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I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

theatlantic.com

111–120 of 189 posts

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also made a throwaway account to make a comment here. I also said the article was well written. I am an HN regular, but didn't want my medical problem tied to my HN account name. Is it that odd that we might have polar opposite views on the article? Or that having a somewhat similar experience to the author, that I might view the article differently than you do?

It is odd that you would make two different names just to talk up the article, yes.

I'm not the other throwaway account posting here. I do have a normal HN account though.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#113

A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or n…

I had something very similar. 2 years went by where I visited over 30 doctors, and none of the public healthcare (UK) primary care and specialists had any idea what the hell was going. I took matters in my own hands, was doing blood tests by own research, googled everything I can find. Turns out I had hypogonadism, and had evidence of blood tests to prove it, and even then it took 3 more doctors to prescribe me TRT. Hope software replaces docs faster than lightning

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#114
post #79

At the other end of the scale, unrelated to severe trauma I truly believe we don't come back from anaesthesia entirely the same. I have no scientific basis for this belief, it's just how I feel about the experience of waking up from anaesthesia twice. The "who am I" in this article is strong. Who is asking the questions? Is it the same "me" from before time? The other one, knew what parmesan looked like.

Been through anesthesia, did not notice anything of the sort.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#115

Really well written, especially considering the author's plight. Regarding this bit: > The day of the accident I had been working on a project to improve how homeless people are placed into shelters. I say out loud, “I don’t care about homeless people” to see how it feels. It doesn’t ring true; I do care about homeless people. I just don’t feel like working. I wonder if that's directly to do with the brain damage or…

I imagine it's different for different people. I survived an event that m doctor at the time warned me there was very little chance of surviving. After working through all of the stages of loss over my future, I managed to come out the other side of my health issues with less impact than expected.

Now it's almost like I've made peace with my death, and don't much care about anything anymore. The only way I can rationalize what my brain's done is it's accepted a world without me, and is OK with that. It's odd, you'd think someone that survives a traumatic event would be overjoyed. I'm just "meh" most of the time now.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#116
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't exist, who wrote this comment? The hands. Driven by the chemical phenomena taking place in the brain given the information it had been fed previously. Both the hands and the brain and the memories are mine but not me. The same way my finger is (I won't be less me if I loose it, neither I will if I loose a memory of something, even of my name) and my car is. I am merely the observer of all these but ok,…

I've found this concept is near impossible to share without sounding, well, like you put it, "a new-age loon". We haven't really developed a system or language that succinctly expresses the nature of self or experience (well, I only know English. Perhaps other languages lend themselves better). For me, I find the simplest terms to be the most profound way of capturing what you said, but when I say them out loud to so…

If other languages had proper words right for these things, even the people for whom these languages were native would have to explain the words to the kids somehow. And the only ways to teach someone a word are either explain in simple concepts or point to the object and say "this is it". So having the words doesn't really help much. There actually are such words in Tibetan, Pali, Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, native American languages, etc but you won't need them once you actually know what do they really mean and knowing them won't be of much use in expressing the meanings to others who don't know so far.

As a rough (yet quite close) example: we have a word for swimming but you can't just say "swim" and see a person who never did like "aha! all I have is to swim!" yet all he has to do actually is to swim and breaking it into simpler concepts isn't a particularly fast way to teach them. I myself learnt to swim (after all the instructors with their theories failed to teach me) just by going into water and trying until I acquired a feeling of how to do it. Curiously enough, there is an easy way to instantly turn the swimming skill of by means of electric stimulation so otherwise normal person believing he can swim (because he did it so many times) would jump into water and immediately discover he doesn't remember how to.

If we consider the experiences and understanding we are discussing useful for others (I believe they can have great therapeutic value for many but also be dangerous for many) all we can do is develop and refine systems of guiding people to experience and understand these things themselves. Religions took care of this historically and Buddhism in particular has been particularly productive (and didn't lost nor hid that with time) but I believe a religion with all its mythological, mystical and dogmatic stuff is not really necessary, rational methods are possible.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#117
post #10

To de-clickbait this article: the author had a traumatic brain injury which eliminated her racing inner monologue.

What is the point of quieting your inner monologue? o-O

Repetitive and unhelpful thoughts. Rumination.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#118

A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or n…

> 1. Like any other industry, 90% of medical “experts” are totally incompetent. Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion. When I was a kid it took 2 years to diagnose my, frankly quite textbook, hypothyroidism. Know who first diagnosed it? A friend of my mother's who worked the toll booth at the airport. Her dog had it, you see, so she recognized the symptoms. My mother had to go full Karen mode on a doctor to get them…

A few years back my father had a valve replacement due to childhood rheumatic fever. At ten days post op he woke up with an unstable heart rhythm and went to the hospital. They gave him drugs to get the rhythm under control, which failed. After two days, I get a call from my sister, a neurologist, telling me to get to the hospital immediately. When I arrived, he was short of breath and in a bad way. At the hospital my sister took one look at his EKG and remarked that he was at risk of going into tamponade at any moment. She asked if anyone had bothered to do an echocardiogram when he was admitted -- they hadn't. She just about chewed out his nurse and they ran the echo. Lo and behold, he had pericardial effusion: a half litre of fluid was compressing his heart. They rushed him into the catheter lab, drained the fluid and his symptoms resolved immediately.

On Monday I was having coffee with a coworker and mentioned that my father had a valve replaced and he'd been in the hospital over the weekend. My coworkers immediately remarked, "Oh, he had a pericardial effusion." The medical staff had become so fixated on his erratic rhythm that they had forgotten the context of his case: if someone shows up with symptoms of a post op complication, don't start by trying to diagnose an unrelated malady. My coworker? His mother had a valve replacement and had a pericardial effusion.

That's a lot of words to say: checklists save lives.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#119
post #11
post #2

This headline is like a bad r/nosleep title. Someday, somehow, I hope we move past this dumb clickbait style.

Yeah, I couldn't get very far in to it. Something about the author's tone and writing style was awkward and offputting.

This is the best article I have read that was posted to HN this year. Most other articles that try to be insightful just reveal the writers own stupidity and desire to follow trends.

I did not see the same tricks in this article.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#120
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have good news for you. Ignoring the small chance that you're actually a figment of my imagination, I can confirm you actually do exist.

> Ignoring the small chance that you're actually a figment of my imagination Haha. I always figure I'm not smart enough to come up with all these people, and if I was, I'd know their thoughts in advance because they'd be part of me.

You just are not "smart enough" (don't have enough working memory and attention capacity) to fit all (or any) these people thoughts in your "observation window", you already have immense amount of information processed consciously and unconsciously in it and all around it which clouds this function of perception to the point of near-impossibility.

Some meditation techniques can let you develop nearly direct perception without ideas but as soon as you want to use this to read someone's mind that already is an idea and makes this impossible.

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