14 ms·

Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself

773 points by jger15 1y ago

mooreds 1y ago
... "and bloom" is a key missing part of the title. I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.
- Insanity 1y ago
  Reminds me of the Feynman quote “everything is interesting when you go into it deep enough” (or similar to that). Which I think is related to what you’re saying. Looking more closely at something and paying more attention can both unveil what’s “beneath the surface”.
  - BobbyTables2 1y ago
    Never realized Feynman said that but have discovered it true myself. Early on in my career, I thought a lot of technical topics wouldn’t be interesting. Especially things that aren’t new. Yet, when one gets down into it, mundane things end up being quite interesting. Even unit testing!
    - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
      > Even unit testing! Surely this principle has limits!
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - gxs 1y ago
    One thing that helped me have a better attitude at work and maybe life in general, was reframing how I thought about people with stupid ideas or stupid questions Instead of dismissing them or getting super annoyed (which still does happen, not going to lie), I ask myself the question “what do they know or not know that is making them say that? Why are they thinking about it this way?” The answers aren’t always satisfying and a lot of the time they really are just stupid/annoying questions or ideas, but approaching it with curiosity means that finding out at least satisfies that curiosity and is its own mini reward The real benefit though is that it’s simply made me a better listener and in turn a better communicator
    - mooreds 1y ago
      > I ask myself the question “what do they know or not know that is making them say that? Why are they thinking about it this way?” Great approach. One of my favorite things to do when I'm answering or asking a question is always adding "what am I missing?" Because sometimes I'm missing something and it never hurts to ask.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    This is something I strongly identify with. The world is so full of interesting things that being bored for too long feels like a virtual impossibility. There’s always something new to dig into. It’s kind of uplifting in a way. The only depressing part is that one life isn’t nearly enough time to go through it all.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    The thrill of discovery lies in the details of the mundane. It's like being a kid again and finding fascinating new facts around every corner.
- Jensson 1y ago
  No, you get bored with it. Tetris is fun for an hour, but then you get bored, it didn't get more fun after an hour, and people get even more bored after 10 hours. A very small subset of people continue after that and get ever more obsessed with it, that is not normal.
gxonatano 1y ago
This blog post, and the one it references, on the jhanas[1], belong to this weird genre which is basically in the vein of Buddhist writing, but without more than a passing reference to Buddhism, its scholarly tradition, its terminology, or its taxonomy. Here's Nadia: > The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator. She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana." It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry. [1]: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas https://nadia.xyz/jhanas
- nomadpenguin 1y ago
  I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties. Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
  - gxonatano 1y ago
    > it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong. > I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism. My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.
HiroshiSan 1y ago
The part about good art not being about communication is just plain wrong. Good artists (and yes you can argue that art is subjective) spend thousands of hours studying the fundamentals—perspective,light,colour,value,proportion,anatomy, not to mention the dexterity to making a line—so that they can communicate to the viewer in the best way that suits the piece of art. Sustaining the attention on an art piece unlocks things that you missed the first time due to having an untrained eye, much like reading a good book.
derangedHorse 1y ago
A little too hippie-like for my tastes, but an interesting message. Attention may impact long-term enjoyability of even simple things.
danieliz2s1 1y ago
[dead]
photon_garden 1y ago
Yes, exactly!! I use art-making to direct my attention in the same way: > on the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land. > on the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee. > my work helps me pay close attention like this. how can i experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku? [1]: https://lucaaurelia.com/about https://lucaaurelia.com/about
- SonOfLilit 1y ago
  I enjoyed your words and pixels!
johnny-g-tyler 1y ago
He's right, but he approaches it from the boring physical materialist perspective. Wrong level of analysis.
- joe8756438 1y ago
  Go on
  - orangebread 1y ago
    I'll take a shot. I think what the OP was alluding to is a modern movement towards "metaphysics" or manifestation. Think about the world you see and live in. Someone created the monitor you're looking at that you're reading my comment. Someone created the keyboard you're working on. Someone created the machines to manufacture these things. And so on. It started with a concept, an idea. It didn't just appear. We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have. This applies to everything. What our decisions are. Should I eat McDonalds today or have fish and salad? We are, in a sense, wizards in this world. We create what we focus our mind on. Where we direct our focus and our intent we can see desired outcome. If your desire is to make a billion dollars, no one is stopping you. You are the only obstacle. What I'm saying won't resonate with a lot of people, but in my experience, this message isn't for everyone. I'm a software engineer who has learned to appreciate the spiritual world as much as I appreciate the science. The two can live in harmony (as it used to, read about Tesla and Newton's metaphysical works -- they were manifestors as well). This was a little all over the place, but it's meant to be a sampler platter of metaphysical ideas.
    - bccdee 1y ago
      > We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have. Do thoughts exist in an ethereal world, or are they just arrangements of chemicals and charges in the brain? I've never seen "ether," and nobody's ever found a structure in the human body that interfaces with it. There are no structures causally implicated in quantum wave function collapse, either—the microtubule hypothesis is quite pseudoscientific, I'm afraid. "Do I have McDonalds today, or fish and salad" is a decision made at the cellular level, not the subatomic. This feels like a very disenchanted worldview, but the missing mystery you're reaching for is phenomenology, not idealistic metaphysics. The evanescent world of thought encoded within the chemicals and charges of our brain has its own self-referential structure which pays dividends to direct experiential analysis, which this article does engage in. Incidentally, metaphysics is a very broad branch of philosophy which encompasses both materialist and idealist conceptions of the world. You're talking specifically about manifestation/"the law of attraction," which was originally associated with the New Thought religious movement, although it's percolated out into broader pop culture through books like The Secret.
bongripper 1y ago
[flagged]
- Peretus 1y ago
  You may not like his content, but I can assure you that Henrik Karlsson has read more than half a wikipedia article. Writing a dismissive comment like this goes against the HN spirit of curiosity and also comes comes across as a bit mean-spirited.
  - gxs 1y ago
    Kind of ironic when you think about it - drawing such a strong conclusion about someone after reading what amounts to half a wikipedia article (if that) about them
- sapht 1y ago
  Not all philosophy amounts to the same egotistical vocabulary contest. I found it inspired and coherent, maybe not to an analytical taste, but a flowery style is proper for the actual point.
energy123 1y ago
That's the default mode network. People that struggle with anxiety and rumination, as per the author's second section, lack the endogenous mechanisms to interrupt the default mode network.
- wtbdbrrr 1y ago
  > lack the endogenous mechanisms It's not a lack of mechanisms. It's buggy wiring in the brain where at some point in time t some substance or lack thereof forced the brain to reroute blood flow through "paths" that were less impacted by the bug. if you can increase the blood flow through the originally responsible paths, you can recover any buried mechanism. people with ADHD and stuff who had only slightly lower blood and or oxygen flow in the PFC, improve the negative symptoms of their ADHD as soon as normal levels of blood/oxygen flows through the PFC. this is true for any area in the brain*. I'm sure there's studies on post-ischemic recovery that confirm all this. Identifying entire paths through brain areas is no simple task, of course. But comparing "issues" to normal and extreme behaviors usually draws a more or less unambiguous graph. *better blood flow and better oxygen supply usually mean better performance for any organism (or part of it)
  - fwipsy 1y ago
    This seems like a strong claim, and I've never heard of it before. Can you provide sources?
    - devin 1y ago
      The only part of this that rhymed with something I'm aware of is growth in the PFC in practicing meditators and a relation to improvement of ADHD symptoms among other things, though I don't recall whether it was a good study or not. I think I read that more than a decade ago.
      - wtbdbrrr 1y ago
        That's changes in brain chemistry via lifestyle changes. Meditation, if practiced at least adequately intense, creates a time interval that is entirely different to anything an ADHD mind is accustomed to. Meditation is not a dream, not the Default Mode Network under control. You are awake, "lucid", not rooted in your imagination or some other cognitive style/process resulting from "hyperlight association" or similar common phenomena.
