Tag Archives: Acceleritis

Multitasking Increases Short-term Brain Fun at Expense of Long-term

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 13

Speaking at the recent Wharton Advertising 2020 Conference in New York (where I also had the honor of being one of the speakers), neuroscientist Carl Marci used his closed fist to illustrate the brain. He described the fingers, curved under to touch the palm, as the brain’s newest evolutionary part, the prefrontal cortex. He noted that this latest brain development curls back to reach for and touch the much older limbic system, the seat of motivation and emotion.

His interpretation of what the DNA is looking for in doing this, is that the service of the most intellectual part of the brain seeks contact with the primal driving forces that are the seat of the goals in the goal-seeking organism. As if the power of mind exists — like every other part of the organism — to serve the highest ends of the DNA coding the system.

It is all highly purposive and this interpretation lends greater respectability to the primal drives that for centuries have been characterized as “lower” aspects of our being. This also gets back to Freud’s depiction of the id as being the animalistic and gross, babyish and least acclaimed part of our selves. In an earlier posting I offered an alternative view of the id as being our true selves, our original essence divorced from the later layering of experience-driven neuronal nets of software that expand the true self into new territory, some of it counterproductive.

Carl went on to spellbind us with an outpouring of ideas, one of which is that multitasking is so popular especially among Millennials because it gives them a jolt of pleasurable brain chemicals (presumably oxytocin or adenosine, or serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc.) by maintaining novelty-driven attention on something again and again by adding in another element whenever boredom sets in, which it all too easily does.

This jibes with my theory that the Acceleritis-ridden culture shifts us into avoidance of going deeper into percepts. Due to the overwhelming daunting list of questions arising in our brains from all this stimulation, which one subconsciously wants to avoid opening like a Pandora’s Box. This avoidance of the deep makes us lovers of the breadth – seeking more brain-juice cocktails by taking the overdose of stimulation even further.

However, as Carl noted, we are less effective when multitasking. Single-pointed attention is the way to Flow state/the Zone. This means that the seeking of momentary brain pleasure actually works against the organism attaining the goals of its heart. In the long run this reduces brain pleasure more profoundly and in a more lasting way. Borrowing on the credit card of brain-juice by multitasking burns your credit in the end.

Best to all,

Bill

NOTE:  Learn more about dopamine in this article.

Bring a Sense of the Epic into Your Life

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 11

Science can no longer rule out the possibility that a Single Universal Intelligence is the only thing that exists, per our Theory of the Conscious Universe. Our theory explains how this Intelligence is able to simultaneously play an infinite number of chess games called lives. The You who looks out your eyes and experiences life may not be the gnomish “you” that parts of yourself — neuron clusters programmed by Accidentalism and Materialism — think you are.

Accidentalism is the religion that claims the universe came about by accident out of nothingness.

Materialism is the religion that claims everything is matter, so the human need to worship something can be directed only at material things.

My theory is not a religion. It is a system of hypotheses aimed at explaining all of documented human experience including the “paranormal”. We classify certain experiences as “paranormal” based on our limited experience in the universe as the standard for what is “normal”. And based on our mental emotional ego filters that protect us from dissonance by steadfastly refusing to make anything out of the cumulatively uncanny success rate of our own hunches, thereby trivializing our own experiences of the “paranormal”.

The explanation making the most sense to my gut is that there is only One of us. Each of us is another instance of the Universal Intelligence. All instances are really one Intelligence playing many roles.

The main thing about my theory is that I don’t want you to believe it but rather to test it for yourself. This means using it as a lens of what may in fact be true, certainly is possible, and why not see if using the lens to explain experience might not lead to more control and pleasure than the present way of looking at things?

Some might liken this to a pleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy. It is equally plausible that the way we as a world look at things today is an unpleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy.

At any rate, one needs merely to entertain the possibility that the entire selfness of the Universe is what looks out your eyes, which you call yourself “me”. This is logically and empirically possible based on the most predictively successful theory in history, quantum mechanics. So entertain it for a second.

Realize it is possible that you are the one self that exists, enjoying yet another life. Realize if this just happens to be the one true explanation that science and everyone will affirm some day in the future, here you are going to the movies to enjoy identifying with a fictional character who is having an epic adventure, when in fact that is just a fairy tale produced in Hollywood while your own life is a genuine, authentic, rich real life saga of a hero beset by challenges and overcoming them — just like in the movies — but real — and therefore infinitely more meaningful and dramatic.

