It's interesting how mind wandering can be analysed from different perspectives:
1. In meditation the main goal is precisely to free ourselves from the monkey mind that seems to be the cause of all suffering
2. In neuroscience mind wandering is seen as the brain default mode unless we are operating within a goal driven mindset
3. This can also be seen as a kind of reinforcement learning: we train ourselves to notice when we are mind wandering - this process in itself, after some time, conditions the mind to focus on the present moment
4. From a metabolic perspective (e.g. ketogenic therapy), mind wandering can be seen as the result of blood glucose fluctuations that cause mental fogginess and impair focus
In my own experience as a long time meditation practitioner, what really made the difference for me was regulating my blood glucose levels by following a ketogenic diet. The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me.
> The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me.
Feeling smart != being smart. I was once doing a water fast for a week and felt rather enlightened after a few days, like any problem would be easy. Upon trying to churn on some more advanced math proofs and programming stuff, it seemed to actually be harder than it would usually be. In fact I quickly decided that my time would be better spent walking around outside in the woods.
Fasting isn't really the same as keto of course. But I wonder if there are actual studies proving an increase in problem solving skills during something like a ketogenic diet or similar.
naasking 6 hours ago [-]
> Feeling smart != being smart. I was once doing a water fast for a week and felt rather enlightened after a few days, like any problem would be easy. Upon trying to churn on some more advanced math proofs and programming stuff, it seemed to actually be harder than it would usually be.
Exactly. Often touted for silly reasons, but it's definitely 100% true: feelings are not facts. Feeling healthier does not mean you are healthier. Feeling clearer does not mean you are clearer, etc.
Gooblebrai 19 hours ago [-]
> Feeling smart != being smart
Like many psychedelic users can attest to. The mindset of enlightenment is just another mindset that can be produced by the brain by doing the appropriate actions
Hugsun 18 hours ago [-]
There are is an unfortunately large proportion of them that are fooled by the emotion and believe it.
mewpmewp2 15 hours ago [-]
For me, I get drunk and I start to feel really smart and enlightened, however next day I usually cringe, but who knows maybe it was the drunk me that was the smart one and the cringing me is just too narrow minded and judgmental.
itronitron 10 hours ago [-]
It really depends on the task, some people are better at speaking a foreign language after they've had a few drinks.
gtirloni 6 hours ago [-]
I can confirm. While visiting Russia and having a few drinks with friends, I could understand everything perfectly even though my vocabulary was just a few words! Just kidding of course but we seemed to be understanding each other really well and later when everybody was sober, we recalled it being a good time.
im3w1l 6 hours ago [-]
The sober mind has been trained to carefully construct grammatically flawless sentences for the teacher. Hence the sober mind is hesitant, fearful and prone to second guessing itself.
The drunk mind he knows it not matter. Tempo and rhythm importanter. No stopping. Know not how conjugate don't conjugate. Not remember word loan other lingua. Say story no stopping manier words is gooder.
vundercind 5 hours ago [-]
I found that I had to get over feeling like I was mocking a foreign accent, before I could become even passably-for-someone-bad-at-it good at an accent for the one other language I've ever tried to semi-seriously learn. In fact, leaning into "mocking" it was the fastest way to improve. I bet that it's easier to get past that perceived faux-pas when a few drinks in....
djmips 5 hours ago [-]
Same with music.
fsckboy 10 hours ago [-]
oh, so that's why they become less intelligible to their native friends!
lynx23 11 hours ago [-]
That. Joscha Bach pretty much summarized the problem with just one word: Overfitting. I've since spotted the pattern several times. People going all in on psychedelics, seeing them as the solution to almost everything. Leary and McKenna starting a cult. Esp. McKenna and the true hallucination story make it pretty obvious that these two brothers overdid it so much that they couldn't just leave it behind, they had to follow up and supposedly go deep on that stuff.
mistermann 5 hours ago [-]
> just
I am always skeptical of instances of normal consciousness that claim to know the unknowable.
