Happiness is the expectation of upcoming good things
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
21–30 of 238 posts
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#22>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...]
High school tier literature.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
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 satisf…
> 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.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#24Sure. 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.)
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#25[flagged]
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#26Happiness is the expectation of upcoming good things
[dead]
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#27This 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.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#28That'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.
> 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)
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#29This 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.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#30Sounds 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.
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.