jpopesculian 1y ago
Reminds me of The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. It's difficult to succinctly state the premise of the book, but in a way, I think its about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects
- piva00 1y ago
  Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"? I went on a binge of Byung-Chul Han last year, reading "The Crisis of Narration", "In The Swarm", "Psychopolitics", and "The Burnout Society". Really enjoyed all of them, and given how dense it can be I set myself to read them at least twice which I'm just finishing, was on the lookout for what else to read from him and was thinking about "The Disappearance of Rituals" as the next one.
  - peterldowns 1y ago
    Given your interest in BCH, you may enjoy Non-places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Augé. BCH draws on a lot of Augé's ideas from this book in Psychopolitics. It is obtuse and either poorly-translated or badly-written but the ideas are excellent.
- maroonblazer 1y ago
  What serendipity! The latest episode of "Philosophize This!" is titled "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han".[0] I'd never heard of him before. Apparently his book "The Burnout Society" is recommended reading. [0]https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jdvGsEdrpEEjMBJG5oRaH?si=gPLcLUiqTTCa28nXRn4Rfg https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jdvGsEdrpEEjMBJG5oRaH?si=g...
  - bobson381 1y ago
    Philosophize this has been on such a cool track out of western canon and through more mystic/nondual flavored stuff, in a way that builds off of itself. I got Deleuze-pilled a few years ago, and have had fun listening to the whole progression lately. Interesting dovetails with the Alan Watts marathon I did for like a year or two haha
SJMG 1y ago
Man choosing `.xyz` as a TLD in a world with corporate firewalls is such an unforced error.
- hnthrow09238475 1y ago
  Pull out your phone, silly
swayvil 1y ago
Sounds like concentration meditation. (The Buddhists call it "samatha") Concentration causes your perception to penetrate things. What you observe dissolves, its former appearance a mere veil, parted, to reveal another appearance. And then that veil is parted. And so on. The process could be described as a penetrating, blooming or revealing.
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on it and meditation can't do that.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - swayvil 1y ago
    I dunno man, name a scientist who doesn't concentrate.
  - flufluflufluffy 1y ago
    or maybe it would reveal to the meditator that consciousness is nonlocal and what we perceive as our self is an illusion created by the systems of symbols and language which overlays our perception and through which existence filters and there is no self there is no other there is one whole and it is all conscious
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - jjk7 1y ago
    It's a presumption that the universe is not a product of the mind. Without which you can not establish that the 'secrets of the universe' are not inside the mind.
create-username 1y ago
Happiness is the expectation of upcoming good things
- kylebenzle 1y ago
  [dead]
moralestapia 1y ago
>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...] High school tier literature.
- tomasphan 1y ago
  I couldn't relate either but that doesn't make the article bad.
- paganel 1y ago
  Goes well with the rationalist/Bay Area-audience in here.
- brenainn 1y ago
  I got more of a LinkedIn vibe. "I am good at sex, here's my take on Eastern philosophy".
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
Sure. What you focus on will consume your mind and grow within it. The bad variety is often called dwelling or rumination. Some will find the desert father John Cassian[0] interesting in this regard. He uses the analogy of a water mill for the mind. You cannot stop a water mill from turning - the water keeps flowing and keeps turning the grindstone - so all you can do is choose what is poured into the grindstone. If you fill it with high quality wheat, you will have high quality flour. If you fill it with or add to it darnel, you will produce something toxic. You reap what you sow, and if you sow your mind and your attention with filth, filth will sprout and spread and metastasize. Cultivate the garden of your mind wisely. If the mind drifts, pull it back. Let the good crop choke out any weeds in your mind. This is why there is an ethics of thought and imagination. It is wrong to intentionally think certain things. Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. Indulging or pursuing bad thoughts corrupts you from the inside, and they prepare the ground for bad actions down the line. (N.b., there was a link trending on HN a few years ago about a book of selections from Cassian's "Conferences" [1]. I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately.) [0] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm [1] https://a.co/d/cbxYLo7 https://a.co/d/cbxYLo7
- metabagel 1y ago
  > Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. In my experience, the best approach is to maintain a neutral aspect and just let those negative or unhelpful thoughts go. Wave goodbye and allow your mind to naturally drift to something else.
- onenite 1y ago
  Reminds me of the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha from ~2500 years ago. … allegedly): Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. . Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow. Source: https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/ https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/
verysmarties 1y ago
[flagged]
causal 1y ago
This did not go where I thought it was going, and I'm glad. I enjoyed the read. I'm not versed enough in psychiatry to validate the brain-chemistry stuff but my practical experience lines up. Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.
- Doxin 1y ago
  I've been learning to draw lately and I was having some serious "getting started" issues every time. For me the trick was to not go "I will now practice drawing" but to go "I will now hold a pencil and browse through my old drawings". It ends me up holding a pencil and looking at a blank page. I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I have to use this trick to help manage my ADHD. Of course, just actually starting for 5 minutes is a challenge in itself but while medicated at least I can. Giving myself a time limit as an easy out works wonders, and after 5 minutes I'm probably going to keep going.
  - mhurron 1y ago
    I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything. To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.
    - metabagel 1y ago
      Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example? Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it. Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different.
lisper 1y ago
> In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention. In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
- mrsvanwinkle 1y ago
  Absolutely mind/world-expanding. Thanks for sharing. The Swedish version reminds me of (the now "disgraced" but his Proust book is cool journalist) Lehrer's chapter on Virginia Woolfe in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, where he claims that "attention _is_ consciousness" in Woolf's then-novel stream of consciousness style in To the Lighthouse.
  - DisruptiveDave 1y ago
    This is buddhism and mindfulness in a nutshell. The only thing about your existence that does not change is that which is aware.
- WA 1y ago
  In German, you "direct" attention at something or "gift" attention to someone.
  - lisper 1y ago
    What German phrase did you have in mind? Because the idiomatic translation of "to pay attention" is "aufpassen", which literally translates to something like "pass on" or "fit on".
    - epaga 1y ago
      "jemandem Aufmerksamkeit schenken", "Aufmerksamkeit auf etwas richten"
    - fainpul 1y ago
      You can't rip apart that word into "auf" and "passen" and then individually translate them literally. The result seems nonsensical. I would say "aufpassen" is literally "be attentive" / "be watchful". Edit: "to pay attention" is literally "Aufmerksamkeit zollen"
causal 1y ago
This article discusses attention in a very immediate sense, but I think most of the points also apply to long-term attention. Our behaviors are determined by habit far more than anything, willpower is seldom enough to result in behavioral patterns over time. Even things like the career we chose become habit; pivoting from technology to horticulture will not happen if you cannot change your daily habits to go from thinking about technology to thinking about horticulture.
wtbdbrrr 1y ago
Drug addicts, patients and recreational users start to increase the dosage and chase the high. Others don't chase the high at all, but remember the state of mind and simply tune their brains to respond with said high on command whenever the chemistry in the brain fulfills the conditions, which can happen without taking the drug at all. I don't see a loop there; I see different levels of awareness, consciousness and needs. It's also what I think when I hear Hofstadter or (high-)functioning people talking about being "strange loops". ... use some of your opportunities, peace of mind and resources to sue people (you can probably come up with entire lists...) and the "strange loop" will break immediately. Some people edge for days, others had to use various toys and stimuli before getting off since youth.
lloydatkinson 1y ago
Weird unnecessary title editing, the “and bloom” part is necessary to the title. Sometimes I don’t know if the title editors here are just bored.
- lolc 1y ago
  The original title is 6 chars too long for HN.
deleted 1y ago
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layer8 1y ago
> Art is guided meditation. From the daydream that is described thereafter, “guided hallucination” would seem more fitting. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, just that what is being described is different from meditation.
supportengineer 1y ago
