Science & Fun - Jonathan Graehl

As I’ve said before, I like 59 Seconds. I’m trusting the author to fairly summarize the research, even though I know he’ll sometimes over-sell it.

Creativity

This chapter was a little less exciting for me. It mostly seems to be about people brainstorming in groups.

Unconscious mind

Distract your conscious mind when you’re stuck. Or just put the task away and come back later (especially in a different environment). At the very least, this may allow you to let go of a fixed mental box. Track a dot as it moves across the monitor (the saccadic eye exercise in Brain Workshop might do, even though it’s not continuous motion). Watch cars or birds as they move across your window.

Encourage analogy

Look for advice from similar situations. Think of how some other person does something like what you want to do. Change of perspective, or just useful clues? It should help, either way. Imagine what happens if you did the opposite of what you think will help.

Flowers and plants

These help encourage creativity and play. Why? Doesn’t matter. Red is associated with danger, green with positivity and relaxation. Green ink -> 30% more anagrams solved than red ink (maybe red is harder to see, too). But on the other hand, pictures or video windows of nature scenes don’t work well. Green paint might help.

Fresh Blood

In groups, rotating out a new collaborator helps on average. Maybe this is just because in the study, the transaction was to take 1 person out of each group and move them to the next, on the same task. So naturally this person would be stealing all the cool (types of) ideas from their previous group. But I still have a weak belief that this helps beyond that effect (or maybe the study did control for it by using different people or tasks).

Priming

Priming matters a lot in general. Our brain associates things with other things. Trigger one thing and it triggers associated things.

Put people in front of computer wallpaper showing dollar symbols, and they behave in a more selfish and unfriendly way, giving less money to charity and sitting farther away from others.¹⁷ Give interviewers a cup of iced coffee, and they unknowingly rate interviewees as colder and less pleasant.¹⁸ Add a faint smell of cleaning fluid to the air, and people tidy up more thoroughly.¹⁹ Put a briefcase on a table during a meeting, and people suddenly become more competitive.²⁰

So, expect to be inspired by watching or thinking about other great creators. Or, glance at a piece of art that suggests creativity. A picture with 12 identically colored crosses inspired less creativity than one with 1 of the 12 colored differently. Images like these are somehow “creative-priming” compared to the boring all-same versions:

Pull yourself toward your desk to increase creativity. Push down on the desk to decrease it (we have a long association of pushing away things we don’t like).

If you’re more stressed, you’ll be less creative (more focused). All stress is physical, but there are different types, still. The brain uses blood. Different parts of the brain are boosted/suppressed by stress. People unscramble anagrams (10%) faster when lying down than when standing up - probably because of physical stress.

(from Seth Roberts: if you’re walking on a treadmill, you’ll enjoy studying more; standing up is no help. suggests walking/learning priming)

Attraction

Cookies taken from a nearly-empty jar taste better than cookies from a full jar (scarcity).

Researchers failed to produce any measurable “hard to get” attraction effect from first contacts in online dating. Since that failed, they tried enlisting prostitutes; also no effect.

However, if you appear to be GENERALLY hard to get but SPECIFICALLY easy for your mark, then they are more excited about you (because you probably won’t reject or publicly humiliate them, but you won’t embarrass them with your reputation of being easy; you’re a more impressive prize).

For females: latex bra inserts. A cup: 13, faked B cup: 19, faked C cup: 44 (approaches by men in a nightclub), and 15%,18%,24% (hitchhiking success rate).

Touch the upper arm of someone you need help from. Brief touch = 20% more successful panhandling. I don’t think this is all intimidation. This also makes women (and probably men) more receptive to cold approaches, even in public (physically attractive, confident young men apparently have a 20% success rate in getting a woman’s number after an appearance-compliment and offer for drinks that night, but only 10% without touching).

Touching is high status and dominant, even if not intimidating to the recipient.

Succesful men and women in speed-dating get people talking about themselves, with fun/offbeat queries, probably because they’re a refreshing change from the conventional interaction (and fun/playful/leading people are attractive).

“If you were on a hit show, who would you be?” “If you were a pizza topping, what would you be?”

Mimic someone (repeat exactly their words back to them, or just their body language), and they report feeling a closer emotional bond. Don’t be too obvious and they won’t notice.

People seem to be able to detect that you act interested in everyone (in a speed-dating environment, irrespective of whether they eavesdrop or are just perceptive of your progression with them implying a fixed agenda). They hate that. Maybe you’ll be unfaithful, or maybe it means you’re low status and grateful for anything you can get.

Women avoid (in planning on long-term commitment) men who seem too attractive AND too high status, probably figuring they won’t be able to keep them.

Women claim kindness is what they’re looking for. What they really want is bravery. For impressing women, rock climbing, skateboard/snowboard/bmx/etc, soccer, and hiking are attractive. Aerobic and golf aren’t. For impressing men, aerobics, yoga, gym (but not bodybuilding).

Scary first date = they think they’re excited about you.

Get them to disclose personal info. It will need to be reciprocal, and if it wasn’t safe small-talk, you’ll feel intimate. For example:

1. Imagine hosting the perfect dinner party. You can invite anyone who has ever lived. Whom would you ask?

2. When did you last talk to yourself?

3. Name two ways in which you consider yourself lucky.

4. Name something that you have always wanted to do and explain why you haven’t done it yet.

5. Imagine that your house or apartment catches fire. You can save only one object. What would it be?

6. Describe one of the happiest days of your life.

7. Imagine that you are going to become a close friend with your date. What is the most important thing for him or her to know about you?

8. Tell your date two things that you really like about him or her.

9. Describe one of the most embarrassing moments in your life.

10. Describe a personal problem, and ask your date’s advice on how best to handle it.

Get a tame woman to accompany you and dote on you, laughing at your jokes, etc. When she slips away, the other women will want you.

Act lukewarm at first (I’m generally hard to get) but warm, peaking toward the end (but I’m really into you).

Slow developing, real smiles. Tilt your head (note: I actually looked this study up. It’s students scoring CG characters on a screen. But there’s an indirect citation to Frey 1999 that actually talks about (laterally?) tilting your head toward either who you’re looking at or talking to; unfortunately it’s in German).

College students’ first impressions: women want a man with 2 previous partners (but not more) and men want a woman with 4. 0 is bad.

Sustained eye contact => attraction. But people consider it hostile and will avoid it unless there’s an excuse or a willingness to be attracted. (study used a fake “ESP study” scenario to bypass natural defensiveness)

Rather than chatting about topics that you both like, try talking about things you both dislike – people feel closer to each other when they agree about dislikes rather than likes.

I don’t know if I believe this. It’s normally risky to talk shit about others; people associate the shit with you. But maybe that doesn’t apply given attraction, or given that they agree.

In relationships

Active listening almost never happens (“I understand the way you feel when you say XYZ …”) and so isn’t useful in predicting breakups in real relationships. Maybe it would help if you could do it.

The female usually raises a difficult issue, presents an analysis of the problem, and suggests some possible solutions. Males who are able to accept some of these ideas, and therefore show a sense of power sharing with their partner, are far more likely to maintain a successful relationship. In contrast, couples in which the males react by stonewalling, or even showing contempt, are especially likely to break up.

Maybe. You could just as well say that reasonable demands from the female are necessary in order for the man to be able to please.

New joint activity involving physical contact. Dancing, if you haven’t been.

Men estimate how pleased a woman will be by some stereotypical romantic gesture more pessimistically than women.

Identified as maximally romantic by some portion of women:

1. Cover her eyes and lead her to a lovely surprise—40 percent

2. Whisk her away somewhere exciting for the weekend—40 percent

3. Write a song or poem about her—28 percent

4. Tell her that she is the most wonderful woman that you have ever met—25 percent

5. Run her a relaxing bath after she has had a bad day at work—22 percent

6. Send her a romantic text or e-mail, or leave a note around the house—22 percent

7. Wake her up with breakfast in bed—22 percent

8. Offer her a coat when she is cold—18 percent

9. Send her a large bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates at her workplace—16 percent

10. Make her a mix CD of her favorite music—12 percent

It’s easy to remember negative emotions. Maybe 5 times easier.

Negative remarks are returned in kind more than positive ones.

Write (privately) about your feelings about the relationship. Then you’ll tend to express more positive things to your partner.

Think about how others’ relationships are worse than yours. This will make you happier with yours than if you only think of what’s good about it in isolation.

If you have some real criticism of your partner, follow it with “but [a reason it somehow it makes me love them]”.

Keep cool objects in the entertaining-room those that have a history with your partner (gift, shared purchase, vacation, etc.)

Thinking about your love for your partner should decrease your specific interest in sexy bodies.
 

 

Interesting argument apropos Wisconsin public school union-busting: the liberal fantasy that “good teachers” will easily erase the non-asian-minority achievement gap has lead to an unfair “blame the public school teachers” conclusion, that conveniently excuses sending your kid to a private school, and makes attacking the teachers’ union more politically viable.

http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits

A programmable chip (FPGA) loaded with the right program (code ‘evolved’ by an overseer measuring task performance to choose winners, with random sexual combination of code items in a generation) can reliably classify an analog signal with a far simpler design than any human-constructed approach.

Unfortunately, the code may only work for the particular physical substrate (programmable chip) it was evolved on, in that it exploits idiosyncrasies in that particular chip.

One particular winning program produced disconnected loops, that nonetheless were influenced by electromagnetism at distance from nearby circuits, and were essential to task performance.

You could still mass produce such devices by running the evolution on each somewhat-unique chip, seeding it with successful codes from other chips.

They use no clock signal; making changes only happen on transitions of a global clock signal is one of the ways abstract, designed programs can execute reproducibly in spite of small variations in the manufactured substrate (it’s also possible to design clockless circuits that converge reliably, but that’s not as often practiced).

The human brain almost certainly enjoys such efficiencies (compared to rigid, computer-programming-like design). Just a few weeks ago Caltech researchers found actual evidence of changes in neural activity from influences in disconnected neurons in proximity (in rats), under normal (not epileptic) conditions - ”Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons”. I don’t know if this mechanism will turn out to be essential to modeling our brains’ computation. This is definitely analogous to the useful disconnected circuit in the winning evolved FPGA design; if the learning reinforcement is supplied reliably by other already-working parts of the brain, neural ‘circuits’ could even arise by an analogous mechanism.

The study tracked the habits and health of 2,500 adults in Manhattan for nearly ten years. Those who drank diet soda had a 48% higher chance of either stroke or heart attack than those who didn’t drink soda at all. So far, the entire science between the finding hasn’t been concluded, but the study says the link exists regardless of factors like exercise, smoking, diabetes, weight and alcohol consumption. Even healthy people are victim to the diet soda.