Like how could one even conclusively fact check such a thing? Do people even try?
bubblyworld 3 hours ago [-]
I think if you're curious about this sort of thing you have to go the route of the gnostic and try to experience it for yourself (the bidirectional link between your actions and your mental state, I mean). Meditation is one approach, drugs another. Perhaps in the future we'll have the tools to study this stuff more quantitatively, but for now the mind seems to be mostly mystery to science?
arijo 20 hours ago [-]
My ability to focus deeper and for a longer period of time increased substantially - I'm afraid my IQ is still the same ;)
nunodonato 11 hours ago [-]
I can't say I get smarter, but I have very vivid memories of after-fasting days, and in the morning it was really easy to focus on anything I would choose to focus on, the mind would be extremely concentrated and still.
even_639765 8 hours ago [-]
Your body requires nutrients to function. Deliberately depriving your cells of those nutrients can't possibly be good for them and likely does them harm. You evolved to survive such catastrophes of course, but the key word is "survive".
What states of mind can be induced by fasting is a separate consideration, it seems to me.
naasking 6 hours ago [-]
> 3. This can also be seen as a kind of reinforcement learning: we train ourselves to notice when we are mind wandering - this process in itself, after some time, conditions the mind to focus on the present moment
I'm not sure how generalizable this is. Young kids that are still developing seem very present in most circumstances. I almost think we settle into mind wandering as we develop more responsibilities and have to plan further ahead and think about contingencies.
timacles 5 hours ago [-]
Not being present is an ego protection mechanism. Its classic psychology. As children get older, they develop ideas of who they are and naturally develop ways to protect their emotions.
When peoples' mind wanders, they cling to things that made them feel good or "Day dream" of things that would make them feel good. They're not planning ahead or thinking about contingencies.
Dealing with reality is hard, and being present means continually facing this harsh world. You can observe this with not just kids but adults in the modern world as people are more and more detached from reality and can live in some fantasy context by reinforcing with social media and internet echo chambers
naasking 4 hours ago [-]
Frankly, calling it classic psychology isn't saying much given the replication crisis. I think what you describe definitely happens sometimes, but to paint all mind wandering in this way seems like a stretch.
aaarrm 4 hours ago [-]
Any high level readings you can recommend on this? I'm not looking for a textbook, but something to give me a general overview of this and related concepts.
primitivesuave 18 hours ago [-]
If you feel comfortable sharing, what is the meditation technique you practice? I am a Vipassana practitioner and found your observation to be anecdotally true - the commonly stated reasoning for the prescribed diet in a Vipassana course is that it minimizes the amount of blood diverted from other organs (i.e. the brain) to aid in digestion.
In any case, I found your statement "nothing to lose and could always return to my previous, though less-than-optimal, lifestyle" quite inspiring - thank you!
arijo 8 hours ago [-]
My approach these days is to follow a meditation mantra:
1. Slow down - the moment I'm aware my mind is no longer quiet and alert because of some trigger (internal or external)
2. Stop suffering - I do a quick body scan for the associated sensations along the body, tell myself this is just a temporary mood change, it will go away the same way it made its way into my body and mind
3. Take a deep breadth - I focus on my breadth for a few seconds and relax
4. Let it go - I know I should not blindly believe any thoughts or feelings that take over my mind and try to get back to a relaxed state of mind
I do this all the time not just during a few minutes of formal pratice. Its so ingrained in my way of being that some people close to me say my personality drastically changed.
But there's still a long way to go.
timacles 5 hours ago [-]
Learn zazen and zen Buddhism meditation. All other methods are inferior.
Simply observer your own thoughts and do not evaluate them as good or bad. Do this until you forget who you are.
Simple yet extremely difficult
yamrzou 21 hours ago [-]
> From a metabolic perspective (e.g. ketogenic therapy), mind wandering can be seen as the result of blood glucose fluctuations that cause mental fogginess and impair focus
Gosh! Another self-help book to "cure" my ADHD and depression! /s
Sarcasm aside, we already have cures for these disorders. It's absolutely insulting to struggle for decades dealing with mental health problems, for the medical industry to hold the cure (which, incidentally, is also the key to allowing you to perform a lot of self-care steps which would improve your mental health), and to then be told that — no, you won't receive the cure because you're not our "ideal patient" so, instead, maybe try and bang your head against this self-help book that "cures" the disease. Obviously, the disease will be cured if you just try hard enough! Or if you just, idk, Cope With It.
The majority of self-help books exist to generate money and only end up reinforcing the point of view that if you are struggling with mental illness it must be your fault. They take the burden off the rotting, decrepit husk of capitalism and put the burden back on to you. "Oh, you have struggled every day of your life with X? Ah, but this self-help book solves X, so if it doesn't work that must be your fault and you need to struggle harder with the methods in the self-help book!"
soulofmischief 6 hours ago [-]
I hear you. I lost a best friend last year after moving in with him and getting effectively bullied and belittled over my ADHD, which he was adamant was made-up and was just a skill issue that I could meditate my way out of. After he became increasingly hostile and psychotic I had to cancel my lease. Really screwed me up for a while.
arijo 6 hours ago [-]
Listen, stop playing with serious mental illness.
