Wandering carder's mind

[Lord777]

Neuroscientist Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen on the biological reasons for immersion in one's own thoughts, the skill of managing attention and the role of AI in studying the brain

A wandering mind is a situation where a person begins to pay attention to the content of his mind, to information that he creates, as opposed to information coming from the senses. For example, when you are driving a car or riding the subway, you are often preoccupied with your own thoughts and miss important information from the outside, despite the fact that you are watching and listening. So, for example, you miss your stop.

A shift in attention can be triggered by something in the external environment, but it can also occur spontaneously, without any sensory trigger. Neurophysiologists are interested in understanding why mind wandering sometimes lasts from 5 to 10 seconds, and in other cases several minutes.

What determines the duration of these states? Psychologically speaking, boredom is the most common cause of a wandering mind. For example, if you are chatting with someone who talks incessantly, you might get bored. It will become difficult to focus on the other person's monologue, and you will begin to entertain yourself with your own thoughts.

The problem of the wandering mind is acute for workers who are engaged in simple but dangerous work. This can lead to accidents. Not to mention the educational process, when the student cannot concentrate on the teacher or the book being read.

Research History: From James to Killingsworth
In the 1890s, psychology pioneer William James focused on the study of the wandering mind and the stream of consciousness. He said: "While part of what we perceive comes to us through the senses from external objects, another part (and perhaps more) always comes from our own head."

It is only recently that this claim has been backed up by a large amount of quantitative evidence in a landmark scientific paper by Matthew A. Killingsworth, published in 2011. This article was a game changer and sparked new research in the field of the wandering mind ...

Killingsworth attracted 5,000 participants who downloaded the app to their smartphones so that he could study the change and content of their wandering mind in natural settings. This approach was different from previous attempts in which participants had to fill out questionnaires within 24 hours. When the application was turned on at different times of the day, the participant had to answer three questions: "How do you feel right now?", "What are you doing now?" and "Are you thinking about something else that is not related to what you were doing?" In a quarter of a million responses, there was an astounding 47% mind-wandering rate. This was a kind of proof of what James said.

Biological Causes of the Wandering Mind
A relevant and intriguing question is: can certain systems in the brain cause the mind to wander? The system that is most often involved in this process is the network of the passive mode of the brain. It was discovered by Marcus Rachel and colleagues almost 20 years ago during a meta-analysis using positron emission tomography, which measures metabolic activity.

Researchers have found a decrease in activity in certain regions of the brain whenever people are asked to perform a task that requires activity. This discovery surprised everyone, because earlier scientists assumed that cognitive tasks should increase brain activity. It turned out that there are main regions of the brain located in the anterior-central and posterior-central parts of the brain with high basic activity during rest and a decrease in this activity during, for example, solving an arithmetic problem.

Positron emission tomography diagram

We still know little about the functional role of the passive mode network. It is usually studied using resting state neuroimaging, when people are asked to sit motionless with their eyes closed, without falling asleep, for 5-10 minutes. Unfortunately, it is only recently that we have validated instruments that are useful for measuring the content and quality of thoughts and feelings during rest, and they have not yet been implemented as a standard procedure for obtaining such data in neuroimaging of resting states.

The Amsterdam Resting-State questionnaire was specially developed for this purpose and has been validated in resting studies of over a thousand healthy patients. Studies using this questionnaire have shown that there is large and consistent individual variation in the thoughts and feelings of healthy people, but mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety have a profound effect on thoughts and feelings during rest. We still have a lot of work ahead of us before we understand the neural correlates of the wandering mind phenomenon at rest.

Large and stable variation in the content of the wandering mind indicates genetic influence, and this is an interesting and yet unexplored topic. Although Killingsworth discovered that, on average, a person's mind wanders about 47% of the day awake, this result is likely to vary between 35% and 65% from person to person. This is due to the fact that everyone needs internal processing and ordering of information, but an extrovert can spend less time on this than an introvert.

How to gain control of a wandering mind
In the West today, we see an increasing interest in mindfulness, or mindfulness meditation, used to learn to focus and reduce stress. During these exercises, people try to focus on one object (for example, the movement of the chest or the feeling of air passing through the nostrils during breathing) for 10 to 20 minutes. However, this is boring, and an unprepared person will constantly be carried away after his wandering mind. When a person finds himself distracted, his attention should be returned to the starting point.

Attention management skill is not a matter of a few minutes, but a systematic daily practice for weeks and years. Only in this case is there an opportunity to learn this. This behavior change has been associated with improved mental health in cases of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Modern efforts are aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms underlying these effects, as well as finding out their influence on the content, quality and frequency of episodes of the wandering mind.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Brain Research
Neuroscience is currently experiencing an explosion in data acquisition and rapid advances in digital signal processing used to make sense of data. Resting neuroimaging is just one example, while we measure hundreds and thousands of time intervals, each of which originates from a small piece of brain tissue and shows extremely complex vibrations. The signal processing engineer's job is to quantify these fluctuations and relate them to neural mechanisms, cognitive performance, and behavior.

In parallel with these developments, the field of computational neuroscience is growing. In other words, neural systems are simulated on a computer, which allows experiments with more precise control in the study of the role of a particular mechanism in the dynamics of the brain. The challenge is to find the right level of measurement and description of the functions of the human brain - from the molecular to the behavioral level - and to link experimental data with computational models so that we can ultimately understand how this complex and important phenomenon of the wandering mind works. In fact, the amount of knowledge required can greatly exceed the capabilities of an individual. Thus, with the advent of more advanced artificial intelligence capable of working with unstructured data, we cannot rule out

Every year there are new records showing what kind of things a machine can do better than humans. For example, 25 years ago she beat the chess champion. However, chess is a fairly structured game. Then she beat the best Jeopardy players! (game show. - Ed.), and in 2016 she won the champion of go. The IBM Watson system offered the best cancer diagnostics that doctors could provide. With artificial intelligence rapidly improving the ability of computing systems to make sense of received data, it is difficult to say why these developments will not surpass the human ability to absorb large amounts of information and make better decisions about how to understand the brain and treat its disorders.

