Why Is it Impossible to Stop Thinking, to Render the Mind a Complete Blank? by Niki2

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Why Is it Impossible to Stop Thinking, to Render the Mind a Complete Blank?

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Thursday, December 13, 2012 04:40
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Tuesday, December 11, 2012 6:31 PM

Freedom is Important because People are Important

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I don't play FPS. Also, I don't really chill the fuck out. That is a scientific impossibility.

Hello,

Be what you want to be, Byte. I'm sorry I tried to contradict you.

--Anthony

Note to Self:
Raptor - woman testifying about birth control is a slut (the term applies.)
Context: http://tinyurl.com/d6ozfej
Six - Wow, isn't Niki quite the CUNT? And, yes, I spell that in all caps....
http://tinyurl.com/bdjgbpe
Wulf - Niki is a stupid fucking bitch who should hurry up and die.
Context: http://tinyurl.com/afve3r9

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.” -T. S. Szasz

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Tuesday, December 11, 2012 7:24 PM

BYTEMITE

It's okay, I'm not sure why you're apologizing. It appears everyone on this thread thinks *I* was out of line.

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Tuesday, December 11, 2012 11:26 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

[IMG]

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 5:16 AM

JONGSSTRAW

Quote:
Why Is it Impossible to Stop Thinking, to Render the Mind a Complete Blank?

It's not impossible. It's quite easy actually. Just watch back-to-back episodes of 'Duck Dynasty'.

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic."

Benjamin Franklin

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 5:48 AM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
My record is five minutes of slackjawed staring without brain thoughts.

Huh. I cannot remember any moment in my life when I didn't have a conscious thought. Maybe 30 seconds max if I concentrate really hard on a specific feeling.

-----

Don’t waste your life not making amazing things with equally amazing people.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 10:36 AM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Yep, 5 minutes would actually be quite an achievement and demonstrates a natural disposition for meditation.

I'm not sure I've ever done much more than be aware of my thoughts and have them slow down somewhat. In the kind of practise I do, you just observe and then take your focus back on your breathing, which is still 'thinking'

What I am trying to avoid is the "ohmygoditshotinheremynoseisitchydidIpaythathasbillyet?IwonderifIwillgetcutoff?godworkisdrivingmecrazyhowamisupposedtoreachthesenewtargetsshouldigetmynailsdonebeforechristmasIdontwanttodriveallthewaytocoscowithmysisterinlawisthatmyphoneringing?"

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 11:32 AM

BYTEMITE

I would more say it indicates a lack of responsibility, a tendency for boredom, the teenaged aptitude for vegging out and selective hearing, a willingness to attempt challenges, a reason to want to attempt the challenge, and an extreme dislike for most of the thoughts I experience.

Of course, that record only holds for the times I have been conscious, but I am unable to check the time for periods I have spent without thoughts while unconscious.

I can also sleep with my eyes open. Unfortunately, you dream-hallucinate and any useful visual input you might be able to have is obscured by that. Sleeping upright or standing and at whim is actually the better skill.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 1:01 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Which explains Congressional sessions quite handily, yeah.

And I too was fond of ye olde frag-fest, sure, but that wasn't the FPS which most interested me.

See, at the time I was still all crumpled up from the near fatal accident, damn near physically invalid and had just managed to finally secure lodging in a basement apartment and resources, and had very little to do.

I had also, by way of building PCs out of parts cadged from junkpiles and salvation army leftovers, had the "Space Shuttle" - a high end PC cobbled together with the most outrageous of gimmicks, including six hard drives with the latter two running off a modified controller card running on 1E8 IRQ 11 and masquerading as a tetiary IDE bus.
I also had an AiTech scan converter porting to the video to a 19" Quasar Dynacolor I had obtained on the cheap, with two side monitors, a 14" VGA and 13" RCA Monochrome, and the audio was wired through the sound system of a broken console TV with additional speakers wired into a halfassed surround sound - all in front of a thrown out overstuffed recliner with a CH Products flight system control set bolted to it.

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no pain abatement worth a damn, I threw myself headfirst into Descent II so hard that I got punted from many servers cause folks thought I was a bot.