Who has time for sex? Gotta grind your leetcode 996 for the next promo, that Bay Area house payment got to come from somewhere.
wvlia5 1y ago
Reminds me of https://nadia.xyz/jhanas https://nadia.xyz/jhanas I can get psychdelic vision at will being sober (OEVs), mainly looking at grass (with other images it's more difficult). It's produced by sustained attention. It doesn't come with any other psychdelic effect, so it doesn't seem too valuable.
- pahool 1y ago
  which is linked in the article
deleted 1y ago
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palotasb 1y ago
What does "loop on itself" mean in this context? The article repeats it 5 times but I can't find a thesaurus definition, and it's unclear to me if the author means it as a synonym repeat or *self-amplify or something different.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
  Case in point
- hammock 1y ago
  He’s talking about spiraling or virtuous/vicious cycles, as relates to your hormones.
- oasisbob 1y ago
  Mentioning this and "hot" in the same sentence put me in a very Marshall McLuhan context. Personal computing and the growth of the internet are an example of something looping. They reinforce and amplify each other's impact and value. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects
- nartho 1y ago
  I understood as self-amplify, like a feedback loop
- pkdpic 1y ago
  My impression was that the author was referring to *self-amplifying like a positive feedback loop. I agree I would have loved more of a hard / concrete definition oriented approach to the whole piece but everything they were saying really resonated at least in terms of my personal experience. I haven't ever come across a writer focusing on this. It was really unexpected / refreshing. It's already is reshaping little moments in my day like hugging my son just now. Very unexpected transcendental value for an HN skim while ignoring a boring zoom standup. The truth is out there.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  > What does "loop on itself" mean in this context? What it means is understood by looking at its converse - panic attack. Wherein, anxiety stirs some negative thoughts which stirs even more anxiety which stirs more negativity and so on until the system seizes - or that has been my understanding of it. Here, positivity feeds joy which feeds more positivity etc..
deleted 1y ago
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freddier 1y ago
He seems to have hyperphantasia, judging by every example of mental images he described. It's not a requirement, as the example from the other person on the beach didn't need it to feel that level of self-feeding joy. But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?
- anentropic 1y ago
  I have aphantasia, and I can definitely get deep into music and to be honest, for me, turning great music into a mental movie seems to be almost missing the point, I prefer experiencing it as music
- buildbot 1y ago
  I think aphantastic people would be able to but using an inner monologue/internal text? Or even just the feeling and concentration on that feeling? Tangentially trying to imagine not being able to visualize mental images is really hard.
mock-possum 1y ago
The quote about the trip to the beach, and his description of his reverie during the musical performance are familiar to me - those are psychedelic experiences. You could drop acid and take a walk on the beach and see the ocean that way and feel those things and cry about it. You could get stoned and put on your favorite album and slip into a vivid daydream, directed by the music as a soundtrack.
- ericmcer 1y ago
  I wouldn't call them psychedelic per se, or even really a "Jhana" requiring deep concentration. Feeling joy as a result of focusing on something beautiful/interesting is just a fundamental part of being human. I agree with the author that intense focus can make something more mundane feel special, like intensely focusing on the act of eating an apple, but being moved by walking on a beautiful beach in the evening seems almost expected? I did do mushrooms frequently at a young age (like a couple times a month from 16-18) so maybe that tweaked something in my brain, but I feel like I slip in "Jhana" all the goddamn time haha. I was tearing up staring at the trees blowing outside while waiting for my dentist a couple days ago.
xdavidliu 1y ago
> Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon. I noticed this as well. One time many many years ago, I was in grad school and doing research until later in the evening, and deliberately delayed dinner until I got home. I was anticipating a nice meal and decided to do some house cleaning and some misc chores. Knowing I had the meal "on the other side" made me do the chores with gusto and a certain "sharpness" that I usually didn't have.
bzmrgonz 1y ago
Looks like we need to come up with some sort of attention wasabi in our ultra modern short-video world. Any Psy professionals in our midst? What would a good attention wasabi look like??
patrickscoleman 1y ago
Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more [1] https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/ https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/
mallowdram 1y ago
Attention probably does not exist as a reduction. Noticing does and has different regularities from the intent we enforce into attention. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00246/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/ There are others.
lupusreal 1y ago
So true, my dog loves chasing her own tail.
mapcars 1y ago
Attention leads to consciousness, consciousness leads bliss. This is the whole goal of yoga, meditation and eastern spirituality.
triceratops 1y ago
I wonder if this explains the popularity of It's a Wonderful Life. The story is well-known at this point. It was a box-office flop when first released, and fell out of copyright because the studio couldn't be bothered to renew it. As a result it played repeatedly on TV around Christmastime every year. The repeated exposure to this film, presumably also associating it with other pleasant holiday memories for audiences, transformed its reputation. To the point that it's now considered one of the best films of all time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Recept...
- hinkley 1y ago
  Part of the reason why it was on 24 hours a day for 20 years is that something got fucked up with the copyright and TV channels were using it as free filler. When I was very young it merely competed with Miracle on 34th Street. And then it was just fucking everywhere. I’m not sure I’m entirely over hating it for never being off the air. Even though it’s been 15-20 years since they stopped playing it every hour of the day.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    The Shawshank Redemption has a similar story. Didn't do well when released. Its video release fared a little better, maybe because people could re-watch it at home. Then Turner picked up TV distribution rights cheaply and showed it again and again. Now, just like It's a Wonderful Life, it's considered one of the best movies ever made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption#Critical_reassessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption#Criti... Groundhog Day is like this too. Although it was a "modest" box office success its critical reputation grew massively as the years went by. To the point that again it's consistently on best-ever movie lists. "[12 years later] Ebert raised his original score for the film from three stars to a full four stars [saying] that he had underestimated the film" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)#Post-release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)#Post-rele... It's befitting that watching Groundhog Day again and again makes you like the movie more. Btw I mentioned It's a Wonderful Life's copyright situation in my original post.
iamben 1y ago
If you're near any of the cities they run events in, I highly recommend https://pitchblackplayback.com/ https://pitchblackplayback.com/ There's something deeply connecting (and often very moving) about listening to a record and having your attention forced on it. So much that I usually start by thinking "I hope they turn it up," and by the end, when it has your sole focus, it's almost deafening.
- munificent 1y ago
  When I travel for work, being in meetings all day and in an unusual place can be draining. Many years ago, I developed the habit of when I get back to my hotel room: * Turn off all the lights * Lay flat on my back in bed * Put on headphones * Listen to a few songs and give them my full attention It very much helps me unwind after a long day. But it's also astonishing how much more I hear in the music itself when I do this. I remember the first time I listened to Portishead's "Wandering Stars" this way, I could immediately hear the slight push and pull where the organ riff isn't exactly on beat. I'd never noticed that (consciously) before.
- waterheater 1y ago
  Some years ago, I snagged a great deal on some Sennheiser HD600s. After also acquiring a Schiit stack (Magni + Modi) and finding high-quality audio sources, I would close my eyes, lay down on the couch, and just listen...actually, I'll call it perceive the music. No other audio experience compares, just like a huge screen which fills your vision is truly the best way to experience a movie. Virtually all people on the planet perceive the world with their eyes but push the other four physical senses into the background. There's good reason for this reality, of course: of our five physical senses, the eyes are capable of providing the richest information. And yet, most discussion around increasing perceptual abilities are vision-centric. Learning to perceive with your ears, smell, touch, and taste in addition to eyes should also be learned.
  - wrs 1y ago
    I’ve been producing music as a side interest for a long time, and I learned early on that to really hear what’s going on during a mix I have to close my eyes and wait about 30 seconds for my ears to “open up”. My visual sense overrides the soundstage — I can make some technical choices about frequency masking and so forth, but I can’t fully hear with eyes open.
avazhi 1y ago
[flagged]
- ThouYS 1y ago
  lool
hinkley 1y ago