Correlation, not intervention/control, but still: randomly selected (Manhattan) residents over a 10 year period. It’s suspicious to me that they didn’t mention caffeine, which is correlated with diet soda imbibed :)

Also, no study text available. Looks super-preliminary - press release science.

This was all I could find in the conference program:

Poster Board Number P55 / Presentation Number Th P55
Soda Consumption and Risk of Vascular Events in the Northern
Manhattan Study
Hannah Gardener, Tatjana Rundek, Clinton Wright, Univ of Miami Miller
Sch of Med, Miami, FL; Julio Vieira, Mitchell S Elkind, Columbia Univ, New
York, NY; Ralph L Sacco, Univ of Miami Miller Sch of Med, Miami, FL

Salt implicated in stroke risk by the same team:

Dietary Sodium Intake is a Risk Factor for Incident 25
Ischemic Stroke: The Northern Manhattan Study (NOMAS)
Hannah Gardener, Tatjana Rundek, Clinton Wright, Univ of
Miami Miller Sch of Med, Miami, FL; Norbelina Disla,
Mitchell S Elkind, Columbia Univ, New York, NY; Ralph L
Sacco, Univ of Miami Miller Sch of Med, Miami, FL

It’s commonly recommended that people with high blood pressure avoid salt, so perhaps this is sensible. I refuse to modify my salt intake beyond what my taste tells me until I hear a better case that I specifically am at risk, or that on net the harms of a high-salt diet exceed the benefits.

Robin Hanson, my favorite intellectual provocateur, says that the super-rich are almost always virtuous. I’m inclined to agree, except that the type of virtue in making lots of money can involve malfeasance, self-serving negligence, and fraud - Enron, Pfizer (Vioxx), various banks encouraging non-scrutiny of fraudulent home assessments and income declarations, mortgage-backed-securities and credit default swaps, poisonous baby formula and toothpaste, unsafe counterfeit rock-climbing gear, etc.

I don’t know how frequent such occurrences are (reporting them is crowd pleasing, so I can’t just think ‘I hear about it all the time, so it must be really common!’), but to the extent that we effectively punish such crimes by removing most of the perpetrators’ wealth, then it would be even more true that the presently rich are likely virtuous.

For some reason, often only a fraction of a criminal’s wealth is removed, even though violent or drug crimes of lesser harm result in the entirety of a person’s freedom being removed. I also assume that people trying to win in competitive businesses are routinely guilty of lies, collusion, etc., but that’s just part of the game and not part of the ‘virtue’ meant.

I’m not sure that, aside from Gates+friends’ recent push to secure large donations (50% of wealth?) from many of the so-rich-they-can-afford-it, we should expect successful rich people to be especially selfless. One of the reasons many modestly wealthy people have so much as they do is from a practice of selfish frugality. I don’t equate charity with virtue, but it does seem fantastic that Gates+friends are trying to spend money in a way that improves more human lives (by more), instead of just donating to the poorest U.S. citizens who are competent to apply for aid (whose biggest problem, I presume, is the terrible behavior of their neighbors, and not a lack of medical care, food, safe water, internet access, etc.).

I suppose it is bad for middle-class U.S. citizens if the rich decide that they want to use their influence to secure lower tax rates (on the rich) so they can spend more helping foreign poor. Naturally, the rich are still spending plenty of money on status and pleasure goods, but I think it’s fair of them to have little allegiance to their native country.

Taking 13 milligrams every three to four hours during the day, for a total of 50-65 milligrams per day, is what seemed to cut down colds.

You only suffer 60% of the normal days of coughing/sneezing when you take zinc on the first day (avoid nasal spray zinc). Source: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

I’ve weakly believed in this for over 10 years, but haven’t consistently employed it.

Also (not sure of research), many shut-ins or people in low-sunlight areas claim that taking 10x the RDA of vitamin D has resulted in their not succumbing to colds. This is quite weak anecdotal evidence.

I got tired of reading the book on Vipassana meditation. It’s mostly nonsense.

My mostly-certain judgments:

The idea that “not caring” is always the ideal direction is silly.

The idea of being really aware of what’s going on in your mind, rather than being driven by emotional repulsion fields, and especially by childish do-not-want! feelings toward the way things really are in relation to you, is beautiful and what I’ve already always aspired to.

The idea that actively resting from activity allows training in the above, and/or is more restorative than simply adding extra (quality) sleep time, is unsettled in my mind. I’ve definitely achieved significant pleasure in resting while being observant of how I feel (meditating, in some sense; but I didn’t invest a lot of time really following their specific advice so can’t fairly say how effective it is, except that I don’t find their advice in general to be well-motivated beyond ‘trust us, we spent a lot of time trying different things’). But that awake-rest is more pleasurable and interesting than real sleep only because I can’t remember much of what goes on when I’m asleep. It doesn’t mean that it’s more physically helpful or even likely to form new insights more effectively.

I guess in the same way that people may choose to spend time on various drugs, because they can reach different states of mind there, if I wanted variety for variety’s sake, I might want a few minutes daily of meditation. Whether or not it’s better on average than the alternatives (sleep or activity), it’s at least different.

As an example of things that meditation subtracts time from, other than sleep, I’ve started ‘composing’ music (improvising using a keyboard and instrument samples, really). During this time I’m not thinking about myself at all. I doubt I’m improving at anything other than imagining sounds and mapping sounds to the requisite finger movements (it’s thought that focused practice, and learning in general, may preserve or amplify some global brain attributes, but I doubt anyone’s proved it). But it feels nice in moderation, and I can’t say my life would be any better if I meditated instead. Almost any time I’d be tempted to meditate, I’m more tempted to perform this (equally pointless) activity. It’s more rewarding. It’s true that I could expect to become ‘better’ at meditating in some sense, but practicing music offers definitive, and (I’m not sure how important this is) sharable improvements.

Of course, I’m not only picking a single most rewarding activity and sustaining it in every available moment (other than necessities like work/sleep/food/bills). My internal reward diminishes eventually, and during its refractory period, I’ll do the next thing. That implements a sort of preference for novelty and variety. Also, I have feelings of ‘needing to recharge facility X’ or “I can’t do this as well now because I’m tired, I’ll do something else until I go to sleep or nap, then I’ll get back to it when rested”.

That’s my explanation of why I don’t have a meditation habit, even though I never convinced myself that it would be a complete waste of time.

For sure I disagree with most things that come from a guru-driven (or worse, religion-driven) school, and that includes any sort of meditation instruction I’ve come across. I think it’s actually irresponsible to “try out” practices and beliefs too whole-heartedly. Once you endorse a set of practices at all, you enlist all your biases to cementing them in you. I do believe in avoiding unnecessary stress, and feeling like you need to continually monitor changes in yourself during such an experiment, in order to avoid passing a point of no return, doesn’t sound like fun. I don’t think I’m infinitely susceptible to influence, but I am definitely somewhat susceptible to both self-influence and peer pressure.

59 Seconds is full of evidence-based self-help advice. I recommend it (on the basis of the first 3 chapters - I haven’t finished). In some cases there may be a danger that findings of correlation lead to cargo-cult recommendations, but generally the causation of happiness and motivation is bidirectional (things that happen as a result of them also reinforce them).

Some amusing studies cited in the book:

The day before the 2004 American presidential election, more than a hundred voters were asked to imagine themselves going to the polling booth the following day. One group was told to carry out the visualization exercise from a first-person perspective (seeing the world through their own eyes), while another group was instructed to carry out the same task from a third-person perspective (seeing themselves as someone else would see them). Remarkably, 90 percent of those who imagined themselves from a third-person perspective went on to vote, compared with just more than 70 percent of those who employed first-person visualization. Although the explanation for the effect is uncertain, it could be that adopting a third-person perspective requires more mental effort than a first-person one and so results in more significant behavioral changes.

A more powerful explanation: imagining people seeing you makes activates the idea that people will see you, which makes you behave more like you want to be seen - a ‘good citizen’. Just like making the lights less bright (via sunglasses, even) increases your cheating, because you’ll imagine that people can’t see you.

People were taken to the bottom of a hill and asked to estimate how steep it was and therefore how difficult it would be to climb. When they were accompanied by a friend, their estimates were about 15 percent lower than when they were on their own, and even just thinking about a friend when looking at the hill made it seem far more surmountable.

Obviously, people don’t want to act weak in front of others. But I’ll definitely try thinking of my friends when I’m alone and facing a challenge.

They were asked to form a clear image in their mind’s eye and imagine how great it would feel to make a high grade. … Even though the daydreaming exercise lasted only a few minutes, it had a significant impact on the students’ behavior, causing them to study less and make lower grades on the exam.

I’m now going to paraphrase most of the points in the first 3 chapters that I agree with. When I say ‘but …’, I mean that it’s something I ‘know’ (have thought of, or read about elsewhere) that the book doesn’t mention.

Positive thinking can lead to poor performance. Expecting a reward may also mean we’re less interested in the actual reward (we use up some of the juice in advance, and are less motivated by it).

What’s recommended instead of pure daydreaming: imagine all the nice things that go with success, and all the problems likely to block you. Then, alternate through those lists (fantasizing about enjoying a benefit after reaching the goal, contemplating what response could be employed against the obstacle). The alternation sounds like a decent idea. In any case, the procedure helped on the whole. It can be helpful to actually form concepts for each thing, which is easier if you can assign a short label. Generally, writing seems to help with this. There’s a tendency for ideas mentally rehearsed to either get stuck or fade, which is avoided with diagrams or notes.

Diet tips

• start eating at normal speed, then slow down+savor for the remainder
• use tall glasses and small dishes/utensils
• store snacks out of sight (where you’re not likely to remember them)
• just eat. combining food with another engaging activity leads to a ‘popcorn movie’ effect
• keep track of what you eat (mental or brief written notes)
• eat near a mirror. don’t exercise near one.
• fidget more. move more vigorously in everyday life
• don’t think eating ‘diet’ foods will result in less caloric intake, or excuse you from activity

Mood-boosting writing exercises

You can send these to a friend you’re able to be honest with, or just write to yourself. I’m sure there’s diminishing returns on effort, length, and comprehensiveness. These worked for me (I did one a day). The effects lingered.

• things you’re currently grateful for
• an emotional high point from your past
• write about a fantasized-for future where you’re completely happy with what you’ve become and achieved
• tell someone that they’re valuable to you (that you love them), and why.
• some things that went better than expected for you in the last week (trivial things are fine), and why you think they happened

Charitable giving makes people happy (or maybe the other way around?). The thrill is greatest if you get to see up close people’s lives improved by your giving (this is why professionals work in soup kitchens instead of more rationally working for extra money and paying others to work in the soup kitchen; this is also why charities that send you photos of the child you ‘sponsored’ do repeat business). But I imagine you could derive a more abstract thrill from being the kind of person who maximizes the leverage of their charitable dollar in *really* helping people, not just in seeing grateful faces up close, knowing you’ve helped them.

