that. It is just hard for me to understand how they live and why it has become like that. And maybe there are some ways in which I am in the same way, perhaps regarding other obvious things?
- throwaway56034 6y ago
- nosmokewhereiam 6y agoIs there a list of emotions? I'm very rational, and I'm afraid I may have missed a lot growing up without them.
- ayayecocojambo 6y agoit is written in your mind/body. you need to look back untill it is too late.
- carapace 6y agohttps://www.healthline.com/health/list-of-emotions https://www.healthline.com/health/list-of-emotions ? As the above linked article points out, "Keep in mind that this is just one way of categorizing emotions." Some emotions don't have English names! It's been said that each muscle in the body has a corresponding emotion in subjectivity. Look up something called "Body Scan" meditation, it might help you get more in touch with your emotions.
- pessimizer 6y agoEmotions are culturally-bound post hoc rationalizations of the activation of the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems. You aren't broken.
- dandanua 6y agoYeah, but how do you realize that the brain is not for thinking without thinking?
- gerbilly 6y agoI'm surprised the article didn't mention 'Central Governor Theory'¹ which proposes that exercise fatigue is not a physical sensation but more like an 'emotion' created by the brain to prevent over-exertion. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor
- azeirah 6y agoWhile her book doesn't mention this phenomenon by name, it does reference this exact concept. She mentioned that this is something marathon runners have to learn. When they're getting fatigued, it doesn't mean that they're out of energy at all, it's just a warning sign.
- nanis 6y agoDo people really think the collective functioning of organs that have evolved to cohabitate in a given lump are not subject to constraints so that the lump doesn't all apart? The fact that each subsystem evolved in that environment to get cues from common signals does not mean there is a thing that is aware of the fact that it has communication lines to, say, kidneys, and lungs etc. Given that every single thing is subject to constraints, the things that evolved to work together must be, by necessity, relying on a signaling mechanism so one part does not fall apart trying to fulfill the demands of other parts. Otherwise, the thing we are looking at, in this context, brain in a body, could not have existed in this arrangement.
- hliyan 6y agoWhile the article doesn't state it explicitly, this seems to imply that there exists a level of feedback from our body to our state of mind that we might not be comfortable with: we think our thoughts are always our own and our thoughts give rise to our emotions, but sometimes our thoughts may actually be the result of something happening in our gut, heart, lungs or skin. We can never fully be sure because our mind seems to maintain a perfect illusion of executive control.
- curiousllama 6y agoI would argue that is more than sometimes. Ever get hangry? Or depressed 3 hours after you finish your coffee? Or irritable when someone wakes you up at 4am? Those thoughts you have (“WHO THE HECK calls at 4am?”) is driven by a physiological need (sleep) not logic, as it might be during the day.
- social_quotient 6y agoAside: In the age of cell phones - is the old adage of 4am calls a dying thing? Speaking for myself I can remember when that was a thing and now that you mention it, it’s no longer a thing because my phone is on silent all the time. What’s counterintuitive is that in the age of instant access to everyone, always connected living, it’s significantly more difficult to get my attention at 4am than it used to be. Same for everyone else?
- silverpepsi 6y agoYes but I don't know how interesting it is, it will soon be forgotten. Basically I see a lot of observations like this, where people reminisce how things "used to be" based on the technological limitations of first gen tech. One guy was complaining on my Facebook about how the battery went dead on his car remote and he misses the day when you could start the car with a physical key. Well, from a UX perspective, the key was never intrinsically desired. What is actually desired is that "only authorized users can access the car and start the engine, and without any delay in doing so". Unfortunately for him, his new car didn't have as expensive of tech as mine. In my Lexus even if the battery is completely dead, you can hold the key fob close to the steering column and it can still read the chip. The ultimate version of the technology will have no flaws or caveats and just always work for authorized users without them needing to remember to carry an object or have batteries. So yeah the first versions of phones had terrible UX, they sounded when the owner shouldn't have been disturbed. But what we must remember is that this state of affairs should have never come to exist in the first place. It's just at the time, no one knew how to remedy it. This type of thing will soon be forgotten except for an obscure reference in history books explaining why some time period story makes sense (why the father got enraged at being woken up). Meanwhile, until then, bringing it up in conversation will be a good way to signal to young people that you are "really, really old". It is barely a blip no the radar once humans have had phones for 1000 years.
- gosuri 6y agoYour brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. I'll remind myself that from now on giving the fact I'm always feeling guilty for not doing too much thinking.
- Technically 6y agoWhere did the absolutely atrocious title come from? It's missing the context that makes the sentence meaningful and I thought there was a policy to use article titles when they make sense. The title of "Your brain is not for thinking" encapsulates the narrative of the article quite nicely compared to this title.
- marojejian 6y agoSean Carroll has a great podcast episode with the author of this article: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/11/16/123-lisa-feldman-barrett-on-emotions-actions-and-the-brain/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/11/16/123-...
- ozuly 6y agoAlthough this article was adapted from the author's newest book, she also has an older book[0] where she writes more about this topic and how it relates to emotions. I thought it was a little longer than it needed to be, but it was still the most interesting no-fiction book I read that year. [0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp/B00QPHURT6 https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret-ebook/dp...
- mensetmanusman 6y agoFree will is a super natural entity, or we are zombies.
- t0ughcritic 6y agoMay sound odd how does this fit in with spirituality ?