I feel like software would be a better place if more of us had discovered a sport of some kind early. Sports understand overtraining. It even means much the same as in AI circles. The trick isn’t avoiding measurement. The trick is staggering out use if any measurement. Today we are working on speed drills. Tomorrow we work on form. Ans in a couple days we work on endurance. Nobody but software developers are trying to work on their sprinting every goddamned day. We are the insane ones.
techlatest_net 1y ago
[dead]
hinkley 1y ago
> When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was. I can’t tell if Henrik is okay and just a very vivid writer, or… not.
flufluflufluffy 1y ago
congratulations you’ve discovered meditation
westurner 1y ago
Given that the heart is generator which drives electrovolt oscillations through the nervous system and the fat of the brain, and that the extracerebral field created by the electrovolt potentials in the tissues of the brain is nonlinearly related to the electrical activations through the axons and dendrites in the tissues of the brain, Are there electrical cycles in the brain (and thus feedback and probably spiking) or does the charge distribute through the brain in a DAG directed acyclic graph? Are there stable neural correlates to ear worm or rumination or flow states, for example? Is sustained charge necessary for data persistence in the brain, as it is for RAM?
- westurner 1y ago
  Paraphrasing the model's reply to force myself to learn: The brain is observed to be cyclical with feedback cycles. (Biological neural networks thus cannot be sufficiently modeled with DAGs. RNN Recurrent Neural Networks do model cycles.) The brain is actually its own generator. The oscillations of the brain are measurable with e.g. EEG; and are distinct from the heart, which is measurable or imaged with ECG, for example. Long term memory depends upon synaptic plasticity, which does not require continued electrical charge, though short term memory does depend upon neuronal oscillations which depend upon continued electrical charge. The DMN Default Mode Network in the brain is observed to be less active in so-called flow states; and more active during daydreaming, ear worm, rumination, and self-reflection. The DMN is probably feed-forward too.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
rabbitlord 1y ago
This is really good and inspiring writing. I love it.
Arch-TK 1y ago
I don't know about this. Paying attention to how your anxiety feels is a powerful way of noticing that it is just an experience like all other experience and there is a great freedom in realizing that you are not the anxiety, you are merely experiencing anxiety. I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
- ehnto 1y ago
  It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about. Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it. In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a spiral of reinforcing thoughts that increase my anxiety. Paying attention to the feeling, not the thoughts, lets me break the spiral and attempt to free my thoughts. The feeling can linger for some time though, given its a chemical process to flush it all out from the body. During that period it's more likely I might end up thinking about the topic again so it's precarious still.
  - Arch-TK 1y ago
    Yeah now I read this I think the author doesn't mean paying attention to the anxiety as much as he means reinforcing the anxiety by identifying with whatever thoughts it brings up. Which definitely doesn't help the anxiety.
joe_the_user 1y ago
It's sort of an interesting but the use of the term attention seems "over determined" (used to mean several not identical things) and "looping" is fuzzily defined (the main clue of seems analogy with "good sex", sex where you're engaging your entire body and being - a subject that apparently gets people's interest, yeah). I think there's a standard and clearer explanation of what the author describes. A rich, satisfying experience comes from a melding of "goal focus" and expanded awareness. IE, Pleasure in some complex process involves reaching for a set "foreground" goal while keeping an awareness of entire "background" situation that prevents from fixating on the immediate goal. You can qualities of rhythm, self-similarity and etc into this "recipe" to describe rich satisfying experiences of multiple sorts (Art, sex, dance, conversation, [insert your favorite thing]). The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly goes into this stuff in long but still fuzzy detail.
- anon84873628 1y ago
  The article doesn't attempt to define any terms or reference the actual literature, just throws random "good sounding" crap together as if it's valid. I mean they unironically use the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field." Seriously? Lmao.
onenite 1y ago
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” - often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu
- _mu 1y ago
  Yes, it's a very ancient idea. "As we think, so we become." - Buddha
  - onenite 1y ago
    Thanks, i was about to share the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha. … allegedly), which perhaps would have been better than the misattributed quote in my initial comment: Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. . Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow. Source: https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/ https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  Lao Tzu didn't say this. It appears to date from the owner of a supermarket chain in the 1970s
  - onenite 1y ago
    D’oh! Should’ve done my research—It sounds so believable. Thank you for the correction.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      No problem :) It does sound believable.
indiantinker 1y ago
Day 4/10 of Vipassana meditation. This is EXACTLY what happens.
popalchemist 1y ago
This is a very valuable insight, and it is at the core of the ancient greek way of looking at time as either horizontal (chronos, our normal sense of time moving forward on an X axis, moment by monent), or vertical (kairos, wherein transcendent meaning arises).
levocardia 1y ago
Including, interestingly enough, attention itself! There's something of a neural "fire together, wire together" explanation for this general phenomenon, no?
minism 1y ago
This was a great essay, and as someone who struggles a lot with hyperawareness OCD, I cried reading it. First on a positive note, the example about attention on sex and arousal feeding back on itself and deepening the experience is well described and easy to relate to. But I think the "deepening an experience through attention" phenomenon applies in so many other domains as well - Sustained attention on a film or video game world, deep uninterrupted creative work for many hours, etc. It's a wonderful positive feedback loop. It is somewhat similar to how when sitting in silence outside for a long period of time you begin to become aware of more and more subtle details of the experience that weren't immediately accessible. Almost like you're turning up the sensitivity knob on things. Unfortunately as the author describes, the attention feedback loop can become unpleasant and even torturous when it is directed on negative sensations. For me it has been various things at different stages of my life - muscle tension, breathing, eye floaters in my vision, etc. The same process plays out - Sustained fixation of attention on the sensation increases your sensitivity to it, meaning you notice it more and it bothers you more, meaning you pay more attention to it, and it gets out of control. The difficulty I experience is that this attention is unwanted and yet I feel my mind focus on it almost automatically. Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them, which I'm still working on. But it is helpful to see the positive flip side of the coin too - Our minds are capable of deep focus and deep attention, which can increase sensitivity and let you see increasingly subtle details of experience, making you a better appreciator of art and life, a better creator, a better listener and friend, etc.
- joquarky 1y ago
  I can relate to the muscle tension. No amount of stretching is sufficient, and ignoring it seems to cause it to grow in intensity.
- papyrus9244 1y ago
  > Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them That sounds a lot like meditation.
lawrenceyan 1y ago
Nice, very cool. Jhanas (when in the positive direction), and dukkha or suffering (as caused by tanha or tension) when applied in the negative direction.
0x10ca1h0st 1y ago
I notice this on IG. Spend enough time on IG, and you have pretty much seen all the advertised memes, etc. Do this over years, and it just starts to loop on itself, the same memes, the same attempt at reactions, etc.
- semiinfinitely 1y ago
  im sorry for your loss
  - 0x10ca1h0st 1y ago
    Thank you <3
ilaksh 1y ago
Pure pretension.
- anon84873628 1y ago
  Absolutely. One of the footnotes even uses the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field" as if that actually means something. Barf.
themafia 1y ago
This comes across as manic. It reminds me very much of the types of themes and prose my diagnosed roommate would create.
- automatoney 1y ago
  The writing feels odd in a sort of off putting way. Maybe too much vividness and a kind of pseudointellectual vibe. Or like a bit egotistical? I don't know if that's what you're getting at, but it's what I was getting from it.
celdon25 1y ago
How can you do this in the spirit of what the author is talking about if you have some kind of chronic pain?
darkerside 1y ago
This is the same mechanism behind addiction (IMO, not a psychiatrist). The sustained attention becomes a feedback loop death spiral. Certainly the case for "light" addictions like caffeine, smoking, gambling, etc.
techdar42 1y ago
completely relate to how panic attacks are often caused by simply overthinking about having one, which causes more symptoms to arise, which leads to more panic...feedback loop. Interesting read.
ozim 1y ago
Missed solving of riddles. Also why programming is fun as you try to solve the problem wrap your head around it immerse yourself in problem space and at the end you get to solution that usually is a pleasant sensation.