Also, it seems you should binge on ‘being a good person’ satisfaction. Spreading out small kindnesses one a day for a week gave less joy to people than lumping them all into a single-day extravaganza (small things like writing thank-you notes, giving blood, etc.). I guess it has to be sufficient so you’re really convinced that you are a good person.

Doing fun things with your money (vacation, food, shows, etc.) apparently makes you happier than buying super-expensive goods. (But I read elsewhere that people surveyed during a vacation are on average pretty stressed and unhappy; but it’s often a net gain because a few nice moments, blown up in stories/memories , that provide pleasant recollections and things to brag about over the coming years.)

If you starve someone for validation, then it’s likely that they’ll spend more money on the strategy of happiness by consumption.

Fake it until you make it, physically. Really smile, for a few seconds (at least 10). In order to do really do this, you should think of something that makes you smile. Similarly, sit up straight, don’t slouch. For men (or confident women?), stick your chest out. Take an expansive pose. Move and talk like a happy person - swing your arms more, bounce more when walking, be more expressive in nonverbal communication (nod your head when you follow what someone is saying, smile, etc), all your voice to swing to higher pitch and speak faster (like you’re excited), say emotionally positive things (express liking and approval), and shake hands firmly. Don’t use first person pronouns so much. (I’m not sure if all of these can be abused for reverse-expected causation like smiling can, but for sure they’re correlated with happiness).

Active habits that increase happiness may increase it permanently, as opposed to accidental windfalls (lottery winning) which make you happy only for a little while.

Persuasion

Small and random rewards work better than rewards large enough that people think they’re doing something just because they’re paid for it.

If you want a job, make them like you in the interview. Good eye contact, smile, talk about other things. Act interested in their org and their work, and ask questions. Give a real compliment. Ask what they’re looking for in you. Act excited about the job. Open with confessions of weakness (provided your overall case is strong, people will like you more if you exhibit *some* weakness and are not all perfection; it also signals honesty) and close with your strongest bragging points (of course trying to pretend to modesty). The reverse order is worse. Remember always that there’s a chance others don’t notice your mistake (you certainly feel intensely ashamed of it, but remember that others don’t know and notice everything you do). It’s ok to acknowledge a mistake, and great to continue on as if you’re unperturbed.

Sit toward the middle of a table (at least on ‘The Weakest Link’). Use simpler language (applies to invented product/company names, too - and probably to human names).

Get people to do small favors that you act like you personally will greatly appreciate. This will make them see you as indebted to them, which is nice because they’re likely to keep investing in you.

Familiarity breeds liking.

Anything you can do that increases the tendency of people to like you is valuable.

Carnegie: act interested in people. People love to feel like someone cares about them, and love to talk about themselves. Other tricks: match body language/speech, act modest, help people, give sincere compliments (all of this in a way that doesn’t make them suspicious that you’re trying to play them).

If you gossip about someone’s negative behavior, people will unconsciously associate you with that behavior. (but in general gossip is widely used to enforce social norms; maybe not participating at all marks you as holier-than-thou or free-riding)

If people think highly of you already, a mistake that you’d think would be embarrassing will endear you more to them. If they think you’re a loser, then they’ll really turn away in disgust after that same mistake.

Get people to say something positive at all (“how are you feeling/doing?”), and then ask them to do something for you. This works better than just asking.

People like things more if they’re paired with a (free?) meal or a drink. Caffeine makes you more persuadable (by new arguments, I imagine).

“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.” Rhyme is actually persuasive. (In general things that are easier to understand/remember are more persuasive; people distrust the same words said in a thick foreign accent, for that reason among others).

If people think they’re more like you (e.g. same name), they’ll like you or help you more.

Crack a joke that gets them to smile, and they’ll give you a better deal in negotiation.

If you need help, target a specific person and ask them directly; don’t ask the group.

People will reciprocate. Do them small favors (of course, this may make you like them more).

Put a cute smiling baby photo in your wallet. Then it gets returned 1/3 the time instead of 1/8. (because they imagine they like you, and because babies are thrilling in a way other attractive things aren’t).

Motivation

1. make a plan (write down or form a mental list of subtasks)
2. tell people you’re working on the goal (this raises the stakes, at least, and the bigger a show you make, to more (important) people, about your promise to do something, the more worried you’d be at not doing it).
3. mentally link the steps of your plan with the good things you’ll get when you finish it - be attracted to what you’ll have when you succeed, not repulsed by what will happen if you fail. frequently remind yourself of the attraction
4. give yourself artificial rewards (as part of your plan or impromptu) for achieving subtasks, if they’re not inherently rewarding
5. journal or chart plan progress or actions taken
6. actually get started. once you do this, you’ll be nagging/worrying over it until you finish or give up. you’ll want to work on it more. this is where most procrastination lies: in not starting.

Not very useful: worship and emulate people you admire for having done similar, think about the bad consequences of failure, consciously try to ‘not think of an elephant’ (e.g. sex/drugs/food you want to cut back on), expect to exert willpower (perseverance in the face of high expected chance of unrewarding outcomes), fantasize about your future life after you’ve got what you want (this was actually recommended as a general mood booster, but I think it leeches away some of the inherent reward for achieving steps toward your goal).

For each goal subtask, make yourself believe that you’ll probably succeed (come up with a good reason). Then outline the concrete actions you’ll take, and commit to a deadline and a reward that goes with that deadline (optional). List the benefits of winning the main goal (it’s also motivating to think of how you’ll be helping other people, not only yourself).

I’ll probably continue as in this post later (for the remaining 7 chapters) as I read more.

Who	Genotype	What It Means
Jonathan Graehl	CC	Two working copies of alpha-actinin-3 in fast-twitch muscle fiber.Many world-class sprinters and some endurance athletes have this genotype.

I’m fast-twitchy.

breast-fed as a baby:

Who	Genotype	What It Means
Jonathan Graehl	CC	Being breastfed raised subjects’ IQ by 6-7 points on average.

Who	Genotype	What It Means
Jonathan Graehl	AA	Being breastfed raised subjects’ IQ by 4-5 points on average.

negative reinforcement works well on me (also linked in general to having more dopamine receptors and maybe being susceptible to heroin addiction):

Who	Genotype	What It Means
Jonathan Graehl	GG	Effectively learns to avoid errors.

better memory (of word sequences/events):

Jonathan Graehl

CT

Slightly increased episodic memory.

fatty diet won’t make me fat:

Jonathan Graehl

AG

No change in BMI with a high-fat diet.

I have testosterone:

Who	Genotype	What It Means
Jonathan Graehl	AA	Typical levels of circulating testosterone.

I can diet:

Who	Genotype	What It Means
Jonathan Graehl	AA	Decreasing energy intake and increasing physical activity was associated with weight loss

average longevity:

Jonathan Graehl

AC

Typical odds of living to 100.

not susceptible to cigarette addiction:

Who	Genotype	What It Means
	AA	In Europeans who smoke, likely to smoke two more cigarettes per day on average than the typical amount.
	AG	In Europeans who smoke, likely to smoke one more cigarette per day on average than the typical amount.
Jonathan Graehl	GG	In Europeans who smoke, likely to smoke the typical number of cigarettes per day.

50% normal risk of psoriasis
75% normal risk of melanoma
50% normal risk of rhematoid arthritis
20% normal risk of age related vision loss

the bad news:
320% normal risk of venous thromboembolism (blood clot -> possible pulmonary embolism / stroke).

Fortunately, it seems like there are easily controllable lifestyle factors, and you can detect a clot before it breaks off and causes stroke.

(DVT/PE is a lifetime 12% risk for normal people, 40% for me!)

• DVT (leg clot) symptoms:
  • Swelling, usually in one leg
  • Leg pain or tenderness
  • Reddish or bluish skin discoloration
  • Leg warm to touch
• PE (lung clot) symptoms:
  • Sudden shortness of breath
  • Chest pain-sharp, stabbing; may get worse with deep breath
  • Rapid heart rate
  • Unexplained cough, sometimes with bloody mucus

Don’t smoke

A large Danish study found that women who smoked had a 52% increased risk for venous thromboembolism compared with women who had never smoked. For men, smoking conferred a 32% increase in risk. Heavy smokers had even higher risks.

Keep your weight in check
Obesity increases the risk of venous thromboembolism.

Get up and move
Venous thromboembolism is sometimes called “economy class syndrome” because sitting still for long periods of time, as on a cramped airplane, can cause sluggish blood flow, which in turn increases the risk for the formation of blood clots.

part 1
part 2

This covers my first Vipassana-like meditation, as described in chapter 5.

 Chapter 5

 

 

Seeing with wisdom means seeing things within the framework of our body/mind complex without prejudices or biases springing from our greed, hatred and delusion. Ordinarily when we watch the working of our mind/body complex, we tend to hide or ignore things which are not pleasant to us and to hold onto things which are pleasant. This is because our minds are generally influenced by our desires, resentment and delusion. Our ego, self or opinions get in our way and color our judgment.

Obviously.

When we mindfully watch our bodily sensations, we should not confuse them with mental formations, for bodily sensations can arise without anything to do with the mind. For instance, we sit comfortably. After a while, there can arise some uncomfortable feeling on our back or in our legs. Our mind immediately experiences that discomfort and forms numerous thoughts around the feeling.

Agreed. Whatever I pay attention to, prompts thoughts.

At that point, without trying to confuse the feeling with the mental formations, we should isolate the feeling as feeling and watch it mindfully. Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors.

 

The other six are contact, perception, mental formations, concentration, life force, and awareness.

meaningless mumbo jumbo to me. needs explanation.

At another time, we may have a certain emotion such as, resentment, fear, or lust. Then we should watch the emotion exactly as it is without trying to confuse it with anything else. When we bundle our form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness up into one and try to watch all of them as feeling, we get confused, as we will not be able to see the source of feeling. If we simply dwell upon the feeling alone, ignoring other mental factors, our realization of truth becomes very difficult.

 

We want to gain the insight into the experience of impermanence to over come our resentment;

huh? more undefined nonsense.

our deeper knowledge of unhappiness overcomes our greed which causes our unhappiness;

I’ll stop being greedy if I realize it’s causing my unhappiness. He appears to be claiming that I don’t even realize when I’m unhappy. It’s true that I sometimes don’t think at all about how I feel.

our realization of selflessness overcomes ignorance arising from the notion of self.

nonsense. ‘selflessness’ hasn’t even been defined. I have no idea what it is. For me, the ‘notion of self’ is just a fact. I’m a machine, distinct from other objects.

