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

henrikkarlsson.xyz

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

#71

Post by mhurron »

thewebguyd wrote: post #48
causal wrote: post #27

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.

> "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.

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.

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

#73

Post by ssttoo »

lisper wrote: post #33

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

Ha, I was just recently thinking about what you do with attention in different languages. In my native Bulgarian (обръщам внимание) you “turn” your attention as in you “direct” it. Same word for when you turn a page. Like you have but a single attention and it’s up to you where you direct it.

In French (correct me if I’m wrong) you “make” attention, « faire attention ». Like there’s unlimited amount of attention and you can always make more.

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

#74

Post by freddier »

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?

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

#75

Post by mock-possum »

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.

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

#76

Post by xdavidliu »

> 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.

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

#77

Post by DisruptiveDave »

mrsvanwinkle wrote: post #39
lisper wrote: post #33

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

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.

This is buddhism and mindfulness in a nutshell. The only thing about your existence that does not change is that which is aware.

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

#78

Post by ajkjk »

jimkri wrote: post #70
fwipsy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a strong claim, and I've never heard of it before. Can you provide sources?

I’m not backing that comment claim, but from recent research I’ve been doing. My ADHD brain is lacking non-essential and essential amino acids/minerals,I think that comment stated the brain then rewires to compensate for the lack of nutrients. Thats what I’m taking. I’ve been taking Spirulina as my booster to help fill in my nutrition deficiencies and then I’ve been feeling better leading me to get past the anxiety a…

that's not 'research'

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

#80

Post by bccdee »

orangebread wrote: post #35
joe8756438 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on

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 h…

> 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.

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