773 points by jger15 1y ago

... "and bloom" is a key missing part of the title. I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.

Insanity 1y ago
Reminds me of the Feynman quote “everything is interesting when you go into it deep enough” (or similar to that). Which I think is related to what you’re saying. Looking more closely at something and paying more attention can both unveil what’s “beneath the surface”.
- BobbyTables2 1y ago
  Never realized Feynman said that but have discovered it true myself. Early on in my career, I thought a lot of technical topics wouldn’t be interesting. Especially things that aren’t new. Yet, when one gets down into it, mundane things end up being quite interesting. Even unit testing!
  - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
    > Even unit testing! Surely this principle has limits!
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  [flagged]
- gxs 1y ago
  One thing that helped me have a better attitude at work and maybe life in general, was reframing how I thought about people with stupid ideas or stupid questions Instead of dismissing them or getting super annoyed (which still does happen, not going to lie), I ask myself the question “what do they know or not know that is making them say that? Why are they thinking about it this way?” The answers aren’t always satisfying and a lot of the time they really are just stupid/annoying questions or ideas, but approaching it with curiosity means that finding out at least satisfies that curiosity and is its own mini reward The real benefit though is that it’s simply made me a better listener and in turn a better communicator
  - mooreds 1y ago
    > I ask myself the question “what do they know or not know that is making them say that? Why are they thinking about it this way?” Great approach. One of my favorite things to do when I'm answering or asking a question is always adding "what am I missing?" Because sometimes I'm missing something and it never hurts to ask.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  This is something I strongly identify with. The world is so full of interesting things that being bored for too long feels like a virtual impossibility. There’s always something new to dig into. It’s kind of uplifting in a way. The only depressing part is that one life isn’t nearly enough time to go through it all.
- jandrese 1y ago
  The thrill of discovery lies in the details of the mundane. It's like being a kid again and finding fascinating new facts around every corner.
Jensson 1y ago
No, you get bored with it. Tetris is fun for an hour, but then you get bored, it didn't get more fun after an hour, and people get even more bored after 10 hours. A very small subset of people continue after that and get ever more obsessed with it, that is not normal.

gxonatano 1y ago

This blog post, and the one it references, on the jhanas[1], belong to this weird genre which is basically in the vein of Buddhist writing, but without more than a passing reference to Buddhism, its scholarly tradition, its terminology, or its taxonomy. Here's Nadia: > The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator. She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana." It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry. [1]: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas https://nadia.xyz/jhanas

nomadpenguin 1y ago
I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties. Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
- gxonatano 1y ago
  > it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong. > I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism. My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.

HiroshiSan 1y ago

The part about good art not being about communication is just plain wrong. Good artists (and yes you can argue that art is subjective) spend thousands of hours studying the fundamentals—perspective,light,colour,value,proportion,anatomy, not to mention the dexterity to making a line—so that they can communicate to the viewer in the best way that suits the piece of art. Sustaining the attention on an art piece unlocks things that you missed the first time due to having an untrained eye, much like reading a good book.

derangedHorse 1y ago

A little too hippie-like for my tastes, but an interesting message. Attention may impact long-term enjoyability of even simple things.

danieliz2s1 1y ago

[dead]

photon_garden 1y ago

Yes, exactly!! I use art-making to direct my attention in the same way: > on the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land. > on the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee. > my work helps me pay close attention like this. how can i experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku? [1]: https://lucaaurelia.com/about https://lucaaurelia.com/about

SonOfLilit 1y ago
I enjoyed your words and pixels!

johnny-g-tyler 1y ago

He's right, but he approaches it from the boring physical materialist perspective. Wrong level of analysis.

joe8756438 1y ago
Go on
- orangebread 1y ago
  I'll take a shot. I think what the OP was alluding to is a modern movement towards "metaphysics" or manifestation. Think about the world you see and live in. Someone created the monitor you're looking at that you're reading my comment. Someone created the keyboard you're working on. Someone created the machines to manufacture these things. And so on. It started with a concept, an idea. It didn't just appear. We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have. This applies to everything. What our decisions are. Should I eat McDonalds today or have fish and salad? We are, in a sense, wizards in this world. We create what we focus our mind on. Where we direct our focus and our intent we can see desired outcome. If your desire is to make a billion dollars, no one is stopping you. You are the only obstacle. What I'm saying won't resonate with a lot of people, but in my experience, this message isn't for everyone. I'm a software engineer who has learned to appreciate the spiritual world as much as I appreciate the science. The two can live in harmony (as it used to, read about Tesla and Newton's metaphysical works -- they were manifestors as well). This was a little all over the place, but it's meant to be a sampler platter of metaphysical ideas.
  - bccdee 1y ago
    > We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have. Do thoughts exist in an ethereal world, or are they just arrangements of chemicals and charges in the brain? I've never seen "ether," and nobody's ever found a structure in the human body that interfaces with it. There are no structures causally implicated in quantum wave function collapse, either—the microtubule hypothesis is quite pseudoscientific, I'm afraid. "Do I have McDonalds today, or fish and salad" is a decision made at the cellular level, not the subatomic. This feels like a very disenchanted worldview, but the missing mystery you're reaching for is phenomenology, not idealistic metaphysics. The evanescent world of thought encoded within the chemicals and charges of our brain has its own self-referential structure which pays dividends to direct experiential analysis, which this article does engage in. Incidentally, metaphysics is a very broad branch of philosophy which encompasses both materialist and idealist conceptions of the world. You're talking specifically about manifestation/"the law of attraction," which was originally associated with the New Thought religious movement, although it's percolated out into broader pop culture through books like The Secret.

bongripper 1y ago

[flagged]

Peretus 1y ago
You may not like his content, but I can assure you that Henrik Karlsson has read more than half a wikipedia article. Writing a dismissive comment like this goes against the HN spirit of curiosity and also comes comes across as a bit mean-spirited.
- gxs 1y ago
  Kind of ironic when you think about it - drawing such a strong conclusion about someone after reading what amounts to half a wikipedia article (if that) about them
sapht 1y ago
Not all philosophy amounts to the same egotistical vocabulary contest. I found it inspired and coherent, maybe not to an analytical taste, but a flowery style is proper for the actual point.

energy123 1y ago

That's the default mode network. People that struggle with anxiety and rumination, as per the author's second section, lack the endogenous mechanisms to interrupt the default mode network.

wtbdbrrr 1y ago
> lack the endogenous mechanisms It's not a lack of mechanisms. It's buggy wiring in the brain where at some point in time t some substance or lack thereof forced the brain to reroute blood flow through "paths" that were less impacted by the bug. if you can increase the blood flow through the originally responsible paths, you can recover any buried mechanism. people with ADHD and stuff who had only slightly lower blood and or oxygen flow in the PFC, improve the negative symptoms of their ADHD as soon as normal levels of blood/oxygen flows through the PFC. this is true for any area in the brain*. I'm sure there's studies on post-ischemic recovery that confirm all this. Identifying entire paths through brain areas is no simple task, of course. But comparing "issues" to normal and extreme behaviors usually draws a more or less unambiguous graph. *better blood flow and better oxygen supply usually mean better performance for any organism (or part of it)
- fwipsy 1y ago
  This seems like a strong claim, and I've never heard of it before. Can you provide sources?
  - devin 1y ago
    The only part of this that rhymed with something I'm aware of is growth in the PFC in practicing meditators and a relation to improvement of ADHD symptoms among other things, though I don't recall whether it was a good study or not. I think I read that more than a decade ago.
    - wtbdbrrr 1y ago
      That's changes in brain chemistry via lifestyle changes. Meditation, if practiced at least adequately intense, creates a time interval that is entirely different to anything an ADHD mind is accustomed to. Meditation is not a dream, not the Default Mode Network under control. You are awake, "lucid", not rooted in your imagination or some other cognitive style/process resulting from "hyperlight association" or similar common phenomena.