We should see the mind and body separately first. Having comprehended them separately, we should see their essential interconnectedness.

If they’re not separable, then why try to understand them in isolation? It only makes sense to think about “mind” because we can’t scan and model all the physical details of our own brain (and definitely not others’).

As our insight becomes sharp, we become more and more aware of the fact that all the aggregates are cooperating to work together. None can exist without the other. We can see the real meaning of the famous metaphor of the blind man who has a healthy body to walk and the disabled person who has very good eyes to see. Neither of them alone can do much for himself. But when the disabled person climbs on the shoulders of the blind man, together they can travel and achieve their goals easily. Similarly, the body alone can do nothing for itself. It is like a log unable to move or do anything by itself except to become a subject of impermanence, decay and death. The mind itself can do nothing without the support of the body. When we mindfully watch both body and mind, we can see how many wonderful things they do together.

My mind already coordinates quite well with my body. I’m not seeing any useful concrete advice, or evidence of advanced skill on the part of the uathor.

As long as we are sitting in one place we may gain some degree of mindfulness. Going to a retreat and spending several days or several months watching our feelings, perceptions, countless thoughts and various states of consciousness may make us eventually calm and peaceful.

Maybe. I wonder if I’ll ever try this.

Normally we do not have that much time to spend in one place meditating all the time. Therefore, we should find a way to apply our mindfulness to our daily life in order for us to be able to handle daily unforeseeable eventualities.

 

What we face every day is unpredictable. Things happen due to multiple causes and conditions,

true

as we are living in a conditional and impermanent world.

huh? zero descriptive value.

Mindfulness is our emergency kit, readily available at our service at any time. When we face a situation where we feel indignation, if we mindfully investigate our own mind, we will discover bitter truths in ourselves. That is we are selfish; we are egocentric; we are attached to our ego; we hold on to our opinions; we think we are right and everybody else is wrong; we are prejudices; we are biased; and at the bottom of all of this, we do not really love ourselves.

I agree that in being frustrated when interacting with others, I can be saddened by the person I seem to be. If “ego” means “delusional self-beliefs”, then I agree that we should try not to defend it. If “egocentric” means “not having a clear picture of, or really caring about, what’s going on in others’ heads”, then I agree that this causes us to miscalculate. That I’m selfish is not a problem; I’m not going to give up trying to win just because it’s sometimes frustrating.

This discovery, though bitter, is a most rewarding experience. And in the long run, this discovery delivers us from deeply rooted psychological and spiritual suffering.

Just knowing something about my nature doesn’t necessarily free me from my nature.

Mindfulness practice is the practice of one hundred percent honesty with ourselves.

This sounds like my style. But I also allow myself to be optimistic (when calculating the exact odds of success is too much work), or else I’ll never try anything hard. It can be valid to sacrifice precision at times, as long as the downside risk is roughly accounted for.

When we watch our own mind and body, we notice certain things that are unpleasant to realize. As we do not like them, we try to reject them. What are the things we do not like?

 

We do not like to detach ourselves from loved ones or to live with unloved ones.

Nor should we.

We include not only people, places and material things into our likes and dislikes, but opinions, ideas, beliefs and decisions as well.

Yes, I feel pleased and displeased to varying degrees by everything in my mind.

We do not like what naturally happens to us. We do not like, for instance, growing old, becoming sick, becoming weak or showing our age, for we have a great desire to preserve our appearance.

As is wise.

We do not like someone pointing out our faults, for we take great pride in ourselves.

Except in the company of those I know value me fairly, it’s true that I will irrationally defend myself because of status instinct. And probably I should, or else lose out to those who do. Nobody else is going to represent me in this way.

We do not like someone to be wiser than we are, for we are deluded about ourselves.

I love it, when they are on my side.

These are but a few examples of our personal experience of greed, hatred and ignorance.

When greed, hatred and ignorance reveal themselves in our daily lives, we use our mindfulness to track them down and comprehend their roots. The root of each of these mental states in within ourselves. If we do not, for instance, have the root of hatred, nobody can make us angry, for it is the root of our anger that reacts to somebody’s actions or words or behavior.

Even if it’s possible, why would I want to be incapable of anger?

If we are mindful, we will diligently use our wisdom to look into our own mind. If we do not have hatred in us we will not be concerned when someone points out our shortcomings. Rather, we will be thankful to the person who draws our attention to our faults. We have to be extremely wise and mindful to thank the person who explicates our faults so we will be able to tread the upward path toward improving ourselves. We all have blind spots. The other person is our mirror for us to see our faults with wisdom. We should consider the person who shows our shortcomings as one who excavates a hidden treasure in us that we were unaware of. It is by knowing the existence of our deficiencies that we can improve ourselves. Improving ourselves is the unswerving path to the perfection which is our goal in life. Only by overcoming weaknesses can we cultivate noble qualities hidden deep down in our subconscious mind. Before we try to surmount our defects, we should what they are.

1. are they correct? if so, believe it.
2. are they harming your status?
2a. then defuse it by thanking them and acting unconcerned for status (even if they’re wrong)
2b. fight their claim (even if they’re right)

If we are sick, we must find out the cause of our sickness. Only then can we get treatment. If we pretend that we do not have sickness even though we are suffering, we will never get treatment. Similarly, if we think that we don’t have these faults, we will never clear our spiritual path. If we are blind to our own flaws, we need someone to point them out to us. When they point out our faults, we should be grateful to them like the Venerable Sariputta, who said: “Even if a seven-year-old novice monk points out my mistakes, I will accept them with utmost respect for him.”

Easy, if he never happened to agree with anyone’s claim that he made a mistake.

Ven. Sariputta was an Arahant who was one hundred percent mindful and had no fault in him.

Useless information.

One who speaks with resentment cannot be mindful and is unable to express himself clearly. One who feels hurt while listening to harsh language may lose his mindfulness and not hear what the other person is really saying. We should speak mindfully and listen mindfully to be benefitted by talking and listening.

I thought being mindful was just being aware of your feelings and 100% self-honest. So I could feel resentful and know it - even know why I feel resentful - and still be mindful. I could also communicate clearly while choosing to be harsh, but it’s true that I should expect my target to bristle.

When we listen and talk mindfully, our minds are free from greed, selfishness, hatred and delusion.

If this is a substantive claim, I don’t understand it. I don’t see why my mind is free from such things just because I perceive them honestly and clearly.

Our goal is to reach the perfection of all the noble and wholesome qualities latent in our subconscious mind. This goal has five elements to it: Purification of mind, overcoming sorrow and lamentation, overcoming pain and grief, treading the right path leading to attainment of eternal peace, and attaining happiness by following that path.

I’ll summarize this as “reducing delusional beliefs, and freedom from the full weight of negative feelings”. I don’t think being fully content in the worst of external circumstances is really possible.

Once you sit, do not change the position again until the end of the time you determined at the beginning. Suppose you change your original position because it is uncomfortable, and assume another position. What happens after a while is that the new position becomes uncomfortable. Then you want another and after a while, it too becomes uncomfortable. So you may go on shifting, moving, changing one position to another the whole time you are on your mediation cushion and you may not gain a deep and meaningful level of concentration. Therefore, do not change your original position, no matter how painful it is.

Seems like bad advice.

 If you have never meditated before, sit motionless not longer than twenty minutes.

timer: http://www.berkeleymonastery.org/meditate.asp

 if you keep quiet without moving you body, focusing your entire undivided attention on the subject of your meditation, your mind settles down and begins to experience the bliss of meditation.

I just tried 10 minutes after reading this far. I ended my meditation 5 seconds before the timer rang (my brain knows what 10 minutes is?).

I don’t avoid thoughts while meditating; I just try to not get emotionally agitated. Worries, plans, dissatisfactions, and concerns that came to mind had simple and easily reached explanations. My thoughts definitely don’t need fixing. When my temper/defensiveness is aroused, I definitely become combative and rash, but that doesn’t affect me normally, and I’m not so sure that it’s a terrible thing.

I felt good. I adjusted my position until I was comfortable, then remained for about 9 minutes. I heard people talking nearby, but that doesn’t distract me. I’ll do it again. I like being awake and free of significant distractions, so my thoughts are slower and less reactive. I’ve meditated in yoga class, but that context is somewhat distracting (I’m excessively conscious of how my body feels, and the fact that I’m in a class).

Aside from rest and quiet-thinking-time, I can see meditation as a possible emotional self-regulation practice - maybe similar to what you’d get by practicing controling some biofeedback indicator. I do feel something that could be described as being aware of different parts of my mind, especially the difference between what comes from my body’s senses and what comes (mostly) unprompted by them. I don’t feel any super bliss or “self is an illusion”.

I don’t feel transformed. Just relaxed. If I were more tired, a 10 minutes nap would probably be more relaxing. But I have more specific and pleasant memories of a meditation experience than a nap (where I sometimes remember a few disjointed seconds of sleep-thought).

Also, instead of paying attention to my breath as a fixed point as was recommended, I took something more abstract - my mortality. I think that’s the ultimate in true perspective.

To prepare for this attainment, we should keep our mind in the present moment. The present moment is changing so fast that the casual observer does not seem to notice its existence at all. Every moment is a moment of events and no moment passes by without noticing events taking place in that moment. Therefore, the moment we try to pay bare attention to is the present moment. Our mind goes through a series of events like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of these pictures are coming from our past experiences and others are our imaginations of things that we plan to do in the future.

The mind can never be focused without a mental object. Therefore we must give our mind an object which is readily available every present moment. What is present every moment is our breath. The mind does not have to make a great effort to find the breath, for every moment the breath is flowing in and out through our nostrils. As our practice of insight meditation is taking place every waking moment, our mind finds it very easy to focus itself on the breath, for it is more conspicuous and constant than any other object.

To get the bliss, focus on how you feel. That seems to be their recipe. Definitely a potential feedback loop. I didn’t do this. I just paid attention to my thoughts/feelings and didn’t spend more than a moment thinking about the referent of any one thought. Mostly I just thought about the thought itself, how it made me feel, and why I was having it (in simple, broad terms).

I’ll try this physical-present-focus-bliss recipe next time.

After sitting in the manner explained earlier and having shared your loving-kindness with everybody

I assume this means to remember a generalized love for all the people you can love. I don’t think it was defined earlier.

take three deep breaths. After taking three deep breaths, breathe normally, letting your breath flow in and out freely, effortlessly and begin focusing your attention on the rims of your nostrils. Simply notice the feeling of breath going in and out. When one inhalation is complete and before exhaling begins, there is a brief pause. Notice it and notice the beginning of exhaling. When the exhalation is complete, there is another brief pause before inhaling begins. Notice this brief pause, too. This means that there are two brief pauses of breath–one at the end of inhaling, and the other at the end of exhaling. The two pauses occur in such a brief moment you may not be aware of their occurrence. But when you are mindful, you can notice them.