I suffer from severe mental illness since I was young - ketogenic therapy is evidence based medicine and has changed my life in a way medication never has.
When you downplay this emerging field of metabolic health you're preventing many people to have access to a treatment that can save their lives.
Please inform yourself better - do not careless spread misinformation that can hurt other people.
soulofmischief 5 hours ago [-]
> Please inform yourself better - do not careless spread misinformation that can hurt other people.
Please inform yourself on ADHD research. When you downplay the role of genetics in mental illness you're preventing many people from having access to life-changing treatment. The irony of your last statement is quite something. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC161723/
It's wonderful that ketogenic therapy has changed your life. That has absolutely no bearing on people with different a brain structure. Ketogenic diets can be beneficial, meditation is essential, but there are aspects of ADHD that simply cannot be fixed other than introducing more dopamine into your brain.
It's a Oxford’s Keto for ADHD & Depression Randomized Controlled Trial
My personal story is with psychosis which is as severe a mental illness as there can be - and I'm very thankful there are doctors and researchers out there battling all the misinformation about metabolic therapies.
People have different brain structures, but all brains are composed of cells and cells depend on their normal metabolic pathways to do their job.
I actually took dopamine reducing drugs for more than 20 years and I do know from personal experience how these drugs mess up people's lives.
So, yes I'm following a ketogenic therapy to, via metabolic normalization, regulate my dopamine pathways, and after 20+ year of misery I finally feel like I have a brain and a life.
I hope everyone has the chance to benefit from this research as I am benefiting, because I do know how painful it is to be prescribed these drugs for life.
shkkmo 3 hours ago [-]
> ketogenic therapy is evidence based medicine
There is only anedotal evidence and an animal study that a ketogengic diet reduces ADHD symptoms. There are reasons to be hopeful, but to call this "evidence based medicine" is a lie.
I find it unfortunate that the Keto diet attracts such fanaticism. It makes it much harder to find good information about it.
I couldn't find anything on that site that wasn't marketing material. I didn't dig deep into that organization but it appears to be run by the type of fanatics that I am talking about. It is dedicated to advocating for a certain type of treatment, not dedicated to gathering what we do and don't know about the topic.
arijo 33 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure why you keep using the term fanatics in what should be a civil cpnversation - it makes me think that either you have an agenda you're trying to hide your simply put you're an extremely rude person.
arijo 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
amanaplanacanal 7 hours ago [-]
Where are the studies? His list of publications only had individual case studies, which are nice, I guess, but... Lots of people have theories. Where is the science?
arijo 6 hours ago [-]
I see you did not read the book - if you go to the notes section you'll find references to all the technical papers that support each chapter of the book.
I suffer from a severe mental illness and following a ketogenic therapy has been life changing for me.
It is giving me hope and I see the mind blowing results every day.
It's not a theory to me.
Gasp0de 6 hours ago [-]
I don't have the book, since you have read it, could you provide some of the scientific studies that it cites? I believe you when you say it helped you, but you will have to agree that your anecdotal evidence is not sufficient as proof that it was the ketogenic diet that helped you.
tilne 7 hours ago [-]
It is absolutely a self-help book.
arijo 6 hours ago [-]
Did you read the book?
Provide some quotes that support your absolute certainty that this is a self-help book.
Cthulhu_ 5 hours ago [-]
It's a book. You read it. You are helped by the words and insights in it. Its tagline is "If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life." It is a more accessible format of the scientific papers it uses as sources. That's some definitions of a self-help book, no?
arijo 4 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but not well thought through complete nonsense is not an acceptable answer.
soulofmischief 6 hours ago [-]
ADHD has been linked to a reduced amount of dopamine receptor sites in the brain, and an abnormally high amount of dopamine transporters, which has a profound neurological and physiological impact.
Please, explain how this is just a metabolic issue and how simply adjusting my blood sugar and meditating will magically grow me more dopamine receptors.
arijo 6 hours ago [-]
It's all in the book. Read it.