jpopesculian 1y ago

Reminds me of The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. It's difficult to succinctly state the premise of the book, but in a way, I think its about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects

piva00 1y ago
Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"? I went on a binge of Byung-Chul Han last year, reading "The Crisis of Narration", "In The Swarm", "Psychopolitics", and "The Burnout Society". Really enjoyed all of them, and given how dense it can be I set myself to read them at least twice which I'm just finishing, was on the lookout for what else to read from him and was thinking about "The Disappearance of Rituals" as the next one.
- peterldowns 1y ago
  Given your interest in BCH, you may enjoy Non-places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Augé. BCH draws on a lot of Augé's ideas from this book in Psychopolitics. It is obtuse and either poorly-translated or badly-written but the ideas are excellent.
maroonblazer 1y ago
What serendipity! The latest episode of "Philosophize This!" is titled "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han".[0] I'd never heard of him before. Apparently his book "The Burnout Society" is recommended reading. [0]https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jdvGsEdrpEEjMBJG5oRaH?si=gPLcLUiqTTCa28nXRn4Rfg https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jdvGsEdrpEEjMBJG5oRaH?si=g...
- bobson381 1y ago
  Philosophize this has been on such a cool track out of western canon and through more mystic/nondual flavored stuff, in a way that builds off of itself. I got Deleuze-pilled a few years ago, and have had fun listening to the whole progression lately. Interesting dovetails with the Alan Watts marathon I did for like a year or two haha

SJMG 1y ago

Man choosing `.xyz` as a TLD in a world with corporate firewalls is such an unforced error.

hnthrow09238475 1y ago
Pull out your phone, silly

swayvil 1y ago

Sounds like concentration meditation. (The Buddhists call it "samatha") Concentration causes your perception to penetrate things. What you observe dissolves, its former appearance a mere veil, parted, to reveal another appearance. And then that veil is parted. And so on. The process could be described as a penetrating, blooming or revealing.

cantor_S_drug 1y ago
There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on it and meditation can't do that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- swayvil 1y ago
  I dunno man, name a scientist who doesn't concentrate.
- flufluflufluffy 1y ago
  or maybe it would reveal to the meditator that consciousness is nonlocal and what we perceive as our self is an illusion created by the systems of symbols and language which overlays our perception and through which existence filters and there is no self there is no other there is one whole and it is all conscious
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- jjk7 1y ago
  It's a presumption that the universe is not a product of the mind. Without which you can not establish that the 'secrets of the universe' are not inside the mind.

create-username 1y ago

Happiness is the expectation of upcoming good things

kylebenzle 1y ago
[dead]

moralestapia 1y ago

>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...] High school tier literature.

tomasphan 1y ago
I couldn't relate either but that doesn't make the article bad.
paganel 1y ago
Goes well with the rationalist/Bay Area-audience in here.
brenainn 1y ago
I got more of a LinkedIn vibe. "I am good at sex, here's my take on Eastern philosophy".

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

Sure. What you focus on will consume your mind and grow within it. The bad variety is often called dwelling or rumination. Some will find the desert father John Cassian[0] interesting in this regard. He uses the analogy of a water mill for the mind. You cannot stop a water mill from turning - the water keeps flowing and keeps turning the grindstone - so all you can do is choose what is poured into the grindstone. If you fill it with high quality wheat, you will have high quality flour. If you fill it with or add to it darnel, you will produce something toxic. You reap what you sow, and if you sow your mind and your attention with filth, filth will sprout and spread and metastasize. Cultivate the garden of your mind wisely. If the mind drifts, pull it back. Let the good crop choke out any weeds in your mind. This is why there is an ethics of thought and imagination. It is wrong to intentionally think certain things. Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. Indulging or pursuing bad thoughts corrupts you from the inside, and they prepare the ground for bad actions down the line. (N.b., there was a link trending on HN a few years ago about a book of selections from Cassian's "Conferences" [1]. I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately.) [0] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm [1] https://a.co/d/cbxYLo7 https://a.co/d/cbxYLo7

metabagel 1y ago
> Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. In my experience, the best approach is to maintain a neutral aspect and just let those negative or unhelpful thoughts go. Wave goodbye and allow your mind to naturally drift to something else.
onenite 1y ago
Reminds me of the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha from ~2500 years ago. … allegedly): Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. . Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow. Source: https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/ https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/

verysmarties 1y ago

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causal 1y ago

This did not go where I thought it was going, and I'm glad. I enjoyed the read. I'm not versed enough in psychiatry to validate the brain-chemistry stuff but my practical experience lines up. Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.

Doxin 1y ago
I've been learning to draw lately and I was having some serious "getting started" issues every time. For me the trick was to not go "I will now practice drawing" but to go "I will now hold a pencil and browse through my old drawings". It ends me up holding a pencil and looking at a blank page. I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.
thewebguyd 1y ago
> "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I have to use this trick to help manage my ADHD. Of course, just actually starting for 5 minutes is a challenge in itself but while medicated at least I can. Giving myself a time limit as an easy out works wonders, and after 5 minutes I'm probably going to keep going.
- mhurron 1y ago
  I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything. To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.
  - metabagel 1y ago
    Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example? Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it. Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different.

lisper 1y ago

> In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention. In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).

mrsvanwinkle 1y ago
Absolutely mind/world-expanding. Thanks for sharing. The Swedish version reminds me of (the now "disgraced" but his Proust book is cool journalist) Lehrer's chapter on Virginia Woolfe in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, where he claims that "attention _is_ consciousness" in Woolf's then-novel stream of consciousness style in To the Lighthouse.
- DisruptiveDave 1y ago
  This is buddhism and mindfulness in a nutshell. The only thing about your existence that does not change is that which is aware.
WA 1y ago
In German, you "direct" attention at something or "gift" attention to someone.
- lisper 1y ago
  What German phrase did you have in mind? Because the idiomatic translation of "to pay attention" is "aufpassen", which literally translates to something like "pass on" or "fit on".
  - epaga 1y ago
    "jemandem Aufmerksamkeit schenken", "Aufmerksamkeit auf etwas richten"
  - fainpul 1y ago
    You can't rip apart that word into "auf" and "passen" and then individually translate them literally. The result seems nonsensical. I would say "aufpassen" is literally "be attentive" / "be watchful". Edit: "to pay attention" is literally "Aufmerksamkeit zollen"

causal 1y ago

This article discusses attention in a very immediate sense, but I think most of the points also apply to long-term attention. Our behaviors are determined by habit far more than anything, willpower is seldom enough to result in behavioral patterns over time. Even things like the career we chose become habit; pivoting from technology to horticulture will not happen if you cannot change your daily habits to go from thinking about technology to thinking about horticulture.

wtbdbrrr 1y ago

Drug addicts, patients and recreational users start to increase the dosage and chase the high. Others don't chase the high at all, but remember the state of mind and simply tune their brains to respond with said high on command whenever the chemistry in the brain fulfills the conditions, which can happen without taking the drug at all. I don't see a loop there; I see different levels of awareness, consciousness and needs. It's also what I think when I hear Hofstadter or (high-)functioning people talking about being "strange loops". ... use some of your opportunities, peace of mind and resources to sue people (you can probably come up with entire lists...) and the "strange loop" will break immediately. Some people edge for days, others had to use various toys and stimuli before getting off since youth.

lloydatkinson 1y ago

Weird unnecessary title editing, the “and bloom” part is necessary to the title. Sometimes I don’t know if the title editors here are just bored.

lolc 1y ago
The original title is 6 chars too long for HN.

