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I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
- malwarebytess 5y agoIt's an interesting article but the author is insufferable. She may be suffering a TBI, but she writes a lot more like someone grappling with an emaciated ego which was once overstuffed.
- pianoben 5y agoThis headline is like a bad r/nosleep title. Someday, somehow, I hope we move past this dumb clickbait style.
- adamrezich 5y agothe attention economy demands it, as long as it reigns supreme we'll never be free from this dumb shit
- doggodaddo78 5y agoI think we need more obsessive and honest curation of titles. Perhaps a "launch a title change vote" feature so the community can fix it.
- tyingq 5y agoIt's not really new. https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+journalism+headlines&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+journalism+headlines&...
- blowski 5y agoExactly! While most click bait has interesting titles, not all interesting titles are clickbait. So many people seem to want headlines to be merely an 80 character summary of the article. That’s fine on articles of news - “so and so has died”, “Country declares war on Country Y”. Or in tutorials. But in pieces of writing we are reading mostly for leisure there’s no reason for it to have such a matter-of-fact title. For me clickbait is hyper-sensationalised, usually misleading, and typically the article doesn’t deliver what the title says it will. None of those three attributes are true of this title or article.
- oh_sigh 5y agoAlso misleading...usually when people talk about "quiet mind" they're talking about meditation, not TBIs
- mewpmewp2 5y agoThought it was obvious that it was meant to be a cheeky type of title.
- doggodaddo78 5y agoYou think it's an article on the downsides of excessive patience or zen meditation, but no, TBI. As a tangent: I learned how to enter a waking ideation / guided daydreaming state associated with sensory deprivation without extreme stimuli removal. It is good for startup ideas (not that they're any good but for generating them), fiction novel outlines, and letting your subconscious out. Edit since I can't comment below right now: I'm so sorry, I learned it intuitively by spending days / weeks by myself without human contact or interruptions in a low stimuli environment. Instead of going "crazy," it's possible the mind can entertain and amuse itself. I think this also explains why kids (and adults) in very poor countries have such wild imaginations and are so happy when they have almost nothing. And, where else would magical realism arise if not Colombia?
- ta1234567890 5y ago> As a tangent: I learned how to enter a waking ideation / guided daydreaming state associated with sensory deprivation without extreme stimuli removal. Awesome. How? Any books/articles/resources that could help?
- Sr_developer 5y agoJust think 35 "persons" voted for it. Most probably than not the voting is being heavily manipulated, but still.
- eric_b 5y agoYeah, I couldn't get very far in to it. Something about the author's tone and writing style was awkward and offputting.
- maydup-nem 5y agoOn the contrary, I enjoyed it and read the whole thing with interest.
- sergiomattei 5y agoI felt like after reading the first paragraph, everything afterwards was just the same, written differently over and over again.
- Tade0 5y agoTo me it felt very self-centered. Like that bit about having the worst injury. Was it really worth pointing out?
- mewpmewp2 5y agoWorst injury out of the family, and I'd definitely agree with her. I definitely throughout the story was able to imagine myself being in her position and how dreadful it would be. I think self centered is totally fine, since it's her shitty circumstances that could really happen to anyone. Losing your intelligence could very well be one of the scariest things.
- ketamine__ 5y agoMany people I have known remarked on how an older person they know has a failing body and an active mind. The mind being the most important.
- robocat 5y agoPerhaps due to her head injury - I was surprised at how readable it was and just presumed she had significant help editing it (although that is unclear, perhaps not).
- ketamine__ 5y ago
- ta988 5y agoOr we should just get past the FOMO and let some stuff unclicked and focus on things interesting for us.
- pianoben 5y agoPersonally I got over that long ago; the style itself just irks me to see. I left Facebook to get away from attention-economy junk and am sad to see it show up here.
- mewpmewp2 5y agoI kind of like this title, it in my view throws shade to all the regurgitated desire to reach the monk/quiet mind status. And I intuitively guessed it to be about something like that, so didn't consider it to be clickbait per se, and the story was great.
- ALittleLight 5y agoReading the author's description of waking up in a hospital bed reminded of when I found myself waking up in one. I felt like I was peeing the bed and was embarrassed about it. I couldn't move or look much, so I was exploring with my hands to "assess the damage" and wondering how I was going to explain wetting the bed as an adult to whoever when I discovered the good and bad news. Good news - I hadn't wet the bed. Bad news - I had a catheter. The author's brain injury, of course, is much more unsettling. But, if the old you has died, then it's not coming back. May as well make the best of the new you.