When your insulin levels are deregulated, the receptors in your brain-blood barrier became insulin resistant and despite being drown in a sea of glucose your brain cells cannot access it and let their mitochondria use it to produce energy.
Your brain cells then start malfunctioning and neurotransmitter pathways, like dopamine, serotonin or GABA, get messed up.
This is the link from carbs, to glucose levels, to insulin resistance, to the pathophysiology of neurotransmiter pathways which are the SYMPTOMS, not the CAUSE of mental illness.
Read the book.
Watch videos from metabolicmind.org.
There are a lot of researchers working on metabolic health studies as we speak.
soulofmischief 5 hours ago [-]
I don't need to read some guy's book or watch random videos when I can read peer-reviewed, published medical papers. You're misunderstanding the role of genetics in brain development. From birth, the ADHD brain begins developing differently. In the presence of childhood trauma, often exacerbated by ADHD itself, the brain's development diverges even further.
Your worldview fails to account for genetic, environmental and sociological effects on brain development, and you seem to think that someone can just will their brain to suddenly develop more dopamine receptors and better neurological dopamine regulation systems.
arijo 4 hours ago [-]
Please read the book. The genetics are accounted for as are all other biopsychosocial factors that correlate with a lot of metabolic and mental illnesses.
detourdog 21 hours ago [-]
What I think is interesting in your point number 3. is that a social framework be the reinforcement mechanism. Growing up in an isolated environment could presents one reality growing up in a strong social environment presents another reality.
The coping skills in one reality my not translate to the new reality.
__MatrixMan__ 19 hours ago [-]
Do you have any thoughts about the possibility that it wasn't ketosis but instead just a lack of gluten?
I've not tried either but I've heard the same result attributed to making both changes (hard to know because they tend to coincide).
arijo 19 hours ago [-]
I think the main issue is the unhealthy up and down insulin spikes caused by modern high carbs diets.
__MatrixMan__ 18 hours ago [-]
That feels right. And it's good news too. I think I need to make some kind of similar change and for similar reasons and I'd really not like to eat and much meat as it takes to maintain ketosis. But there are a lot of ways to be blood-sugar-aware...
ljf 8 hours ago [-]
Look into the 'Slow Carb' diet - in simple terms you cut out sugar/processed carbs and replace bread/pasta/potato/rice with beans and extra veg.
Then one day a week you eat what you want. I personally find it far easier to follow than Keto - and while the affects aren't as extreme, when I was being strict with it, I was at my leanest and healthiest I've ever been.
Melatonic 5 hours ago [-]
Do we really need to group potatoes in there ? They're not processed carbs at all and have more protein than most people think
ljf 3 hours ago [-]
They cause an insulin spike so yes - but you can bend the rules however you want. For me just doing something where I stop myself gorging on sweets/chocolate is half the battle. Anything that spikes my insulin makes me crave sweet foods.
It is also known as karma mind in the Zen Buddhism.
Obsession over things that benefit you and avoiding things that hurt you.
even_639765 8 hours ago [-]
It's called reverie. The stream of thinking that you naturally have when you're not deliberately trying to focus.
Essentially, one thought leading to another which leads to another and so on, without you having to make any effort.
Most people identify so much with their thinking, they aren't aware of it as a "thing"; it feels like it's something you're doing.
What are you thinking about?
But if you try to just pay attention, say to your breath, going in and out, after a few seconds you'll discover you slipped back into thinking, as described above, back into reverie.
Continued failure, despite your increasing resolve, to stay just listening to your breath reveals this fact: you can't stop "your" thinking mind from recapturing your attention.
So it seems like a monkey, that is, a thing which jumps around, from thought to thought, a separate entity from you, one which will not obey you.
21 hours ago [-]
Aeglaecia 20 hours ago [-]
more broadly , the difference between reacting and responding to a stimulus
musicale 19 hours ago [-]
For me, undirected mind wandering (daydreaming, background processing, actual dreaming and similar states) seems to be the best source of creative thought as well as flashes of insight. And semi-directed mind wandering (brainstorming as well as random walks down pathways of thought) seems to be essential to problem solving.
However, schools and workplaces rarely appreciate any form of thinking that doesn't produce immediate tangible output with some kind of economic value.
phaedrus 21 hours ago [-]
Does mind wandering in this context refer to daydreaming or does it refer to blanking out? As someone with late-diagnosed ADHD and likely also on the spectrum, I find myself struggling with both of these. I engage in a lot of Walter Mitty-esque hyper realistic daydreams, but I also have random periods of minutes of completely blank mind. Both result in a lot of "lost time" for me throughout the day. It runs in my family such we refer to it as "the our-surname fog".