Do not verbalize or conceptualize anything. Simply notice the in-coming and out-going breath without saying, “I breathe in”, or “I breathe out.” When you focus your attention on the breath ignore any thought, memory, sound, smell, taste, etc., and focus your attention exclusively on the breath, nothing else.

sound easy

In spite of your concerted effort to keep the mind on your breathing, the mind may wander away. It may go to past experiences and suddenly you may find yourself remembering places you’ve visited, people you met, friends not seen for a long time, a book you read long ago, the taste of food you ate yesterday, and so on. As soon as you notice that you mind is no longer on your breath, mindfully bring it back to it and anchor it there.

I don’t generally have this problem, except a few times a year when I’m insomniac.

However, in a few moments you may be caught up again thinking how to pay your bills, to make a telephone call to you friend, write a letter to someone, do your laundry, buy your groceries, go to a party, plan your next vacation, and so forth.

I do have such thoughts simmering below conscious notice (usually I’m too focused on my immediate task, but in meditating, they can pop up). It would be nice to temporarily disable them, as useful as they generally are.

 As soon as you notice that your mind is not on your subject, bring it back mindfully. Following are some suggestions to help you gain the concentration necessary for the practice of mindfulness.

I don’t see what the hurry is. I’d rather understand why my mind is on the subject, then return to neutral. After all, I want honesty, insight, and clear thinking.

1. Counting

In a situation like this, counting may help. The purpose of counting is simply to focus the mind on the breath. Once you mind is focused on the breath, give up counting. This is a device for gaining concentration. There are numerous ways of counting. Any counting should be done mentally.

 

2. Connecting

After inhaling do not wait to notice the brief pause before exhaling but connect the inhaling and exhaling, so you can notice both inhaling and exhaling as one continuous breath.

3. Fixing

After joining inhaling and exhaling, fix your mind on the point where you feel you inhaling and exhaling breath touching. Inhale and exhale as on single breath moving in and out touching or rubbing the rims of your nostrils.

redundant w/ 2. of course you’re supposed to pay attention to how you feel in the moment.

4. Focus you mind like a carpenter

A carpenter draws a straight line on a board and that he wants to cut. Then he cuts the board with his handsaw along the straight line he drew. He does not look at the teeth of his saw as they move in and out of the board. Rather he focuses his entire attention on the line he drew so he can cut the board straight. Similarly keep your mind straight on the point where you feel the breath at the rims of your nostrils.

redundant

5. Make you mind like a gate-keeper

A gate-keeper does not take into account any detail of the people entering a house. All he does is notice people entering the house and leaving the house through the gate. Similarly, when you concentrate you should not take into account any detail of your experiences. Simply notice the feeling of your inhaling and exhaling breath as it goes in and out right at the rims of your nostrils.

redundant

As you continue your practice you mind and body becomes so light that you may feel as if you are floating in the air or on water. You may even feel that your body is springing up into the sky. When the grossness of your in-and-out breathing has ceased, subtle in-and-out breathing arises. This very subtle breath is your objective focus of the mind. This is the sign of concentration. This first appearance of a sign-object will be replaced by more and more subtle sign-object.

I guess you probably can form several levels of concepts in your brain for the various subjective noticing-breathing colors

But the breath becomes subtler and subtler as the sign develops. Because of this subtlety, you may not notice the presence of your breath. Don’t get disappointed thinking that you lost your breath or that nothing is happening to your meditation practice. Don’t worry. Be mindful and determined to bring your feeling of breath back to the rims of your nostrils.

I disagree. You should do nothing. Maybe his recommendation is more likely to bring you the physical bliss, but if you want insight, I don’t see why you should obsess over a fixed point.

This is the time you should practice more vigorously, balancing your energy, faith, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom.

mumbo jumbo

As you keep your mind focused on the rims of your nostrils, you will be able to notice the sign of the development of meditation. You will feel the pleasant sensation of sign. Different meditators feel this differently. It will be like a star, or a peg made of heartwood, or a long string, or a wreath of flowers, or a puff of smoke, or a cob-web, or a film of cloud, or a lotus flower, or the disc of the moon or the disc of the sun.

Your spirit animal! I wonder how common such an association is, if not encouraged. Definitely I can close my eyes and at will recall visual imagery almost as in a dream.

Earlier in your practice you had inhaling and exhaling as objects of meditation. Now you have the sign as the third object of meditation. When you focus your mind on this third object, your mind reaches a stage of concentration sufficient for your practice of insight meditation. This sign is strongly present at the rims of the nostrils. Master it and gain full control of it so that whenever you want, it should be available. Unite the mind with this sign which is available in the present moment and let the mind flow with every succeeding moment. As you pay bare attention to it, you will see the sign itself is changing every moment.

It seems like he wants me to allow visual imagery to happen, and to not fix it to a single form. Good, that would be boring and maybe dangerous, like monitor burn-in :-)

 

 

Although I’ve tried meditation before, and will try it again, I recommend not reading “Mindfulness in Plain English”. It’s too much poor rhetoric, and doesn’t at all live up to its grand promises. I will say that imagining being part of some “set of other people who’ve lived through exactly this emotional experience” is more soothing than I expected, so I appreciate Mindfulness and other books for recommending it.

Gurus are mostly full of it. Don’t bother listening until you see evidence that they and their subjects are doing subtantially better than placebo. But if you like, go ahead and pick the placebo with the least costs. Maybe a life with no placebos at all is unnecessarily hard. After all, your skeptical purity is nothing to be proud of once you die (an inspiring example for others to live by? who cares - you’re dead).

poor: dexter (current season only; first season and lithgow season were great), salt, the other guys, megamind, twilight 2+3 (movies; 3 is one of the worst movies I’ve seen)

decent: house, the hundred thousand kingdoms (female get-sexed-by-gods fantasy), perdido street station (cleverly atmospheric but tedious), twilight 1 (movie), remember me (loved the final school scene, hated the hit-by-bus ending. also, female lead was weakly acted)

good: kimi ni todoke (anime. in the extremely pure-hearted young romance subgenre. some very pretty moments amidst the formulaic cuteness), adventureland and kristen stewart (she’s excellent at emoting desire for a man, and she doesn’t overact) 

great: robert pattinson (even though he’s been in only mediocre films so far), winter’s bone (fantastic writing, casting, directing, and acting. final scene was devastating; take out the overdone “are u gonna leave us?” schmaltz and it’s perfect.) loosely, it’s a more female-centric version of animal kingdom, and nearly as good.

Robin Hanson cited a survey of studies on vitamin supplementation. Their conclusion is that the dosages people take in multivitamins are harmful overall (except for selenium). Phil Goetz pointed out a huge flaw in the survey (it doesn’t have the possibility of identifying lower doses that are helpful, if larger doses in some studies were harmful).

However, there exists a single, high quality study of vitamin C and E supplementation in old men, which uses high but reasonable doses (commonly taken by many people and present in some multivitamins). They looked at cancer and heart attack, but also total mortality.

I already knew that supplementing vitamin E was a bad idea. It turns out that even though it’s not fat soluble (so megadoses get excreted out quickly), supplementing past the accepted-useful amount of vitamin C (100mg/day) is harmful.

In general, supplementing fat-soluble vitamins is dangerous, because the levels build up slowly (daily consumption is not needed). You should really get your blood levels checked, and supplement only if needed. On days when I don’t get much sun (less than 10 minutes), I take 2000 IU of vitamin D. I should check if this is too much.

Alcohol increases insulin sensitivity (which is good). Alcohol consumption later in life is correlated with childhood intelligence. Alcohol leads to more risk-taking behavior even after sobering up. Alcohol (even heavy drinking) makes old people live longer.

It’s a shame alcohol severely impairs (short term only, as far as I know) physical and mental coordination, and causes worse sleep. Otherwise it seems pretty nice.

On the other hand, I’ve heard that it causes small amounts of damage to brain cells (this may be “reefer madness” scare stories from church ladies), and for certain declines in intelligence are often caused by an accumulation of small amounts of damage (that aren’t easy to observe, since the brain reroutes around damage - in extreme cases, massive damage from stroke or hemispherectomy can be overcome simply by learning the missing skills using new brain regions).

The evidence I see of harms from heavy alcohol use is mostly about thiamine deficiency (easily corrected) and liver disease (which allows poisons to reach and harm brain cells). Additionally, if alcohol use is heavy enough to cause withdrawal, then the brain becomes very excitable, and therefore can be severely damaged by Excitotoxicity.

Alcohol related brain damage is due to not also the direct toxic effects of alcohol; alcohol withdrawal, nutritional deficiency, electrolyte disturbances, and liver damage are also believed to contribute to alcohol related brain damage.^[57]

By electrolyte disturbances, I assume they mean that you pee a lot and therefore in drinking more water might end up with the wrong concentrations of salts etc.

Apparently alcohol is carcinogenic (3.5% of cancers are due to alcohol)[142], but since alcohol consumption is so widespread, I’m not sure exactly how carcinogenic 1 drink/day is.

It’s difficult to judge the actual harms of alcohol due to the religious crazies with a stake in it (including AA). I’ve only related what seems plausible; there are dozens of other claims on Wikipedia.

In Nature’s “obesity”,

The obese BMI group displayed significantly lower task-related activation in the right parietal cortex, BA 40/7, (F(2,29) = 5.26, P = 0.011) than the normal (P = 0.016) and overweight (P = 0.047) BMI groups.

The difference is entirely explained by worse insulin sensitivity (a result of being very fat, esp. in the abdominal area). The task is 2-Back (which is easy). The specific brain region is definitely expected to activate in short-term memory tasks, and is associated with performance on them.

There are plenty of reasons to believe insulin resistance (usually due to obesity) damages the brain. Resistance means more insulin is produced, which harms the blood vessels in the brain, which exacerbates dementia (for the same reason, heavy smoking is bad).

insulin is an important factor for the successful operation of several processes related to learning and memory such as glucose metabolism, neurotransmitter release, and long-term potentiation (10,29). Insulin from the periphery has been shown to cross the blood–brain barrier in a dose-dependent manner (32). However, chronic hyperinsulinemia
and insulin resistance are believed to cause insulin receptors on the blood–brain barrier to downregulate, inducing
an insulin deficit state in the brain and negatively affecting neurophysiological processes critical to cognitive functioning (29). In keeping with these findings, rats with diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance display impairments in spatial memory and reduced hippocampal synaptic plasticity (30). Similarly, humans with diabetes mellitus exhibit impaired declarative memory and hippocampal atrophy (33). Last but not least, insulin resistance is implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s type dementia through stimulation of cellular release of amyloid-β and reduction in amyloid-β clearance (29).

part 1

Attitude (ch 4)

 

Within the last century, Western science and physics have made a startling discovery. We are part of the world we view. The very process of our observation changes the things we observe

uh oh …

Eastern science has recognized this basic principle for a very long time. The mind is a set of events, and the observer participates in those events every time he or she looks inward. Meditation is participatory observation. What you are looking at responds to the process of looking.