- megablast 5y agoCars are so incredibly destructive to society, in so many ways. But most people are so blasé about them.
- apozem 5y agoThey really are. I’m reminded of George Miller, who created and directed the Mad Max movies. Those movies are about how cars are terrifying death machines that shred human bodies. Miller said he was “inspired” after working several years as an ER doctor, seeing the damage firsthand.
- viburnum 5y agoAmerica has nearly twice the car death rate of Canada (and Canada hardly has substantially better weather or density than America). It's crazy.
- tyingq 5y agoThe US does rate pretty high in "traffic deaths per 100k people". But they also lead the world in how much they drive. 8,800 kilometers per capita, versus 4,300 in Canada, 7,000 in Germany and less than 1,700 in Japan. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/12/13/why-the-u-s-trails-the-developed-world-on-traffic-deaths/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/12/13/why-the-u-s-trails-th... I'm sure there are other factors, but that would explain most of the difference vs Canada. Twice as much driving means twice as many traffic deaths per capita. Edit: Yes, I agree the US has work to do either way.
- occz 5y agoSeems like something that should be rectified - the entirety of american society should be redesigned to reduce the amount of driving required.
- throwaway4pooxi 5y agoOr we should continue to iterate and improve. You assume all the driving is required, a lot of driving is leisure. I do agree that cities should stop blowing tax payer money that should be spent on public transportation (looking at you 80 billion cali train) But I support a fragmented society where towns are connected by highways and interstates and trucks and cars can travel freely. Most of the disdain for cars come from city slickers burnt by traffic and lack of parking. It's a scaling problem, not a car problem. Fix your politicians.
- prvc 5y agoTo de-clickbait this article: the author had a traumatic brain injury which eliminated her racing inner monologue.
- _rpd 5y agoperhaps ... which temporarily impaired her executive function.
- Aerroon 5y agoIt might not be temporary. Doctors told her that it might come back, but it might never be at full power as before.
- lostmsu 5y agoWhat is the point of quieting your inner monologue? o-O
- ketamine__ 5y agoRepetitive and unhelpful thoughts. Rumination.
- prvc 5y agoWell, if the thoughts are bad, they can lead to anxiety and torment, so removing them can alleviate these feelings, or so the thinking goes. But perhaps the causal relationship between the two is the reverse? Interesting to consider.
- throwaway205826 5y agoA few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or not my mind would come back. At the time, I would have preferred having a disease like cancer because at least I would know what I’m dealing with. Eventually I did start to get better. Like the author, I think I’m probably not quite back to who I was before getting sick. A couple things I learned from my interaction with the medical system - 1. Like any other industry, 90% of medical “experts” are totally incompetent. 2. The state of diagnostics is pretty abysmal. So much of medicine is completely nonscientific guesswork. Most doctors aren’t even aware of the latest diagnostic developments in their own fields. Think about the people you know who learned Java in college and then never learned another programming language; chances are, your doctor is that kind of person.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThey do like mentioning The Art Of Medicine when it's not a simple ailment, or treatment failure. And I get it. It might be the only profession I know of that can still bill though. They make sure they are paid. I do get the difficulty of the profession. I know most treatments are Placebo cures. It's a weird profession. Or, we still know very little, especially ailments that affect the brain.
- codingwageslave 5y agoI’ve been trying to tell people this. It’s always met with ridicule
- ashton314 5y agoFirst, my sincere condolences. That is terrifying. > Think about the people you know who learned Java in college and then never learned another programming language; chances are, your doctor is that kind of person. Ooof. That is a really good analogy.
- skadamou 5y ago
- throw9239393 5y agoReally well written, especially considering the author's plight. Regarding this bit: >The day of the accident I had been working on a project to improve how homeless people are placed into shelters. I say out loud, “I don’t care about homeless people” to see how it feels. It doesn’t ring true; I do care about homeless people. I just don’t feel like working. I wonder if that's directly to do with the brain damage or not. I survived a particularly rough "you're gonna die" type cancer. And I have similar issues with depression, motivation, procrastination, and so on. Which I know sounds counter-intuitive. I survived, and the physical aftermath isn't really bad. So I should be grateful versus depressed, right? I have tried a variety of depression meds over the 5 years that have passed. I really can't tell if any of them work. I suppose partly because I'm not despondent really...just mostly unmotivated. None of them changed that. Anyhow, just to say that near-death experiences, even without physical damage to the brain, seem to have mental consequences.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PKop 5y agoThe book "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" discusses similar dynamics with returning combat troops, and others that have lived through war or extreme challenging scenarios. The surprising finding is it's not the memory of the event that causes PTSD/depression, but returning to "normal" modern, atomized and isolated life of relative peace and stability.. and losing the excitement, adrenaline/thrill of events arguably humans have been adapted to thrive in: challenges and struggles, especially alongside a group of people facing same challenge together. Many people have been polled as being happier in for example war time London facing bombing raids, death and destruction, than peacetime after WW2. It's a good read.