Skimming this paper it's unclear to me whether the author is referring to one or the other, or both.
Interestingly I'm not sure that the mind wandering is separable from my creativity and problem solving. Often I'll come out of a blank period with the answer to something without consciously having been thinking about it. I think of these periods of "lost time" in my day as background processing - it's just my misfortune I live in a world where it's not socially or economically acceptable to space out for long periods throughout the day.
even_639765 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know about the blanking out part, but the rest of the description sounds like a regular human being. That intense daydreaming is, while not everyone's state, pretty typical of people generally. People with powerful brains just experience things intensely or deeply, including their own reverie. You should harness some of that horsepower.
But you always knew that, because it's obvious
FailMore 21 hours ago [-]
Mind wandering (or more precisely the activation of the default mode network) and dreaming are hugely linked. Interestingly the “direction” of the mind wandering during rem sleep is the inverse of anxious mind wandering. When we are anxious we have high levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, but during rem sleep it’s 85% below base waking levels.
In 2017 I wrote a paper discussing the implications for dream content and functionality. Here is the link for it:
And a lot of what ACT does happens to echo what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation.
Maybe the most important aspect of mind wandering -- ie distraction -- is: what pushes us off track? In my experience, that's often a feeling of discomfort that is tied to the anticipated pain of a task. Sometimes that pain is tedium (I know what must be done and don't want to do it), other times it's complexity (I know I must do something but the exact steps are not clear), and other times it's sheer difficulty; ie I'm not breaking the task down into small enough chunks to feel able to do them.
I'm looking for my own internal protocol to sense mind wandering, identify which type of perceived difficulty caused it, and then take the steps to stay on goal: if tedium, put on podcast and forge forth; if complexity, back up and unravel the vague aspiration; if sheer difficulty, break it down into small steps.
I feel like the very ability to slip into metacognitive reflection depends heavily on my overall state, whether I'm doing all the right things like sleeping and exercising in order to monitor the internal course of work.
andyjohnson0 11 hours ago [-]
What does it feel like to have a mind that doesn't (or only minimally) wander? I find it hard to imagine such a state. Would it even be psychologically healthy?
fluoridation 2 hours ago [-]
The mind wanders when you're doing something repetitive that doesn't demand much attention, or when resting. So I guess if you were engaged all the time in something that requires concentration, your mind wouldn't wander.
metalman 6 hours ago [-]
focusing a small lense is great
but it wont help inprove its optical qualities
which requires many small adjusments after the fact of creating a blank lense,size, or ,light gathering ability matters,but occlusions and outside conditions can determine the useability of the image produced
and as we all know,there is a concerted effort
happening to review all of the past ,randomly generated data,stored on film and tape by the metric fuck ton, for the secrets that exist there
and only there,in sharp focus
as our relentless gazing and fidgetings will be mined some other time
and then as now,there are mad shamen gleefully
and deliberatly burrying hints of what is,but cant
be held
w10-1 11 hours ago [-]
Interesting that they mentioned the default-mode network but not the salience network
I experience mind-wandering as sampling salience signals when no signals dominate (as they do in reactivity and goal- or motor-planning).
Mind-wandering presents unlike meditative absorption, when salience seems quiescent (or, conversely but rarely, sharp).
tmshapland 21 hours ago [-]
Thanks for posting. Reminds me of Dan Gilbert's famous paper on the subject. He took polls of people at random times during the day when smartphones first emerged.
"In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."
> What’s more, people’s negative moods appeared to be the result, rather than the cause, of the mind wandering.
This is I think one useful take away from the article... on the other hand...
> “A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize the objective reality of our lives,” he told me. “But we don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to optimize where our minds go.”
I'm so sorry but I refuse to take this seriously. The modern day obsession with optimization is off the rails and honestly is probably the thing that makes most people miserable. My man lost respect with that line of thinking.
But I don't know mind wandering/daydreaming is pretty lit. I like the distraction. Yeah, sometimes it can be a not very positive experience but I feel like these researchers either fail to address or don't discuss the distinction between daydreaming and anxious thought.
IncreasePosts 2 hours ago [-]
I'm 100% with you on this one. I feel like people who won't like mind wandering are heavy Type-A, control-oriented personalities, who have some external objective in mind, and are unsatisfied until that objective is completed.