It is possible that the One Being is you… and everyone else. Possible. Actually possible. You have been betting on a reality so far different from this, your automatic reaction is to thrust it aside with a derisive snort. That reflex is itself an interesting phenomenon deserving careful attention — put a pin in it, we will come back and dissect it often on this page in the future. Call it your daily persona, “the robot”. The name is a handle to put on that aspect of your self — the reasons will become apparent in this blog and in my books (including Mind Magic) and DVDs. 

Don’t let the thrusting aside of new concepts or experiences be internally accepted. Override it by an act of will from your true self. Keep an open mind. Empirical evidence is the only thing to give weight to. Things you yourself have experienced, seen with your own eyes, not things you were told. All the philosophies and cosmologies and religions and scientific theories and my theories are just abstractions of the real thing — symbol systems, metaphors, isomorphisms (same information carried in different code). Reality is what it is. As a race we cannot say yet that we really know what it is. Therefore an open mind is the only sane position — yet another clue that the present world system is not actually sane. Acceleritis has caused EOP. Information overload has actually existed for 6000 years and just keeps getting worse, exponentially. We are dealing with it very poorly. Our society is not yet a sophisticated one. Civilization on planet Earth will be sane and sophisticated when its mind is open and each person is making careful and unfiltered observations of his/her own experience. The Observer state leading to the Flow state.

Takeaway: don’t thrust aside the undisprovable possibility that you are the hero in the most epic movie of all time… and so is everyone else.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — You Are The Universe  is now on track for Summer 2013 publication. Watch this space for more.

Entering and Sustaining Flow by How Much of the Mind Is Cooperating At One Time II

1 Reply

Volume 3, Issue 5

This continues the conversation we started last week on the oneness of being in the Flow state.

We were talking about mindfulness, which Buddha combined with comprehension as the desired end state. Yet as reported in earlier posts, Zen Buddhists do not esteem mindfulness, which as a term they associate with splitting the experience of natural oneness into two illusory parts — an inner manager dealing in concepts and abstractions, and a theoretically outer world, with the inner part using up effort to focus its attention in an unnatural and counterproductive way. We have said in recent posts that mindfulness is useful to get to Observer state and then it is jettisoned in the final move to Flow state, which is undivided and where the subject and object are merged.

Zen is one branch of the perennial psychotechnology that is least disposed to verbalization. Zen aims at Flow not at Observer state, and therefore leaps over mindfulness. Actually, given the state of preparation of the student, he or she may not be able to make that leap directly, and might appreciate being given techniques to attain the Observer state, which in my experience facilitates the transition into Flow. But that is not Zen’s concern. Zen seeks to dispose of the abstractions and concepts that distract and divide the mind against the outer world. Distraction is in fact the world’s main problem — Acceleritis is distraction, distraction is Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). Flow state is getting the mind and the brain in perfect harmony so that everything disappears except the experience happening by itself perfectly.

One can be mindful without achieving comprehension, as Buddha pointed out. While comprehension is a result of mindfulness, comprehension can be blocked not only by distraction but also by preconceived notions or models. We can walk into a closet and not see something in plain sight because one’s wife has moved it into a place it couldn’t possibly be, according to the invisible assumption the mind uses to blind the senses.

One knows that one has comprehended when one can predict accurately. This is science. Verifiability.

Distraction can be reduced by taking notes. The mind wants its output to be comprehended — it wants in effect to give us notes to comprehend. If we do not take notes, those thoughts keep swirling around in our head distracting us. Notes must be taken and organized and put away to clear the mind.

The mantle of EOP needs to be taken off. This includes ditching the normal sense of time pressure, the list of to-do’s, slave mentality, worry, attachment, guilt at not doing the many things one has to do. One clears a space to NOT DO. To not ask the question “what is the next logical action”. To put a hold on all action.

Takeaway suggestions:

  1. Make a list of the highest priority gnarliest problems/challenges you currently face, long-term as well as short-term (they will be octaves of each other).

