> 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.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
121–130 of 238 posts
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#122congratulations you’ve discovered meditation
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#123If you're near any of the cities they run events in, I highly recommend 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.
If this intrigues you, and you are in the Bay Area, I would recommend checking out Audium.
Similarly, it places you in a room, turns off the lights, and you listen to an audio performance. Though it is more soundscapes interlaced musically than the Pitch Black Playback's focus on albums.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#124Given 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?
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#125I 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 audience…
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.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#126Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#127That'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 blo…
My symptoms didn’t improve that much when I was an endurance athlete. Most of the improvements could be adequately explained by the hedonic treadmill. I could suffer longer.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#128Sounds 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…
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
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#129I 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 audience…
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…
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#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-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.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#130Given 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)…
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.