I don't think I've ever experienced a negative mood due to mind wandering. If anything, negative moods for me result in more fixation on a problem, where my mind will not wander, and will just constantly come back to a single thing.
even_639765 7 hours ago [-]
To say it's unhappy is not quite right, it's problem solving and running simulations whose goal is naturally and properly a source of low level anxiety - how to secure this organisms future well being.
That wandering mind is conducting probability analysis on potential future events and circumstances or the same calculation on the actual nature of past events. It is trying to secure its future security, to form an ugly phrase.
That's what this organism does with its mind. It runs simulations to try to predict the future in an if this, then that sort of way. That's its natural state. Seems harsh to call that "unhappy".
Productive reasoning, the kind of mental activity we are proud of and covet, in this context, is really less like thinking and more like acting, like engaging in affirmative, directed action.
19 hours ago [-]
banga 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting article. Key takeaway for me was:
“Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) provided further evidence that it is specifically unresolved goals and concerns that trigger habitual mind wandering.”
...
“Remarkably, making a plan freed participants from this kind of habitual mind wandering.”
wslh 20 hours ago [-]
After skimming the article, I found it unconvincing. It feels poorly structured, almost like something a high school student might put together for a monograph. The references seem to be there to add a sense of authority, but they lack clarity. Who exactly is the article referring to? Is it talking about all human beings, specific types of people like artists, or perhaps Einstein when he was daydreaming?
There are plenty of successful people who possess this trait the article critiques, which makes me wonder if one strong counterexample is enough to challenge the entire premise. In my view, the argument lacks depth and fails to consider broader, real-world examples.
calf 11 hours ago [-]
I thought it was written by scientistic 1960s psychologists but it is actually from 2018, peak CBT pseudoscience.
lincpa 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 19:08:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
1. In meditation the main goal is precisely to free ourselves from the monkey mind that seems to be the cause of all suffering
2. In neuroscience mind wandering is seen as the brain default mode unless we are operating within a goal driven mindset
3. This can also be seen as a kind of reinforcement learning: we train ourselves to notice when we are mind wandering - this process in itself, after some time, conditions the mind to focus on the present moment
4. From a metabolic perspective (e.g. ketogenic therapy), mind wandering can be seen as the result of blood glucose fluctuations that cause mental fogginess and impair focus
In my own experience as a long time meditation practitioner, what really made the difference for me was regulating my blood glucose levels by following a ketogenic diet. The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me.
I write a bit on my experience in my blog:
https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped...
Just my 2 cents on a fascinating subject!
Feeling smart != being smart. I was once doing a water fast for a week and felt rather enlightened after a few days, like any problem would be easy. Upon trying to churn on some more advanced math proofs and programming stuff, it seemed to actually be harder than it would usually be. In fact I quickly decided that my time would be better spent walking around outside in the woods.
Fasting isn't really the same as keto of course. But I wonder if there are actual studies proving an increase in problem solving skills during something like a ketogenic diet or similar.
Exactly. Often touted for silly reasons, but it's definitely 100% true: feelings are not facts. Feeling healthier does not mean you are healthier. Feeling clearer does not mean you are clearer, etc.
Like many psychedelic users can attest to. The mindset of enlightenment is just another mindset that can be produced by the brain by doing the appropriate actions
The drunk mind he knows it not matter. Tempo and rhythm importanter. No stopping. Know not how conjugate don't conjugate. Not remember word loan other lingua. Say story no stopping manier words is gooder.
I am always skeptical of instances of normal consciousness that claim to know the unknowable.
Like how could one even conclusively fact check such a thing? Do people even try?
What states of mind can be induced by fasting is a separate consideration, it seems to me.
I'm not sure how generalizable this is. Young kids that are still developing seem very present in most circumstances. I almost think we settle into mind wandering as we develop more responsibilities and have to plan further ahead and think about contingencies.
When peoples' mind wanders, they cling to things that made them feel good or "Day dream" of things that would make them feel good. They're not planning ahead or thinking about contingencies.
Dealing with reality is hard, and being present means continually facing this harsh world. You can observe this with not just kids but adults in the modern world as people are more and more detached from reality and can live in some fantasy context by reinforcing with social media and internet echo chambers
In any case, I found your statement "nothing to lose and could always return to my previous, though less-than-optimal, lifestyle" quite inspiring - thank you!
