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#Recept...
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
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?
If 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.
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.
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?
Reminds me of 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.
> In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention.
In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
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.
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.
Happiness is the expectation of upcoming good things
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.
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....
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/
There are others.
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??
> 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.
Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more
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.
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.)
This is really good and inspiring writing. I love it.
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.
Attention leads to consciousness, consciousness leads bliss. This is the whole goal of yoga, meditation and eastern spirituality.
> 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.
congratulations you’ve discovered meditation
... "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.
> 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.
Who has time for sex? Gotta grind your leetcode 996 for the next promo, that Bay Area house payment got to come from somewhere.
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?
>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...]
High school tier literature.
So true, my dog loves chasing her own tail.
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.
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.
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He's right, but he approaches it from the boring physical materialist perspective. Wrong level of analysis.
Man choosing `.xyz` as a TLD in a world with corporate firewalls is such an unforced error.
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.