You mean Eastern science has recognized the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that the product of the standard deviations of position and momentum of a particle is never less than half the Planck constant? AMAZING! No? Then you only embarrass yourself when you brag about how some thought that predates some scientific discovery is loosely analogous to it. Unless you’re saying that some MAGIC source of wisdom caused the thought, that is now SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN, why even mention it? So sad, the authority you claim for Eastern science. What happened to “don’t trust us because of our meditation-expert authority - find out for yourself”?

Anyway, how dense do you have to be to not grasp the difficulty of “thinking about what you’re thinking about right now”? Clearly it’s impossible to hold an exact model in your mind of what’s in your mind. Great job, Eastern science.

The following attitudes are essential to success in practice. Most of them have been presented before. But we bring them together again here as a series of rules for application.

 

1. Don’t expect anything. Just sit back and see what happens. Treat the whole thing as an experiment. Take an active interest in the test itself. But don’t get distracted by your expectations about results. For that matter, don’t be anxious for any result whatsoever. Let the meditation move along at its own speed and in its own direction.

The only way to introspect. Be quiet.

2. Don’t strain: Don’t force anything or make grand exaggerated efforts. Meditation is not aggressive. There is no violent striving. Just let your effort be relaxed and steady. 

Same as above.

3. Don’t rush: There is no hurry, so take you time. Settle yourself on a cushion and sit as though you have a whole day. Anything really valuable takes time to develop. Patience, patience, patience.

“Anything really valuable takes time to develop.” Let’s try that on for size …

“Valuable” as in “scarce/costly”: obviously, by definition. This is an uninteresting claim. But rhetorically people may believe the statement for other sense of “valuable” because of this interpretation. Sneaky rhetoric.

“Valuable” as in “useful”: something can be novel, useful, and simple. But if extremely so, then you expect it to be widely circulated soon after discovery. And this is what we see: the technique of measuring volume of a solid by displaced water (Eureka indeed), randomly sampling from random samples (bootstrap resampling), “hold your breath and count to ten” (instead of starting a fight) etc. are quickly adopted. So, yes and no. The most valuable tools more than pay for the effort of becoming familiar with them. This is the bar Vipassana has to pass.

4. Don’t cling to anything and don’t reject anything: Let come what comes and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens. Don’t fight with what you experience, just observe it all mindfully.

Agreed. You can’t possibly sense what your mind does associatively and automatically if you’re screaming at it.

5. Let go: Learn to flow with all the changes that come up. Loosen up and relax.

6. Accept everything that arises: Accept your feelings, even the ones you wish you did not have. Accept your experiences, even the ones you hate. Don’t condemn yourself for having human flaws and failings. Learn to see all the phenomena in the mind as being perfectly natural and understandable. Try to exercise a disinterested acceptance at all times and with respect to everything you experience.

7. Be gentle with yourself: Be kind to yourself. You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with. The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.

Extremely redundant with what I’ve already agreed to above.

8. Investigate yourself: Question everything. Take nothing for granted. Don’t believe anything because it sounds wise and pious and some holy men said it. See for yourself.

Of course.

That does not mean that you should be cynical, impudent or irreverent.

Because he hates it when you question his teachings :)

It means you should be empirical. Subject all statements to the actual test of your experience and let the results be your guide to truth. Insight meditation evolves out of an inner longing to wake up to what is real and to gain liberating insight to the true structure of existence. The entire practice hinges upon this desire to be awake to the truth. Without it, the practice is superficial.

Agree. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, to want the truth in order to find it.

9. View all problems as challenges: Look upon negatives that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don’t run from them, condemn yourself or bear your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in and investigate.

For some reason I don’t consider such perspective-change mental illusions to be intellectually unhygienic. I’m okay with positive thinking, mental dis-integration (compartmentalization), and hypocrisy to the extent that it works (leads to eventually-true belief). I’m just skeptical that any particular “instead of thinking of X as X, think of it as Y, even if that’s not exactly true” admonition is feasible or effective. “Challenge” does seem like a winning frame of mind, though.

10. Don’t ponder: You don’t need to figure everything out. Discursive thinking won’t free you from the trap. In mediation, the mind is purified naturally by mindfulness, by wordless bare attention. Habitual deliberation is not necessary to eliminate those things that are keeping you in bondage. All that is necessary is a clear, non-conceptual perception of what they are and how they work. That alone is sufficient to dissolve them. Concepts and reasoning just get in the way. Don’t think. See.

I don’t know. I’ll try it. I think the risk of reasoning is that you’ll make salient other problematic thoughts/feelings. It does seem to conflict with awareness of natural thinking processes if you’re always sidetracking things.

11. Don’t dwell upon contrasts: Differences do exist between people, but dwelling upon then is a dangerous process. Unless carefully handled, it leads directly to egotism. Ordinary human thinking is full of greed, jealousy and pride. A man seeing another man on the street may immediately think, “He is better looking than I am.” The instant result is envy or shame. A girl seeing another girl may think, “I am prettier than she is.” The instant result is pride. This sort of comparison is a mental habit, and it leads directly to ill feeling of one sort or another: greed, envy, pride, jealousy, hatred. It is an unskillful mental state, but we do it all the time. We compare our looks with others, our success, our accomplishments, our wealth, possessions, or I.Q. and all these lead to the same place–estrangement, barriers between people, and ill feeling.

The meditator’s job is to cancel this unskillful habit by examining it thoroughly, and then replacing it with another. Rather than noticing the differences between self and others, the meditator trains himself to notice similarities. He centers his attention on those factors that are universal to all life, things that will move him closer to others. Thus his comparison, if any, leads to feelings of kinship rather than feelings of estrangement.

I have noticed that emphasizing in my mind what I have in common with a group of people helps me enjoy spending time with them. However, I don’t think it makes sense to hide from true comparisons. I don’t think justified and accurate pride or humility is harmful (except socially, if you advertise it indiscriminately). I see he says “unless carefully handled” and “don’t dwell”, so I’ll consider this a point of possible agreement.

Breathing is a universal process. All vertebrates breathe in essentially the same manner. All living things exchange gasses with their environment in some way or other. This is one of the reasons that breathing is chosen as the focus of meditation.

Stupid reason, except I guess that automatic breathing is indeed regulated by part of the brain. Though I can’t rule out that it’s helpful to choose breathing in particular, I’d like to hear a better case than this. Note that it’s dangerous to let people suggest crazy ideas machine-gun style and then try to evaluate each as though it might be true; you eventually slip up and make the mistake of believing something you never should have focused on (see Privileging the Hypothesis).

the meditator is advised to explore the process of his own breathing as a vehicle for realizing his own inherent connectedness with the rest of life. This does not mean that we shut our eyes to all the differences around us. Differences exist. It means simply that we de-emphasize contrasts and emphasize the universal factors.

Weird. Seems motivated by the silly ‘all evil is due to egotism’ belief in Buddhism, so unlikely to be true. But I’ll give it a shot.

The recommended procedure is as follows:

When the meditator perceives any sensory object, he is not to dwell upon it in the ordinary egotistical way. He should rather examine the very process of perception itself. He should watch the feelings that arise and the mental activities that follow. He should note the changes that occur in his own consciousness as a result. In watching all these phenomena, the meditator must be aware of the universality of what he is seeing. That initial perception will spark pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feelings. That is a universal phenomenon. It occurs in the mind of others just as it does in his, and he should see that clearly. Following these feelings various reactions may arise. He may feel greed, lust, or jealousy. He may feel fear, worry, restlessness or boredom. These reactions are universal. He simple notes them and then generalizes. He should realize that these reactions are normal human responses and can arise in anybody. 

The practice of this style of comparison may feel forced and artificial at first, but it is no less natural than what we ordinarily do. It is merely unfamiliar. With practice, this habit pattern replaces our normal habit of egoistic comparing and feels far more natural in the long run. We become very understanding people as a result. we no longer get upset by the failings of others. We progress toward harmony with all life.

Sounds nice. But I’d actually like to do the opposite - to become more cognizant of the fact that others are NOT like me in their thinking (they don’t know what I know, etc.) - because I know I sometimes do a poor job of communicating when I don’t model that well. I guess “we’re all BASICALLY the same” doesn’t conflict with that more specific modeling of others’ knowledge/goals/capabilities, and might be a nice anchor to attach fellow-feeling to. I also know that it can be great fun to laugh at the failings of others with friends, but I suppose all mirth won’t cease just because I regularly stoke a generalized empathy.

I’ve started reading Mindfulness in Plain English.

My motivation in investigating any sort of Buddhist meditation is that, although I’m pretty detached already, I think I could be just as effective in the goals that you’re supposed to not be “attached” to, with a quieter and more pleasurable internal life. I already think pretty hard about what’s going on in my mind, and already try to form true, rather than comforting or self-serving, beliefs. I also already enjoy meditation or napping after enough physical exertion to involve me more in the immediate physical sensation rather than higher level goals, strivings, doubts, and worries in my life. I’ve heard enough mild recommendations from other intelligent folks that I’m open to the possibility that learning some existing meditation techniques might be more efficient than what comes naturally to me. I also doubt that I would have the desire to spend time regularly meditating unless I believed that it were better than the same amount of time exercising or sleeping, so I’m hoping to find some evidence of that.

My impression of Buddhists is that they want to permanently dissociate from their ego (from being afraid of states of mind, of things and people that they’re anchored to), and meditation is a means to this end. Perhaps you can still behave normally (as if you care), but you want the ability to not care, to not be prevented from seeing reality as it is by your fear of what you might lose, or delusional expectation or obsessive fantasy of what you desire. I think that some Buddhists respond to real threats with extreme pacifism, which is tempting given the rewards they’ve learned from a sort of inwardly-directed pacifism, but stupid - not caring only works against excessive worry and affect in your own mind, not actual mortal conflicts with nature and other people.

What Meditation Is (ch 3)

I won’t bother commenting on the first two chapters, since they were just long-winded introduction (useful for people who have never heard of meditaiton, perhaps).

paraphrased:

Different practices that have been called ‘meditation’:

Mere concentration exercises (focus thoughts in one area), which can result in calm/peace if what’s concentrated on is simple and nonthreatening.