1. Slow down - the moment I'm aware my mind is no longer quiet and alert because of some trigger (internal or external)
2. Stop suffering - I do a quick body scan for the associated sensations along the body, tell myself this is just a temporary mood change, it will go away the same way it made its way into my body and mind
3. Take a deep breadth - I focus on my breadth for a few seconds and relax
4. Let it go - I know I should not blindly believe any thoughts or feelings that take over my mind and try to get back to a relaxed state of mind
I do this all the time not just during a few minutes of formal pratice. Its so ingrained in my way of being that some people close to me say my personality drastically changed.
But there's still a long way to go.
Simply observer your own thoughts and do not evaluate them as good or bad. Do this until you forget who you are.
Simple yet extremely difficult
Could you please provide some sources for this?
Sarcasm aside, we already have cures for these disorders. It's absolutely insulting to struggle for decades dealing with mental health problems, for the medical industry to hold the cure (which, incidentally, is also the key to allowing you to perform a lot of self-care steps which would improve your mental health), and to then be told that — no, you won't receive the cure because you're not our "ideal patient" so, instead, maybe try and bang your head against this self-help book that "cures" the disease. Obviously, the disease will be cured if you just try hard enough! Or if you just, idk, Cope With It.
The majority of self-help books exist to generate money and only end up reinforcing the point of view that if you are struggling with mental illness it must be your fault. They take the burden off the rotting, decrepit husk of capitalism and put the burden back on to you. "Oh, you have struggled every day of your life with X? Ah, but this self-help book solves X, so if it doesn't work that must be your fault and you need to struggle harder with the methods in the self-help book!"
I suffer from severe mental illness since I was young - ketogenic therapy is evidence based medicine and has changed my life in a way medication never has.
When you downplay this emerging field of metabolic health you're preventing many people to have access to a treatment that can save their lives.
Please inform yourself better - do not careless spread misinformation that can hurt other people.
Please inform yourself on ADHD research. When you downplay the role of genetics in mental illness you're preventing many people from having access to life-changing treatment. The irony of your last statement is quite something. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC161723/
It's wonderful that ketogenic therapy has changed your life. That has absolutely no bearing on people with different a brain structure. Ketogenic diets can be beneficial, meditation is essential, but there are aspects of ADHD that simply cannot be fixed other than introducing more dopamine into your brain.
It's a Oxford’s Keto for ADHD & Depression Randomized Controlled Trial
My personal story is with psychosis which is as severe a mental illness as there can be - and I'm very thankful there are doctors and researchers out there battling all the misinformation about metabolic therapies.
People have different brain structures, but all brains are composed of cells and cells depend on their normal metabolic pathways to do their job.
I actually took dopamine reducing drugs for more than 20 years and I do know from personal experience how these drugs mess up people's lives.
So, yes I'm following a ketogenic therapy to, via metabolic normalization, regulate my dopamine pathways, and after 20+ year of misery I finally feel like I have a brain and a life.
I hope everyone has the chance to benefit from this research as I am benefiting, because I do know how painful it is to be prescribed these drugs for life.
There is only anedotal evidence and an animal study that a ketogengic diet reduces ADHD symptoms. There are reasons to be hopeful, but to call this "evidence based medicine" is a lie.
I find it unfortunate that the Keto diet attracts such fanaticism. It makes it much harder to find good information about it.
I suffer from a severe mental illness and following a ketogenic therapy has been life changing for me.
It is giving me hope and I see the mind blowing results every day.
It's not a theory to me.
Provide some quotes that support your absolute certainty that this is a self-help book.
Please, explain how this is just a metabolic issue and how simply adjusting my blood sugar and meditating will magically grow me more dopamine receptors.
When your insulin levels are deregulated, the receptors in your brain-blood barrier became insulin resistant and despite being drown in a sea of glucose your brain cells cannot access it and let their mitochondria use it to produce energy.
Your brain cells then start malfunctioning and neurotransmitter pathways, like dopamine, serotonin or GABA, get messed up.
This is the link from carbs, to glucose levels, to insulin resistance, to the pathophysiology of neurotransmiter pathways which are the SYMPTOMS, not the CAUSE of mental illness.
Read the book.
Watch videos from metabolicmind.org.
There are a lot of researchers working on metabolic health studies as we speak.
Your worldview fails to account for genetic, environmental and sociological effects on brain development, and you seem to think that someone can just will their brain to suddenly develop more dopamine receptors and better neurological dopamine regulation systems.