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[CarderPlanet]

The mind is limited by the framework of this reality, spirituality is inaccessible and incomprehensible to it. He is a skeptic and is incapable of believing, let alone feeling the laws of this life. The mind perceives in the categories of scenery in which the soul is temporarily located and its task is to ensure the survival of itself in this body. By identifying yourself with only one mind, you limit yourself to an illusory life with a stake on temporary values. The awakening of the senses of the soul and the perception of the world from the original source is what true enlightenment is. It allows you to relate to life more easily and dissolve the traps created by the brain. Only the soul knows the truth about where you really are.

 

[Teacher]

With the subconscious mind on "you”
Salyut, carders, it has long been known that an experienced hypnotist can put a person into a special state-a hypnotic trance-in a few minutes.
According to psychologists, trance significantly enhances the abilities of the body and mind.
You can acquire temporary insensitivity to pain, recall in detail the events of many years ago, change your regular habits, or simply experience a feeling of gratuitous joy, relax and fully relax in just a few minutes.

The source of these new opportunities is our subconscious mind.
If you have ever experienced intense joy, a sense of self-confidence, or a sense of pleasant relaxation, even for a short time, then the hypnotist only helps you recall this moment from your subconscious mind and relive it again.

But you can also achieve a state of hypnotic trance on your own.
For example, using autogenic training, meditation techniques, or prayer.
In NLP, it is generally accepted that human consciousness is connected to the external world by three systems of perception: visual (visual), auditory (auditory) and kinesthetic (this is the feeling of the body, as well as taste and smell).
It is this approach that Richard Bandler's trance homing technique is based on.

Sit comfortably in a quiet place and find some object that you can look at without straining, such as a chandelier pendant that reflects light.

Focus your eyes on the glass and say out loud or to yourself - whichever is more convenient for you - three sentences related to visual impressions, that is, describing what you see here and now, for example:
"I see a flicker of light on the edges...
I can see my hands in my lap...
I see my reflection..."
You need to pronounce the words calmly and carefully, physically feeling the image that you describe.

Then do the same, finding three auditory perceptions.

For example:
"I can hear a faint fan noise...
I can hear the clock ticking..."
and so on.

After that, make three sentences related to body sensations (they can also be related to the sensations of taste and smell).

For example:
"I can feel the soles of my feet firmly planted on the floor...
I can feel the warmth in my intertwined fingers..."
Or any others.

Then, while maintaining the pose, repeat the same cycle, but this time say one sentence each about sensations in the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems.
By describing your experiences and experiencing them here and now at the same time, you are creating feedback and delving deeper into your inner world.
Therefore, even beginners already in the middle of the exercise feel that their eyes stick together (you should not resist this), and you perceive the environment already from memory.
This is a sign of a trance state.
You have received a kind of internal screen, on which you can later view what you ask your subconscious mind.

Next, determine which hand seems lighter to you and make an assumption that this hand will become lighter and lighter, involuntarily slowly rising, touching the face.
At the same time, you can imagine, for example.
A balloon tied to the hand and pulling it up, or any other auxiliary image (described by auditory, visual, or kinesthetic sensations).
The moment you touch your face, you go into a deep trance.
It is important to understand and practically verify that you can create images that have power over yourself.

If you are not comfortable with the described sequence of perceptions, start with auditory or kinesthetic ones, but first try the initial version.
Some people may notice that after doing the exercise about six times, it is enough to simply say:
"So, I imagine that I am going into this state," and you will already find yourself in it.
Over time, the trance state will become almost instantaneous.
Now let's move on to how you can use this state.
By itself, being in a trance even for a few minutes gives you the opportunity to relax, completely disconnected from all worries.
Before you start an exercise, for example, you can say:
"I wish, subconsciously, that you would wake me up in 15 minutes, so that when I wake up, I feel refreshed and refreshed."

There is a reliable time counter in our body, and if we set ourselves the time to come out of self-hypnosis, it happens quite accurately.
If you forget to give instructions to your subconscious mind before the lesson, then just go into a deep refreshing sleep for a few hours.

But rest and relaxation are not the most useful things that can give a trance state.
Dr. Bandler himself has used it for many years to develop his personality and learn new skills.
Once you have mastered the "homing" method of trance, you can also move on to what Richard Bandler calls"the process of creating new behaviors."

If you want to change your behavior in any situation that often develops at work, in the family or somewhere else, choose a model for yourself-from those people whom you respect, whom you admire in some way.
It is not necessary that you like everything about this person - the task is to "take" from him only the behavior in a specific situation that is significant to you, and transfer it into your life.
If you manage to behave like this once or twice, the skill will gain a foothold.
Then you will remember with a smile about your previous confusion in front of the audience, unnecessary outbursts of anger in a family dispute, or something else that recently bothered you so much.

So, you have chosen the person from whom you want to learn how to behave the way you would like.
Now use the same instructions as in the previous exercise.
Remember a situation in which the behavior of the" model " was what you want to learn. Divide your future work into three stages.
At first, you should just see and hear everything that happened in this situation.
In the second stage, ask your subconscious mind to combine your own image, including, for example, your voice, with the image and voice of the "model", as if to replace yourself with it.

For example, you can see on the internal screen how you approach and merge with it.
You begin to see and hear yourself in the behavior of the "model".
In the third stage, you must get inside the image created in the second stage: experience all the sensations inherent in the new behavior, and perceive the whole situation from a new-internal-point of view.