- zrail 5y agoI survived a not terribly life threatening form of cancer. Two people in my family died of worse forms in that same year. Things haven't quite been the same since.
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
- qwerty456127 5y ago> Of all the injuries we suffered, mine is the worst. My brain injury has shaken my confidence in my own personality, my own existence. I don't exist. That's the secret. This concept took me years to grok but now I know.
- tux1968 5y agoI have good news for you. Ignoring the small chance that you're actually a figment of my imagination, I can confirm you actually do exist.
- sergiomattei 5y agoI can confirm your existence and the parent's existence.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago> Ignoring the small chance that you're actually a figment of my imagination Haha. I always figure I'm not smart enough to come up with all these people, and if I was, I'd know their thoughts in advance because they'd be part of me.
- qwerty456127 5y agoYou just are not "smart enough" (don't have enough working memory and attention capacity) to fit all (or any) these people thoughts in your "observation window", you already have immense amount of information processed consciously and unconsciously in it and all around it which clouds this function of perception to the point of near-impossibility. Some meditation techniques can let you develop nearly direct perception without ideas but as soon as you want to use this to read someone's mind that already is an idea and makes this impossible.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoI enjoyed the wit and sense of humor of this piece. I have a serious medical condition and, yeah, perspective and priorities change after your life gets hit by a truck, whether literally or metaphorically. It can be hard to convey what that's like and that there are bad things but also sometimes good comes out of it and you can choose to embrace the good parts of it and amplify them while continuing to try to resolve the very real problems you have been left with. For me, this was a good read.
- hownottowrite 5y agoMy mother died from a traumatic brain injury. She fell down the basement stairs in the middle of the night and smacked her head on the floor. They tried to fix her up at the hospital but as is common with TBI her brain began to swell. They tried trepanation. It did not work. She went brain dead. I was half a world away at work. My father made me make the decision. The doctors pulled the plug on her 52nd birthday. That was 20 years ago this very year. I do wish they’d put a warning on these types of articles.
- elwell 5y agoI'm sorry to hear that; that's so sad.
- Invictus0 5y agoI truly sympathize with this woman--an injury of this nature dramatically alters your perspective on life. I had a small brain injury about 2 months ago; I never got a diagnosis from my high powered neurologist but we suspected it was related to covid. Thankfully I recovered after about a month. The symptoms of brain injury can be incredibly weird. I'm in touch with people who no longer experience emotions; who lost their internal monologue. My weird symptom was that I would get headaches and light sensitivity after sex. It's interesting. You find out that most of the people you thought cared about you actually don't. You find out that most of the things you cared about don't actually matter. You find out that the neurologists that were supposed to save you are actually just wasting MRI time to write bullshit papers to pad their CV. Even if they wanted to help you, they don't really know anything about the brain, and are dozens of breakthroughs away from getting there, and the few medications at their disposal can't change the reality that neurons don't heal or regenerate, and you'll have to make do with fewer of them. The world moves on without you and it doesn't care if you recover or not. If you were smart, you desperately try to avoid being lumped in with "stupid people", knowing how little respect people have for that population. You realize how much your intelligence factored into your ego and identity. It's not your fault after all. This isn't who you are. It's just an injury. But eventually you come to terms with the fact that your brain really does define who you are, and maybe you accept that or maybe you don't.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoA family member last year had a psychotic episode that lasted a couple months where they lost contact with reality and became a different person (undiagnosed schizophrenia). After their care, they said the hardest thing is understanding who they were, and who they are now (since the medication does change their personality somewhat).
- qwerty456127 5y agoSuch experiences probably are easier to deal with for people who have some experiences with mind-altering substances (psychedelics, weed, benzodiazepines, relevant supplements like 5-HTP or L-Tyrosine) and observing the effects: you behave and think visibly different than "normal you" usually do but that still are you and in some degree you can keep your behavior and judgement in line with what you consider appropriate and relevant to your values or your usual character by means of a conscious effort.