  2. For each one, on a single piece of paper, dump whatever your mind wants to dump about that challenge/opportunity, using pictures, circles, arrows, doodles, words, whatever — be lazy and don’t get into long-winded sentences and paragraphs, leave that for later. Some pages might stay totally blank if there is nothing you hear or see in your mind that wants to come out on a particular topic. Not to worry, blank is fine if that’s what the mind wants.
  3. Each day look at these pages once, even if only for a couple of seconds per page — just take as long as you feel like on each page.
  4. Make no effort to solve any of these things unless and until your mind starts to tug your sleeve with any intuitions that start by themselves to rise up and which you have a gut feeling are relevant to a specific page. Then take dictation from your mind and jot stuff on the relevant page. Just let it flow. By not striving to solve, you leave it to natural process. It is certainly more relaxing and less stressful.
  5. Sometimes what you jot down will be a piece of research you need to do to find out detail where it is currently lacking. The mind has a natural process to detect situations where you need to get more info.
  6. The main thing to do with your mind when you are focused on one of these pages is to recognize and discard any preconceived assumptions, to release the hold of the past, and come at what is on the page as if with a clean slate, a fresh new mind.
  7. Turn away from these problem opportunities and go have fun. It is when you are having fun that sudden molecules of connection will be made and you will get intuitions of creative breakthroughs. Write those down, write those down — use a napkin if that’s what’s available! These intuitions can slip away in the welter of distraction or lose detail otherwise. Those “Aha!” moments are moments of Flow. Go with it. Write it down the way it came to you. Don’t slip into wordsmithing mode. You can always seek to improve it later.

Best to all,

Bill 

PS: Our daily video today just happens to be on hidden intuition. It’s called Intuition vs. Distraction. You can find it just next to this post in the right column or if you missed it on Thursday, click here to watch the video. 

Entering and Sustaining Flow by How Much of the Mind Is Cooperating at One Time

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 4

Continuing our theme of recent posts, we are contemplating and “unpacking” Buddha’s root notion that mindfulness plus comprehension is the one route to true human happiness.

And we are relating that notion to our theory of Holosentience, wherein the brain and mind operate most perfectly and effectively when the sentience, or self-awareness, gathers itself into a wholeness exclusionary of nothing — when the selfness is so complete it disappears into absorption with the wholeness of experience in the now.

In earlier posts we posited that the physical brain is in Flow state (the Zone) when all parts of the brain are contributing and processing harmoniously. Below Flow in perfection is Observer state, where the self has a degree of objective detachment from its own emotional and cognitive arisings. In this state the prefrontal cortex is postulated to be in control though the whole brain is not yet in synchronistic action. These hypotheses are not yet supported by conclusive evidence.

Below the Observer state is what in the last 6000 years of recorded history has been called the normal state of waking consciousness, which I judge to be a state of brain process division far from Flow, and which I attribute to the information overload produced since written language was invented. I call this phenomenon Acceleritis. This lowest mental state I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) meaning that the mind is cutting corners to get things done despite being overloaded, overwhelmed, torn into warring bits, and confused.

Mindfulness is a word that has the connotation of striving for itself. The word has been used going back to the Vedas (the term is again on an upswing) as a tool to remind the seeker that he and she must remember to be mindful, to pay attention — but to what? To both the events around and outside oneself, and the ones inside. At the same time. “Inside” and “outside” both being constructs of the mind. In effect, “mindfulness” is the trigger word for the Observer state — a mnemonic device to remind oneself how to get out of EOP.

For my entire lifetime I have had the intuition of a common natural evolution of mindfulness and comprehension that is accessible internally to each of us. We don’t need outside inputs to discover it. So I have spent most of my life unpacking that intuition into communicable language. And articulating the intuitive cookie-crumb trail that is leading me myself back from EOP into Flow. In doing so I intuit myself to be reiterating the communication of the psychotechnology that resides within each of us, which others throughout history have also communicated, using language more common to their times, and often using metaphors when explicit language was challenged by a lack of models. Living today I have the advantage of the existence of models of information processing that are for the first time in history ideal for articulating what goes on experientially in our consciousness, since in our theory consciousness is an information processing system.

To be continued next week, with more techniques for attaining Observer state and making the transition to Flow.

Best to all,

Bill