1. Judeo-Christian prayer and contemplation.

2. Yogic (Hindu) meditation - repeat a syllable, or focus on an object. Moving to complex focuses (imagined energy flows in body, chants, images) later.

3. Zen (Buddhist) meditation - either focus only on the experience of sitting, or try to solve impossible riddles. Both often under physical duress at a meditation retreat. Eventually you crack (in a good way, you hope).

4. Tantra (also Buddhist) - pretend you’re one of the Tantric gods. Once you believe it, you’re free to identify (or not) with yourself.

5. Vipassana (also Buddhist) - become more sensitive to your own mind. Pay attention and look for real insight. Most people don’t realize it’s possible to *really* pay attention. It may take them years of training to be able to do it.

(end paraphrase)

If I want a concentration exercise, I’ll do something better than stare at a rock. I’ll create music. I’ll lift weights. I’ll practice my skill in some sport or performance activity. I’ll program computers for money. I’ll play Dual N-Back. I’ll think about my plans and beliefs. So I’m hoping for something more out of meditation than the opportunity to expend effort focusing my attention on something. I already focus my attention intentionally; I just do it on things that also have some other value to me.

Through the process of mindfulness, we slowly become aware of what we really are down below the ego image. We wake up to what life really is. It is not just a parade of ups and downs, lollipops and smacks on the wrist. That is an illusion. Life has a much deeper texture than that if we bother to look, and if we look in the right way.

The author breaks his “in Plain English” pledge already with “ego image”. I presume he means the way we signal about ourselves to others for our profit, which necessarily involves rehearsing and self-deception (people are too good at detecting conscious lies and acting, so social confidence depends on hypocrisy and delusion).

Vipassana is a form of mental training that will teach you to experience the world in an entirely new way. You will learn for the first time what is truly happening to you, around you and within you. It is a process of self discovery, a participatory investigation in which you observe your own experiences while participating in them, and as they occur.

I can’t wait. What is it? I want it :)

“I want to apprehend the true and deepest qualities of life, and I don’t want to just accept somebody else’s explanation. I want to see it for myself.” If you pursue your meditation practice with this attitude, you will succeed.

That he makes this promise is nice, because I can be justifiably even more angry than usual if he turns out to have wasted my time. On the other hand, this is no different than other religions’ empty promises that “if you ask God with a pure heart and good intent, the truth of this religion will be impressed upon you”.

‘Vipassana Bhavana’ means the cultivation of the mind, aimed at seeing in a special way that leads to insight and to full understanding.

Ok, but what is it, specifically?

In Vipassana mediation we cultivate this special way of seeing life.

I don’t think ‘this’ is merited since you haven’t described it yet. You haven’t convinced me that there’s something real behind the words you’re using.

We train ourselves to see reality exactly as it is, and we call this special mode of perception ‘mindfulness.’ This process of mindfulness is really quite different from what we usually do. We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for the reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all of our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted. In Vipassana meditation we train ourselves to ignore the constant impulses to be more comfortable, and we dive into the reality instead.

 I don’t agree that my perception is wrong. My attention is a limited resource; I sometimes benefit from not seeing the texture of the asphalt on the road. I’m open to trying new modes of perception. I agree that we spend a lot of effort seeking social validation and other forms of pleasure. I’ve also always been sympathetic to the idea that there’s some value in really apprehending reality in an unbiased way, which certainly means disregarding which belief brings the most comfort.

When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know the reality without illusion, complete with all its pain and danger, that is when real freedom and security are yours. This is not some doctrine we are trying to drill into you. This is an observable reality, a thing you can and should see for yourself.

I expect that a feeling of relief arises. Nothing more. But I will see for myself.

Gotama the Buddha was a highly unorthodox individual and real anti-traditionalist. He did not offer his teaching as a set of dogmas, but rather as a set of propositions for each individual to investigate for himself. His invitation to one and all was ‘Come and See’. One of the things he said to his followers was “Place no head above your own”. By this he meant, don’t accept somebody else’s word. See for yourself.

This would be embarrassing if it were not so. It’s the only reason I give your ideas my time.

From the Buddhist point of view, we human beings live in a very peculiar fashion. We view impermanent things as permanent, though everything is changing all around us. The process of change is constant and eternal. As you read these words, your body is aging. But you pay no attention to that. The book in you hand is decaying. The print is fading and the pages are becoming brittle. The walls around you are aging. The molecules within those walls are vibrating at an enormous rate, and everything is shifting, going to pieces and dissolving slowly. You pay no attention to that, either. Then one day you look around you. Your body is wrinkled and squeaky and you hurt. The book is a yellowed, useless lump; the building is caving in. So you pine for lost youth and you cry when the possessions are gone. Where does this pain come from? It comes from your own inattention. You failed to look closely at life. You failed to observe the constantly shifting flow of the world as it went by. You set up a collection of mental constructions, ‘me’, ‘the book’, ‘the building’, and you assume that they would endure forever. They never do. But you can tune into the constantly ongoing change. You can learn to perceive your life as an ever- flowing movement, a thing of great beauty like a dance or symphony. You can learn to take joy in the perpetual passing away of all phenomena. You can learn to live with the flow of existence rather than running perpetually against the grain.

This seems crazy to me. I’m aware that I’m going to die; none of the other stuff about molecules vibrating or peeling off from the walls or from my body matters at all. Sounds like emotional nonsense.

Our human perceptual habits are remarkably stupid in some ways. We tune out 99% of all the sensory stimuli we actually receive, and we solidify the remainder into discrete mental objects. Then we react to those mental objects in programmed habitual ways. An example: There you are, sitting alone in the stillness of a peaceful night. A dog barks in the distance. The perception itself is indescribably beautiful if you bother to examine it. Up out of that sea of silence come surging waves of sonic vibration. You start to hear the lovely complex patterns, and they are turned into scintillating electronic stimulations within the nervous system. The process is beautiful and fulfilling in itself. We humans tend to ignore it totally. Instead, we solidify that perception into a mental object. We paste a mental picture on it and we launch into a series of emotional and conceptual reactions to it. “There is that dog again. He is always barking at night. What a nuisance. Every night he is a real bother. Somebody should do something. Maybe I should call a cop. No, a dog catcher. So, I’ll call the pound. No, maybe I’ll just write a real nasty letter to the guy who owns that dog. No, too much trouble. I’ll just get an ear plug.” They are just perceptual and mental habits. You learn to respond this way as a child by copying the perceptual habits of those around you. These perceptual responses are not inherent in the structure of the nervous system. The circuits are there. But this is not the only way that our mental machinery can be used. That which has been learned can be unlearned. The first step is to realize what you are doing, as you are doing it, and stand back and quietly watch.

Okay, so you can reexamine things. You can even stare at a face until it becomes not a face, but a set of features. Sounds like a fun game. But I disagree that the way I think now is remarkably stupid.

The cause of suffering is that desire- aversion syndrome which we spoke of earlier. Up pops a perception. It could be anything–a beautiful girl, a handsome guy, speed boat, thug with a gun, truck bearing down on you, anything. Whatever it is, the very next thing we do is to react to the stimulus with a feeling about it.

It sounds like being a Buddhist is about taking a time-out from trying. That sounds nice. But there’s also a time to care and to try. It’s possible that by taking some time not trying or caring, I’ll learn something about my mental habits and make some improvement that will help me succeed at trying. Or maybe I’ll just be less stressed, but stop trying. I doubt that’s a big risk, though.

Take worry. We worry a lot. Worry itself is the problem. Worry is a process. It has steps. Anxiety is not just a state of existence but a procedure. What you’ve got to do is to look at the very beginning of that procedure, those initial stages before the process has built up a head of steam. The very first link of the worry chain is the grasping/rejecting reaction. As soon as some phenomenon pops into the mind, we try mentally to grab onto it or push it away.

I don’t think grabbing onto a good feeling in your mind is something to worry about, unless it’s via a dangerous drug. But pushing away and avoiding a feeling (basically overriding it with disapproval from another part of your mind, based on the fact that the feeling is unwelcome in pursuing some strong goal-desire) does seem truth-destroying and stress-inducing.

Vipassana meditation teaches us how to scrutinize our own perceptual process with great precision. We learn to watch the arising of thought and perception with a feeling of serene detachment. We learn to view our own reactions to stimuli with calm and clarity. We begin to see ourselves reacting without getting caught up in the reactions themselves. The obsessive nature of thought slowly dies. We can still get married. We can still step out of the path of the truck. But we don’t need to go through hell over either one.

Yes, I know this would be nice. I want to see things more clearly, and not suffer from internal emotional turmoil. Can you please describe how to do this? This is a painfully long preface.

Along with this new reality goes a new view of the most central aspect of reality: ‘me’. A close inspection reveals that we have done the same thing to ‘me’ that we have done to all other perceptions. We have taken a flowing vortex of thought, feeling and sensation and we have solidified that into a mental construct. Then we have stuck a label onto it, ‘me’.

I can’t imagine how stupid you would have to be to not have a word/concept for ‘me’.

And forever after, we treat it as if it were a static and enduring entity.

I’ve always been open to the possibility that I will change.

We view it as a thing separate from all other things.

Here’s what I think: I am definitely separate from all other things. My ‘I’ concept is not a faithful representation of what I am, but I’m eager to learn more about myself. I’m also eager to change in ways that get me more of what I presently value. I have no fear at all that I will stop existing because I, or my ‘I’ concept, change. I know I’m going to die. Where I drift before that happens had better be marvelous than in some deluded “I always stayed true to myself” rut.

We pinch ourselves off from the rest of that process of eternal change which is the universe. And than we grieve over how lonely we feel.

While it’s true I feel lonely and value very highly deep mutual understanding and communication with a friend, I reject your claim that this is because I have a concept for ‘me’.

We ignore our inherent connectedness to all other beings and we decide that ‘I’ have to get more for ‘me’; then we marvel at how greedy and insensitive human beings are. And on it goes. Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world stems directly from this false sense of ‘me’ as distinct from all else that is out there.

Evil deeds are the result of natural human conflict, of the fact that it’s often possible to profit at another man’s expense, not because a ‘me’ concept prevents us from thinking ‘when I harm any being, I’m harming the all-beings I’m a part of’. Maybe it feels good to think this, but I’m here for insight, not bullshit.

These are all major insights, of course. Each one is a deep- reaching understanding of one of the fundamental issues of human existence. They do not occur quickly, nor without considerable effort. But the payoff is big.

I wish you could make a reasonable case for the claims you’ve made, instead of making such extravagant promises of reward after years of commitment, which by the way will certainly bias my thinking if I foolishly choose to so commit.