The coping skills in one reality my not translate to the new reality.
I've not tried either but I've heard the same result attributed to making both changes (hard to know because they tend to coincide).
Then one day a week you eat what you want. I personally find it far easier to follow than Keto - and while the affects aren't as extreme, when I was being strict with it, I was at my leanest and healthiest I've ever been.
Obsession over things that benefit you and avoiding things that hurt you.
Essentially, one thought leading to another which leads to another and so on, without you having to make any effort.
Most people identify so much with their thinking, they aren't aware of it as a "thing"; it feels like it's something you're doing.
What are you thinking about?
But if you try to just pay attention, say to your breath, going in and out, after a few seconds you'll discover you slipped back into thinking, as described above, back into reverie.
Continued failure, despite your increasing resolve, to stay just listening to your breath reveals this fact: you can't stop "your" thinking mind from recapturing your attention.
So it seems like a monkey, that is, a thing which jumps around, from thought to thought, a separate entity from you, one which will not obey you.
However, schools and workplaces rarely appreciate any form of thinking that doesn't produce immediate tangible output with some kind of economic value.
Skimming this paper it's unclear to me whether the author is referring to one or the other, or both.
Interestingly I'm not sure that the mind wandering is separable from my creativity and problem solving. Often I'll come out of a blank period with the answer to something without consciously having been thinking about it. I think of these periods of "lost time" in my day as background processing - it's just my misfortune I live in a world where it's not socially or economically acceptable to space out for long periods throughout the day.
But you always knew that, because it's obvious
In 2017 I wrote a paper discussing the implications for dream content and functionality. Here is the link for it:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz
And it was discussed on HN here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
I think knowledge work in general is plagued by the intangibility of the processes that lead to its artifacts.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has a few things to say about this. (Here's Jonathan Bricker's TedX talk for a glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1)
And a lot of what ACT does happens to echo what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation.
Maybe the most important aspect of mind wandering -- ie distraction -- is: what pushes us off track? In my experience, that's often a feeling of discomfort that is tied to the anticipated pain of a task. Sometimes that pain is tedium (I know what must be done and don't want to do it), other times it's complexity (I know I must do something but the exact steps are not clear), and other times it's sheer difficulty; ie I'm not breaking the task down into small enough chunks to feel able to do them.
I'm looking for my own internal protocol to sense mind wandering, identify which type of perceived difficulty caused it, and then take the steps to stay on goal: if tedium, put on podcast and forge forth; if complexity, back up and unravel the vague aspiration; if sheer difficulty, break it down into small steps.
I feel like the very ability to slip into metacognitive reflection depends heavily on my overall state, whether I'm doing all the right things like sleeping and exercising in order to monitor the internal course of work.
I experience mind-wandering as sampling salience signals when no signals dominate (as they do in reactivity and goal- or motor-planning).
Mind-wandering presents unlike meditative absorption, when salience seems quiescent (or, conversely but rarely, sharp).
"In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."
https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBER...
This is I think one useful take away from the article... on the other hand...
> “A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize the objective reality of our lives,” he told me. “But we don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to optimize where our minds go.”
I'm so sorry but I refuse to take this seriously. The modern day obsession with optimization is off the rails and honestly is probably the thing that makes most people miserable. My man lost respect with that line of thinking.
But I don't know mind wandering/daydreaming is pretty lit. I like the distraction. Yeah, sometimes it can be a not very positive experience but I feel like these researchers either fail to address or don't discuss the distinction between daydreaming and anxious thought.
I don't think I've ever experienced a negative mood due to mind wandering. If anything, negative moods for me result in more fixation on a problem, where my mind will not wander, and will just constantly come back to a single thing.
That wandering mind is conducting probability analysis on potential future events and circumstances or the same calculation on the actual nature of past events. It is trying to secure its future security, to form an ugly phrase.
That's what this organism does with its mind. It runs simulations to try to predict the future in an if this, then that sort of way. That's its natural state. Seems harsh to call that "unhappy".
Productive reasoning, the kind of mental activity we are proud of and covet, in this context, is really less like thinking and more like acting, like engaging in affirmative, directed action.
There are plenty of successful people who possess this trait the article critiques, which makes me wonder if one strong counterexample is enough to challenge the entire premise. In my view, the argument lacks depth and fails to consider broader, real-world examples.