- draw_down 5y ago“Sure my family just died in a car wreck but more importantly, it sucks that Donald trump is president”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- peter303 5y agoNPR had a story about a neurologist who had a severe stroke and lost ability to speak or hear language for several months. She said her mind went silent and heard no words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Bolte_Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Bolte_Taylor
- ggm 5y agoAt the other end of the scale, unrelated to severe trauma I truly believe we don't come back from anaesthesia entirely the same. I have no scientific basis for this belief, it's just how I feel about the experience of waking up from anaesthesia twice. The "who am I" in this article is strong. Who is asking the questions? Is it the same "me" from before time? The other one, knew what parmesan looked like.
- lostmsu 5y agoBeen through anesthesia, did not notice anything of the sort.
- ggm 5y agoYou're told not to drive or sign legal documents for a week after in Australia. That's a very long time to be considered "compos mentis" in my book. Brain plasticity being a "thing" and psychoactive drugs like ketamine or psylocibin being capable of encouraging brain rewiring why would you be "the same person" after that experience: I would argue that literally your brain changed. Well. Anaesthesia is not well understood and the models of what it does are unclear. You think you came back unaltered. Ask an anaesthetist about older patients and mental decline. I felt different. I felt partially robbed of time (and I know for a fact I was alert for 20min after one, being interviewed for a drug trial, a period of time I have no recall, except what I was told by the consultant yet, somebody was answering questions...
- lostmsu 5y agoIn many cases patients receive relatively strong pain relief drugs after surgeries, such as opioids. Are you sure the recommendation you mentioned is not due to that rather than anesthesia? What if the feeling of change is an illusion? Many people after doing shrooms think they felt unity with all life, but I am yet to see where that experience would let them better interact with fellow humans.
- phaedrus 5y agoMy uncle was noticeably not the same person after coming back from general anaesthesia. So I know what you mean, although I can't think how to sufficiently explain this to other readers who may not have experienced it. I wonder if it's like that old sci fi philosophical conundrum of whether you'd still be the same person if you went through a teleporter that actually duplicates you.
- Aerroon 5y ago>Have I always been bad at finding things? Maybe? There are limits to how well an injured brain can scrutinize an injured brain. This is something I've worried about ever since I was a teenager. If something happens to my mind, how will I know? The answer I've come up with is that I can't fully know, but my best bet is to "reason on paper". Externalize the facts and opinions (write them down or say them out loud) and then run logic on them using some explainable algorithm. Basically, do it like we do math: the numbers and figures on paper will allow anyone to continue where you stopped. Even if you forget what you were doing or you can't do large scale abstract reasoning, because you've written it down, you can do it piece by piece. When I suffered what seemed to have been a "ministroke" (basically a stroke that solves itself) my cognitive abilities were obviously affected. I seemed to operate basically only on short term memory - several seconds at a time. Anything that happened before that seemed to fade from memory. Saying out loud what I wanted to do and then continuously repeating it out loud enabled me to do more complex tasks. Unfortunately, I had no sense of danger from it. Writing (typing), however, was not really possible. I knew what I wanted to write, but it became "slurred". I hadn't considered that before. I even recognized myself that what I wrote was difficult to decipher, but somehow I just couldn't type out the words correctly. I still think that reasoning on paper or out loud is your best bet in these situations.
- quickthrower2 5y agoI would recommend Taoism type thinking for this person because there needs to be acceptance that this reduced brain capacity (or call it brain rewiring) is the way, while possible and paradoxically trying to fix it at the same time. If you are super switched on and rely on that smartness as part of your identity that’s gonna hurt when it’s diminished. And you switch from go getter to helped person.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5y agoA good point to make is that unlike most other professions, negligent -or downright dangerous- doctors are not naturally flushed out of the profession by market mechanisms that keep other professions in check. As documented by Marty Makari's book "Unaccountable", state boards rarely if ever sanction doctors for negligence. First, bad doctors are protected by a code of omerta from public exposure [1]. This is often because the bad doctors are the ones that deal with the awful hours / patients / cases, no one else wishes to deal with. In the rare instance sanctions happen, they simply go to another state and continue to practice [2] Therefore, you are far more likely to end up with an incompetent doctor... than you would like to think. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444709004577652201640230514 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444709004577652... [2] https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-cms-1-1378603-migrated-story-cp-20120926-featu-20120926-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-cms-1-1378603-mig...
- renewiltord 5y agoNotably someone as incredibly malignantly incompetent as Christopher Duntsch worked for two years after his first horrible work was discovered. These people are protected in their incompetence. For generations we’ve been told that regulation will help. It hasn’t. Suing post facto hasn’t. It’s time to try something else. It’s time to try deregulation and market factors.