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layer8 1y ago

> Art is guided meditation. From the daydream that is described thereafter, “guided hallucination” would seem more fitting. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, just that what is being described is different from meditation.

supportengineer 1y ago

Who has time for sex? Gotta grind your leetcode 996 for the next promo, that Bay Area house payment got to come from somewhere.

wvlia5 1y ago

Reminds me of https://nadia.xyz/jhanas https://nadia.xyz/jhanas I can get psychdelic vision at will being sober (OEVs), mainly looking at grass (with other images it's more difficult). It's produced by sustained attention. It doesn't come with any other psychdelic effect, so it doesn't seem too valuable.

pahool 1y ago
which is linked in the article

deleted 1y ago

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palotasb 1y ago

What does "loop on itself" mean in this context? The article repeats it 5 times but I can't find a thesaurus definition, and it's unclear to me if the author means it as a synonym repeat or *self-amplify or something different.

bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
Case in point
hammock 1y ago
He’s talking about spiraling or virtuous/vicious cycles, as relates to your hormones.
oasisbob 1y ago
Mentioning this and "hot" in the same sentence put me in a very Marshall McLuhan context. Personal computing and the growth of the internet are an example of something looping. They reinforce and amplify each other's impact and value. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects
nartho 1y ago
I understood as self-amplify, like a feedback loop
pkdpic 1y ago
My impression was that the author was referring to *self-amplifying like a positive feedback loop. I agree I would have loved more of a hard / concrete definition oriented approach to the whole piece but everything they were saying really resonated at least in terms of my personal experience. I haven't ever come across a writer focusing on this. It was really unexpected / refreshing. It's already is reshaping little moments in my day like hugging my son just now. Very unexpected transcendental value for an HN skim while ignoring a boring zoom standup. The truth is out there.
bwfan123 1y ago
> What does "loop on itself" mean in this context? What it means is understood by looking at its converse - panic attack. Wherein, anxiety stirs some negative thoughts which stirs even more anxiety which stirs more negativity and so on until the system seizes - or that has been my understanding of it. Here, positivity feeds joy which feeds more positivity etc..

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freddier 1y ago

He seems to have hyperphantasia, judging by every example of mental images he described. It's not a requirement, as the example from the other person on the beach didn't need it to feel that level of self-feeding joy. But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?

anentropic 1y ago
I have aphantasia, and I can definitely get deep into music and to be honest, for me, turning great music into a mental movie seems to be almost missing the point, I prefer experiencing it as music
buildbot 1y ago
I think aphantastic people would be able to but using an inner monologue/internal text? Or even just the feeling and concentration on that feeling? Tangentially trying to imagine not being able to visualize mental images is really hard.

mock-possum 1y ago

The quote about the trip to the beach, and his description of his reverie during the musical performance are familiar to me - those are psychedelic experiences. You could drop acid and take a walk on the beach and see the ocean that way and feel those things and cry about it. You could get stoned and put on your favorite album and slip into a vivid daydream, directed by the music as a soundtrack.

ericmcer 1y ago
I wouldn't call them psychedelic per se, or even really a "Jhana" requiring deep concentration. Feeling joy as a result of focusing on something beautiful/interesting is just a fundamental part of being human. I agree with the author that intense focus can make something more mundane feel special, like intensely focusing on the act of eating an apple, but being moved by walking on a beautiful beach in the evening seems almost expected? I did do mushrooms frequently at a young age (like a couple times a month from 16-18) so maybe that tweaked something in my brain, but I feel like I slip in "Jhana" all the goddamn time haha. I was tearing up staring at the trees blowing outside while waiting for my dentist a couple days ago.

xdavidliu 1y ago

> Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon. I noticed this as well. One time many many years ago, I was in grad school and doing research until later in the evening, and deliberately delayed dinner until I got home. I was anticipating a nice meal and decided to do some house cleaning and some misc chores. Knowing I had the meal "on the other side" made me do the chores with gusto and a certain "sharpness" that I usually didn't have.

bzmrgonz 1y ago

Looks like we need to come up with some sort of attention wasabi in our ultra modern short-video world. Any Psy professionals in our midst? What would a good attention wasabi look like??

patrickscoleman 1y ago

Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more [1] https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/ https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/

mallowdram 1y ago

Attention probably does not exist as a reduction. Noticing does and has different regularities from the intent we enforce into attention. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00246/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/ There are others.

lupusreal 1y ago

So true, my dog loves chasing her own tail.

mapcars 1y ago

Attention leads to consciousness, consciousness leads bliss. This is the whole goal of yoga, meditation and eastern spirituality.

triceratops 1y ago

I wonder if this explains the popularity of It's a Wonderful Life. The story is well-known at this point. It was a box-office flop when first released, and fell out of copyright because the studio couldn't be bothered to renew it. As a result it played repeatedly on TV around Christmastime every year. The repeated exposure to this film, presumably also associating it with other pleasant holiday memories for audiences, transformed its reputation. To the point that it's now considered one of the best films of all time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Recept...

hinkley 1y ago
Part of the reason why it was on 24 hours a day for 20 years is that something got fucked up with the copyright and TV channels were using it as free filler. When I was very young it merely competed with Miracle on 34th Street. And then it was just fucking everywhere. I’m not sure I’m entirely over hating it for never being off the air. Even though it’s been 15-20 years since they stopped playing it every hour of the day.
- triceratops 1y ago
  The Shawshank Redemption has a similar story. Didn't do well when released. Its video release fared a little better, maybe because people could re-watch it at home. Then Turner picked up TV distribution rights cheaply and showed it again and again. Now, just like It's a Wonderful Life, it's considered one of the best movies ever made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption#Critical_reassessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption#Criti... Groundhog Day is like this too. Although it was a "modest" box office success its critical reputation grew massively as the years went by. To the point that again it's consistently on best-ever movie lists. "[12 years later] Ebert raised his original score for the film from three stars to a full four stars [saying] that he had underestimated the film" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)#Post-release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)#Post-rele... It's befitting that watching Groundhog Day again and again makes you like the movie more. Btw I mentioned It's a Wonderful Life's copyright situation in my original post.

iamben 1y ago

If you're near any of the cities they run events in, I highly recommend https://pitchblackplayback.com/ https://pitchblackplayback.com/ There's something deeply connecting (and often very moving) about listening to a record and having your attention forced on it. So much that I usually start by thinking "I hope they turn it up," and by the end, when it has your sole focus, it's almost deafening.

munificent 1y ago
When I travel for work, being in meetings all day and in an unusual place can be draining. Many years ago, I developed the habit of when I get back to my hotel room: * Turn off all the lights * Lay flat on my back in bed * Put on headphones * Listen to a few songs and give them my full attention It very much helps me unwind after a long day. But it's also astonishing how much more I hear in the music itself when I do this. I remember the first time I listened to Portishead's "Wandering Stars" this way, I could immediately hear the slight push and pull where the organ riff isn't exactly on beat. I'd never noticed that (consciously) before.
waterheater 1y ago
Some years ago, I snagged a great deal on some Sennheiser HD600s. After also acquiring a Schiit stack (Magni + Modi) and finding high-quality audio sources, I would close my eyes, lay down on the couch, and just listen...actually, I'll call it perceive the music. No other audio experience compares, just like a huge screen which fills your vision is truly the best way to experience a movie. Virtually all people on the planet perceive the world with their eyes but push the other four physical senses into the background. There's good reason for this reality, of course: of our five physical senses, the eyes are capable of providing the richest information. And yet, most discussion around increasing perceptual abilities are vision-centric. Learning to perceive with your ears, smell, touch, and taste in addition to eyes should also be learned.
- wrs 1y ago
  I’ve been producing music as a side interest for a long time, and I learned early on that to really hear what’s going on during a mix I have to close my eyes and wait about 30 seconds for my ears to “open up”. My visual sense overrides the soundstage — I can make some technical choices about frequency masking and so forth, but I can’t fully hear with eyes open.

avazhi 1y ago

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ThouYS 1y ago
lool

hinkley 1y ago

I feel like software would be a better place if more of us had discovered a sport of some kind early. Sports understand overtraining. It even means much the same as in AI circles. The trick isn’t avoiding measurement. The trick is staggering out use if any measurement. Today we are working on speed drills. Tomorrow we work on form. Ans in a couple days we work on endurance. Nobody but software developers are trying to work on their sprinting every goddamned day. We are the insane ones.