They lead to a total transformation of your life. Every second of your existence thereafter is changed. The meditator who pushes all the way down this track achieves perfect mental health, a pure love for all that lives and complete cessation of suffering. That is not small goal. But you don’t have to go all the way to reap benefits. They start right away and they pile up over the years.

Good, so you’re still enticing me with the promise that you’re going to explain something that’s testable and will immediately give me some abilities or pleasure I didn’t have before. I guess I can keep reading.

In the practice of mediation you become sensitive to the actual experience of living, to how things feel. You do not sit around developing subtle and aesthetic thoughts about living. You live. Vipassana meditation more than anything else is learning to live.

Okay, but what is it?

Exercise correlates with a reduced risk of suffering dementia in later life, just as excess visceral fat is correlated with an increased risk of later developing dementia. The underlying mechanisms are somewhat different, but they both boil down to the quality of the blood vessels in your brain. Impaired blood vessels mean a lower blood flow or the breakages and lesions of vascular dementia - neither of which is good for you in the long term.

Another issue to consider in this context is the ongoing impact of atherosclerosis, the build-up of fatty material on blood vessel walls. This can result in sudden death due to blockage and rupture of larger deposits, but the condition harms your brain across the years leading up to that point:

Atherosclerosis, dementia, and Alzheimer disease in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of aging cohort

We examined the relationship between systemic atherosclerosis, Alzheimer type pathology, and dementia in autopsies from 200 participants in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, a prospective study of the effect of aging on cognition, 175 of whom had complete body autopsies. … we found that the presence of intracranial but not coronary or aortic atherosclerosis significantly increased the odds of dementia.

Just as for the other forms of damage to blood vessels in the brain mentioned above, atherosclerosis is largely something that you do to yourself as a result of your lifestyle. Being fat and sedentary will get you there. Unfortunately, the characteristic mitochondrial damage of aging also spurs the onset of atherosclerosis

Although (see table 1 of this paper) cranial atherosclerosis has a different mechanism and thus different risk factors than other atherosclerosis (frequently patients have one or the other but not both), you should indeed avoid getting fat, which increases the odds of it by 4-6 times.  You’re at risk for a severe stroke if you have cranial atherosclerosis.

Also, heavy smoking (even decades earlier) is at least as harmful to your aging brain as a sedentary lifestyle, probably for the same reason it’s a well known risk factor for stroke (it’s harmful to blood vessels).

(see previous discussion of ego-depletion)

It looks like people studying people’s decline in vigilance-required tasks over time need to take care not to suggest to their subjects the idea that they will probably fatigue.  The theory is that tasks that specifically require “self control” can lead to specific fatigue in other “self control” tasks, as distinct from general mental fatigue, although it’s been found that glucose availability to the brain explains most of this.

A new study, which is much more careful than past ones, gives a pretty strong idea that people’s expectations for how they’ll perform while willpower-taxed are the determining factor (at least for artifical, low-motivation psych-study tasks), and further that when these expectations are manipulated (by push polling), that this obliterates the effects typically reported in the ego-depletion literature. Because of the push polling affecting performance, you can’t just say that it’s ’the person’s idiosyncratic “availability of willpower” after a demanding task that shapes idiosyncratic beliefs about willpower’.

I reproduce here my comments from this LessWrong discussion:

What’s demonstrated: if you prime an excuse for doing poorly, you will do poorly. I think there’s already some similar research (different types of excuses, though). They also show that self-reported exhaustion (not just “ego depleting” tasks) leads to a difference in performance that goes in exactly the direction that the subjects are primed to believe (either being reminded of an existing belief, or being tricked into holding it with biased questions).

It surprises me that, of the people who don’t claim to expect to flag when fatigued, those who report being exhausted by the depletion task actually make less errors than those who don’t. Unless this is just due to warming up their inhibition/vigilance (both the initial and final tests require it) while, it suggests that positive expectations can boost performance, not just that available excuses can harm it.

I like that they demonstrated that errors on IQ problems tracks errors on mundane rule-following, vigilance type tasks, but it’s amusing to me that people who believe they’ll do worse when fatigued, actually test as smarter (less IQ test errors) when fresh, whereas those primed to believe they won’t effectively fatigue improve slightly, but are still worse than the “limited resource” believers initial performance. This effect is still there, but probably not significant, for the simple but tiresome “willpower” testing (Stroop) task. I assume the “limited”-believers are more engaged by an IQ-proving question, either for signaling or entertainment, compared to the boring Stroop task. Disclaimer: these differences, from figures in pg 5 of the 

paper. aren’t strongly significant (N ~= 50), so maybe I shouldn’t conclude anything (the authors don’t pin anything on them).

It seems reasonable to me that push polling about someone’s future behavior will lead them to act consistently with the signal they just sent in the poll - like in Cialdini’s Influence, where people are polled on whether they like to go to opera, or give charitably, by some attractive person they want to impress, and then after affirming are ambushed with a sales pitch (they thought it was an innocent poll but are trapped by their answers). So it seems reasonable to assume that those who were push-polled into believing they will become either sloppier, or more accurate, with fatigue, would act consonantly.

But I don’t think this objection is likely the whole story. The simplest explanation is that people’s stated expectations of their performance do shape their performance - the power of positive thinking, and obviously, negative. (possibly unvoiced/persistent expectations as well as explicitly declared, although of course it’s nearly impossible to measure such things surreptitiously).

An analysis of 10 studies involving more than 3,800 people has found that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements for joint pain are ineffective either alone or in combination.

(no change in pain or actual joint condition)

I had been taking this for mild lower back and knee pain. I never noticed any benefit but trusted in the earlier research which said it definitely relieved pain. Pure placebo, it turns out.

Many missionaries admit to deep doubts. This often makes them more vehement in their persuasion, not more tentative. (If they were motivated only by helping others, then their doubts would in fact make them more tentative).

In a new study, 

David Gal and Derek Rucker from Northwestern University have found that when people’s confidence in their beliefs is shaken, they becomestronger advocates for those beliefs. The duo carried out three experiments involving issues such as animal testing, dietary preferences, and loyalty towards Macs over PCs. In each one, they subtly manipulated their subjects’ confidence and found the same thing: when faced with doubt, people shout even louder.

Gal and Rucker were inspired by a classic psychological book called When Prophecy Fails. In it, Leon Festinger and colleagues infiltrated an American cult whose leader, Dorothy Martin, convinced her followers that flying saucers would rescue them from an apocalyptic flood. Many believed her, giving up their livelihoods, possessions and loved ones in anticipation of their alien saviours. When the fated moment came and nothing happened, the group decided that their dedication had spared the Earth from destruction. In a reversal of their earlier distaste for publicity, they started to actively proselytise for their beliefs. Far from shattering their faith, the absent UFOs had turned them into zealous evangelists.

The case study inspired Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”, which describes the discomfort that people feel when they try to cope with conflicting ideas. Festinger reasoned that people will go to great lengths to reduce this conflict. Altering one’s beliefs in the face of new evidence is one solution but for Martin’s followers, this was too difficult. Their alternative was to try and muster social support for their ideas. If other people also believed, their internal conflicts would lessen.

Festinger predicted that when someone’s beliefs are challenged, they would try to raise support for those beliefs with paradoxical enthusiasm. Amazingly enough, during the intervening half-century, this prediction has never been tested in an experiment – that is, until now.

In their first experiment, Gal and Rucker asked 88 students to write about their views on animal testing for consumer goods, but only half of them were allowed to use their preferred hand. This may seem random, but previous studies have shown that people have less confidence in what they write with the hand they’re less comfortable with. Indeed, that’s what Gal and Rucker found in their study. When asked later, the volunteers who didn’t use their dominant hand were less confident in their views.

However, they were also more likely to try and persuade others of those same views. When they were asked to write something to persuade someone else about their opinions, those who felt less confident wrote significantly longer missives. With a sliver of doubt in their minds, they spent more effort in their attempts at persuasion.

Gal and Rucker also found that this extra effort vanished if the volunteers had a chance to affirm their own identity beforehand. If they were asked to identify their favourite items (books, cities, songs and so on) before writing about animal testing, the choice of hand had no effect on their advocacy attempts. If they were asked to say what their parents’ favourite things were, the hand effect reappeared.

In their second experiment with 151 fresh volunteers, Gal and Rucker found the same effect. This time, they influenced the recruits’ degree of confidence by asking half of them to relate memories where they were brimming with certainty, and the other half to describe relate memories where they were plagued with doubt Afterwards, the volunteers said whether they were vegans, vegetarians or meat-eaters, how confident they were in their opinions, and how important their choice was to them.

As expected, those who remembered times of uncertainty were less confident that their food choices were the right ones. And as before, those same doubtful volunteers advocated their beliefs more strongly. When asked to imagine convincing someone else about their diet, the uncertain group wrote significantly longer messages and spent longer composing those messages.

This experiment – with a different method of manipulating confidence, a different issue at stake, and a different measure of evangelical effort – adds weight to the results of the first one. However, the effect only held true among those who felt that their dietary preferences were important to them. This showed (perhaps, more expectedly) that the ties between doubt and advocacy are stronger for beliefs that are people hold more dearly.

The third experiment found similar results, using a far more trivial issue (well, supposedly more trivial). Gal and Rucker worked with 106 students who all thought that Macs were superiors to PCs. Again, the duo successfully manipulated the students’ confidence by asking them to remember a previous incident of certain resolve or uncertain doubt.

The students had to imagine convincing a PC-user about the merits of an Apple product but this time, half were told that they were talking to a Windows-diehard, and the others were faced with a more open-minded partner. As before, the students put more effort into persuading their imaginary partner if their own confidence was weakened, but only if their partner was receptive.

In all three cases, Gal and Zucker found that doubt turns people into stronger advocates. More subtly, their study shows that this effect is stronger if someone’s identity is threatened, if the belief is important to them, and if they think that others will listen. It all fits with a pattern of behaviour where people evangelise to strengthen their own faltering beliefs.

This all agrees with my experience.  It’s reasonable to spend more time forming an argument for something you’re not totally convinced of (ideally, you would also review the arguments against and possibly revise your belief). By carefully making a case, you should be effectively double checking that it’s still worth believing in the doubtful thing.  As for ”this effect is stronger if someone’s identity is threatened, if the belief is important to them, and if they think that others will listen”, people always crave validation; people spend more effort on things they care about; people prefer to skip communicating with someone who isn’t receptive, respectively.

I don’t like the category “identity is threatened”; this can only really refer to the first study, which showed that being allowed to answer questions about who you are lessens the tendency to spend more effort justifying a belief that you struggled with (being forced to use your off-hand to write about it).