Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Recept...

- often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu

> on the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land.

> on the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee.

> my work helps me pay close attention like this. how can i experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku?

[1]: https://lucaaurelia.com/about

Some will find the desert father John Cassian[0] interesting in this regard. He uses the analogy of a water mill for the mind. You cannot stop a water mill from turning - the water keeps flowing and keeps turning the grindstone - so all you can do is choose what is poured into the grindstone. If you fill it with high quality wheat, you will have high quality flour. If you fill it with or add to it darnel, you will produce something toxic.

You reap what you sow, and if you sow your mind and your attention with filth, filth will sprout and spread and metastasize. Cultivate the garden of your mind wisely. If the mind drifts, pull it back. Let the good crop choke out any weeds in your mind.

This is why there is an ethics of thought and imagination. It is wrong to intentionally think certain things. Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. Indulging or pursuing bad thoughts corrupts you from the inside, and they prepare the ground for bad actions down the line.

(N.b., there was a link trending on HN a few years ago about a book of selections from Cassian's "Conferences" [1]. I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately.)

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm

[1] https://a.co/d/cbxYLo7

First on a positive note, the example about attention on sex and arousal feeding back on itself and deepening the experience is well described and easy to relate to. But I think the "deepening an experience through attention" phenomenon applies in so many other domains as well - Sustained attention on a film or video game world, deep uninterrupted creative work for many hours, etc. It's a wonderful positive feedback loop.

It is somewhat similar to how when sitting in silence outside for a long period of time you begin to become aware of more and more subtle details of the experience that weren't immediately accessible. Almost like you're turning up the sensitivity knob on things.

Unfortunately as the author describes, the attention feedback loop can become unpleasant and even torturous when it is directed on negative sensations. For me it has been various things at different stages of my life - muscle tension, breathing, eye floaters in my vision, etc. The same process plays out - Sustained fixation of attention on the sensation increases your sensitivity to it, meaning you notice it more and it bothers you more, meaning you pay more attention to it, and it gets out of control.

The difficulty I experience is that this attention is unwanted and yet I feel my mind focus on it almost automatically. Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them, which I'm still working on.

But it is helpful to see the positive flip side of the coin too - Our minds are capable of deep focus and deep attention, which can increase sensitivity and let you see increasingly subtle details of experience, making you a better appreciator of art and life, a better creator, a better listener and friend, etc.

There's something deeply connecting (and often very moving) about listening to a record and having your attention forced on it. So much that I usually start by thinking "I hope they turn it up," and by the end, when it has your sole focus, it's almost deafening.

But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?

Concentration causes your perception to penetrate things. What you observe dissolves, its former appearance a mere veil, parted, to reveal another appearance. And then that veil is parted. And so on.

The process could be described as a penetrating, blooming or revealing.

In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).

I can get psychdelic vision at will being sober (OEVs), mainly looking at grass (with other images it's more difficult). It's produced by sustained attention. It doesn't come with any other psychdelic effect, so it doesn't seem too valuable.

> The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator.

She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana."

It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry.

[1]: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas

You could drop acid and take a walk on the beach and see the ocean that way and feel those things and cry about it. You could get stoned and put on your favorite album and slip into a vivid daydream, directed by the music as a soundtrack.

I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.

Sports understand overtraining. It even means much the same as in AI circles.

The trick isn’t avoiding measurement. The trick is staggering out use if any measurement. Today we are working on speed drills. Tomorrow we work on form. Ans in a couple days we work on endurance. Nobody but software developers are trying to work on their sprinting every goddamned day.

We are the insane ones.

Our behaviors are determined by habit far more than anything, willpower is seldom enough to result in behavioral patterns over time. Even things like the career we chose become habit; pivoting from technology to horticulture will not happen if you cannot change your daily habits to go from thinking about technology to thinking about horticulture.

I think there's a standard and clearer explanation of what the author describes. A rich, satisfying experience comes from a melding of "goal focus" and expanded awareness. IE, Pleasure in some complex process involves reaching for a set "foreground" goal while keeping an awareness of entire "background" situation that prevents from fixating on the immediate goal. You can qualities of rhythm, self-similarity and etc into this "recipe" to describe rich satisfying experiences of multiple sorts (Art, sex, dance, conversation, [insert your favorite thing]).

The book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly goes into this stuff in long but still fuzzy detail.

Are there electrical cycles in the brain (and thus feedback and probably spiking) or does the charge distribute through the brain in a DAG directed acyclic graph?

Are there stable neural correlates to ear worm or rumination or flow states, for example?

Is sustained charge necessary for data persistence in the brain, as it is for RAM?

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3279725/

There are others.

I can’t tell if Henrik is okay and just a very vivid writer, or… not.

Sustaining the attention on an art piece unlocks things that you missed the first time due to having an untrained eye, much like reading a good book.

[1] https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/

There's something of a neural "fire together, wire together" explanation for this general phenomenon, no?

Jhanas (when in the positive direction), and dukkha or suffering (as caused by tanha or tension) when applied in the negative direction.

I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.

Others don't chase the high at all, but remember the state of mind and simply tune their brains to respond with said high on command whenever the chemistry in the brain fulfills the conditions, which can happen without taking the drug at all.

I don't see a loop there; I see different levels of awareness, consciousness and needs.

It's also what I think when I hear Hofstadter or (high-)functioning people talking about being "strange loops". ... use some of your opportunities, peace of mind and resources to sue people (you can probably come up with entire lists...) and the "strange loop" will break immediately.

Some people edge for days, others had to use various toys and stimuli before getting off since youth.

High school tier literature.

From the daydream that is described thereafter, “guided hallucination” would seem more fitting.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, just that what is being described is different from meditation.

I noticed this as well. One time many many years ago, I was in grad school and doing research until later in the evening, and deliberately delayed dinner until I got home. I was anticipating a nice meal and decided to do some house cleaning and some misc chores. Knowing I had the meal "on the other side" made me do the chores with gusto and a certain "sharpness" that I usually didn't have.