techlatest_net 1y ago

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hinkley 1y ago

> When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was. I can’t tell if Henrik is okay and just a very vivid writer, or… not.

flufluflufluffy 1y ago

congratulations you’ve discovered meditation

westurner 1y ago

Given that the heart is generator which drives electrovolt oscillations through the nervous system and the fat of the brain, and that the extracerebral field created by the electrovolt potentials in the tissues of the brain is nonlinearly related to the electrical activations through the axons and dendrites in the tissues of the brain, Are there electrical cycles in the brain (and thus feedback and probably spiking) or does the charge distribute through the brain in a DAG directed acyclic graph? Are there stable neural correlates to ear worm or rumination or flow states, for example? Is sustained charge necessary for data persistence in the brain, as it is for RAM?

westurner 1y ago
Paraphrasing the model's reply to force myself to learn: The brain is observed to be cyclical with feedback cycles. (Biological neural networks thus cannot be sufficiently modeled with DAGs. RNN Recurrent Neural Networks do model cycles.) The brain is actually its own generator. The oscillations of the brain are measurable with e.g. EEG; and are distinct from the heart, which is measurable or imaged with ECG, for example. Long term memory depends upon synaptic plasticity, which does not require continued electrical charge, though short term memory does depend upon neuronal oscillations which depend upon continued electrical charge. The DMN Default Mode Network in the brain is observed to be less active in so-called flow states; and more active during daydreaming, ear worm, rumination, and self-reflection. The DMN is probably feed-forward too.

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rabbitlord 1y ago

This is really good and inspiring writing. I love it.

Arch-TK 1y ago

I don't know about this. Paying attention to how your anxiety feels is a powerful way of noticing that it is just an experience like all other experience and there is a great freedom in realizing that you are not the anxiety, you are merely experiencing anxiety. I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.

ehnto 1y ago
It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about. Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it. In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a spiral of reinforcing thoughts that increase my anxiety. Paying attention to the feeling, not the thoughts, lets me break the spiral and attempt to free my thoughts. The feeling can linger for some time though, given its a chemical process to flush it all out from the body. During that period it's more likely I might end up thinking about the topic again so it's precarious still.
- Arch-TK 1y ago
  Yeah now I read this I think the author doesn't mean paying attention to the anxiety as much as he means reinforcing the anxiety by identifying with whatever thoughts it brings up. Which definitely doesn't help the anxiety.

joe_the_user 1y ago

It's sort of an interesting but the use of the term attention seems "over determined" (used to mean several not identical things) and "looping" is fuzzily defined (the main clue of seems analogy with "good sex", sex where you're engaging your entire body and being - a subject that apparently gets people's interest, yeah). I think there's a standard and clearer explanation of what the author describes. A rich, satisfying experience comes from a melding of "goal focus" and expanded awareness. IE, Pleasure in some complex process involves reaching for a set "foreground" goal while keeping an awareness of entire "background" situation that prevents from fixating on the immediate goal. You can qualities of rhythm, self-similarity and etc into this "recipe" to describe rich satisfying experiences of multiple sorts (Art, sex, dance, conversation, [insert your favorite thing]). The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly goes into this stuff in long but still fuzzy detail.

anon84873628 1y ago
The article doesn't attempt to define any terms or reference the actual literature, just throws random "good sounding" crap together as if it's valid. I mean they unironically use the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field." Seriously? Lmao.

onenite 1y ago

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” - often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu

_mu 1y ago
Yes, it's a very ancient idea. "As we think, so we become." - Buddha
- onenite 1y ago
  Thanks, i was about to share the first pair of verses of the Dhammapada (words of the Buddha. … allegedly), which perhaps would have been better than the misattributed quote in my initial comment: Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. . Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are mind-made. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow. Source: https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/ https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01/
ants_everywhere 1y ago
Lao Tzu didn't say this. It appears to date from the owner of a supermarket chain in the 1970s
- onenite 1y ago
  D’oh! Should’ve done my research—It sounds so believable. Thank you for the correction.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    No problem :) It does sound believable.

indiantinker 1y ago

Day 4/10 of Vipassana meditation. This is EXACTLY what happens.

popalchemist 1y ago

This is a very valuable insight, and it is at the core of the ancient greek way of looking at time as either horizontal (chronos, our normal sense of time moving forward on an X axis, moment by monent), or vertical (kairos, wherein transcendent meaning arises).

levocardia 1y ago

Including, interestingly enough, attention itself! There's something of a neural "fire together, wire together" explanation for this general phenomenon, no?

minism 1y ago

This was a great essay, and as someone who struggles a lot with hyperawareness OCD, I cried reading it. First on a positive note, the example about attention on sex and arousal feeding back on itself and deepening the experience is well described and easy to relate to. But I think the "deepening an experience through attention" phenomenon applies in so many other domains as well - Sustained attention on a film or video game world, deep uninterrupted creative work for many hours, etc. It's a wonderful positive feedback loop. It is somewhat similar to how when sitting in silence outside for a long period of time you begin to become aware of more and more subtle details of the experience that weren't immediately accessible. Almost like you're turning up the sensitivity knob on things. Unfortunately as the author describes, the attention feedback loop can become unpleasant and even torturous when it is directed on negative sensations. For me it has been various things at different stages of my life - muscle tension, breathing, eye floaters in my vision, etc. The same process plays out - Sustained fixation of attention on the sensation increases your sensitivity to it, meaning you notice it more and it bothers you more, meaning you pay more attention to it, and it gets out of control. The difficulty I experience is that this attention is unwanted and yet I feel my mind focus on it almost automatically. Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them, which I'm still working on. But it is helpful to see the positive flip side of the coin too - Our minds are capable of deep focus and deep attention, which can increase sensitivity and let you see increasingly subtle details of experience, making you a better appreciator of art and life, a better creator, a better listener and friend, etc.

joquarky 1y ago
I can relate to the muscle tension. No amount of stretching is sufficient, and ignoring it seems to cause it to grow in intensity.
papyrus9244 1y ago
> Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them That sounds a lot like meditation.

lawrenceyan 1y ago

Nice, very cool. Jhanas (when in the positive direction), and dukkha or suffering (as caused by tanha or tension) when applied in the negative direction.

0x10ca1h0st 1y ago

I notice this on IG. Spend enough time on IG, and you have pretty much seen all the advertised memes, etc. Do this over years, and it just starts to loop on itself, the same memes, the same attempt at reactions, etc.

semiinfinitely 1y ago
im sorry for your loss
- 0x10ca1h0st 1y ago
  Thank you <3

ilaksh 1y ago

Pure pretension.

anon84873628 1y ago
Absolutely. One of the footnotes even uses the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field" as if that actually means something. Barf.

themafia 1y ago

This comes across as manic. It reminds me very much of the types of themes and prose my diagnosed roommate would create.

automatoney 1y ago
The writing feels odd in a sort of off putting way. Maybe too much vividness and a kind of pseudointellectual vibe. Or like a bit egotistical? I don't know if that's what you're getting at, but it's what I was getting from it.

celdon25 1y ago

How can you do this in the spirit of what the author is talking about if you have some kind of chronic pain?

darkerside 1y ago

This is the same mechanism behind addiction (IMO, not a psychiatrist). The sustained attention becomes a feedback loop death spiral. Certainly the case for "light" addictions like caffeine, smoking, gambling, etc.

techdar42 1y ago

completely relate to how panic attacks are often caused by simply overthinking about having one, which causes more symptoms to arise, which leads to more panic...feedback loop. Interesting read.

ozim 1y ago

Missed solving of riddles. Also why programming is fun as you try to solve the problem wrap your head around it immerse yourself in problem space and at the end you get to solution that usually is a pleasant sensation.