They don't call that ship Vertigo One for nothin, just WATCHIN me play was enough to make folk carsick.

-Frem

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012 10:38 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Humans are a daydreaming species. According to a recent study led by the Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth, people let their minds wander forty-seven per cent of the time they are awake. (The scientists demonstrated this by developing an iPhone app that contacted twenty-two hundred and fifty volunteers at random intervals during the day.) In fact, the only activity during which we report that our minds are not constantly wandering is “love making.” We’re able to focus for that.

At first glance, such data seems like a confirmation of our inherent laziness. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, mind-wandering is often derided as useless—the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. Freud, for instance, described daydreams as “infantile” and a means of escaping from the necessary chores of the world into fantasies of “wish-fulfillment.”

In recent years, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have redeemed this mental state, revealing the ways in which mind-wandering is an essential cognitive tool. It turns out that whenever we are slightly bored—when reality isn’t quite enough for us—we begin exploring our own associations, contemplating counterfactuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head.

Virginia Woolf, in her novel “To The Lighthouse,” eloquently describes this form of thinking as it unfolds inside the mind of a character named Lily:

Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting.1

A daydream is that fountain spurting, spilling strange new thoughts into the stream of consciousness. And these spurts turn out to be surprisingly useful. A forthcoming paper in Psychological Science led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara helps explain why. The experiment itself was simple: a hundred and forty-five undergraduate students were given a standard test of creativity known as an “unusual use” task, in which they had two minutes to list as many uses as possible for mundane objects such as toothpicks, bricks, and clothes hangers.

Subjects were then randomly assigned to one of four different conditions. In three of those conditions, participants were given a twelve-minute break that entailed either: resting in a quiet room, performing a difficult short-term memory task, or doing something so boring that it would elicit mind-wandering. In a final control condition, participants were given no break at all. Finally, all subjects were given another round of creative tests, including the unusual-use tasks they had worked on only a few minutes before.2

Here’s where things get interesting: those students assigned to the boring task performed far better when asked to come up with additional uses for everyday items to which they had already been exposed. Given new items, all the groups did the same. Given repeated items, the daydreamers came up with forty-one per cent more possibilities than students in the other conditions.

What does this mean? Schooler argues that it’s clear evidence that those twelve minutes of daydreaming allowed the subjects to invent additional possibilities, as their unconscious minds pondered new ways to make use of toothpicks. This is why the effect was limited to those items that the subjects had previously been asked about—the question needed to marinate in the mind, “incubating” in those subterranean parts of the brain we can barely control.

On a more practical note, the scientists argue that their data show why “creative solutions may be facilitated specifically by simple external tasks that maximize mind-wandering.” The benefit of these simple tasks is that they consume just enough attention to keep us occupied, while leaving plenty of mental resources left over for errant daydreams. (When people are left alone, such as those subjects forced to sit by themselves, they tend to perseverate on their problems. Unfortunately, all this focus backfires.) Consider the ping-pong tables that now seem to exist in the lobby of every Silicon Valley startup. While it’s easy to dismiss such interior decorations as mere whimsy, the game turns out to be an ideal mind-wandering activity, at least when played casually. Another task that consistently leads to extended bouts of daydreaming is reading Tolstoy. In Schooler’s earlier work on mind-wandering, he gave subjects a boring passage from “War and Peace.” The undergraduates began zoning out within seconds.

Although Schooler has previously demonstrated a correlation between daydreaming and creativity—those who are more prone to mind-wandering tend to be better at generating new ideas, at least in the lab—this new paper shows that our daydreams seem to serve a similar function as night dreams, facilitating bursts of creative insight. Take a 2004 paper published in Nature by the neuroscientists Ullrich Wagner and Jan Born. The researchers gave a group of students a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. Wagner and Born designed the task so that there was an elegant shortcut, but it could only be uncovered if the subject had an insight about the problem. When people were left to their own devices, less than twenty per cent of them found the shortcut, even when given several hours to mull over the task. The act of dreaming, however, changed everything: after people were allowed to lapse into R.E.M. sleep, nearly sixty per cent of them discovered the secret pattern. Kierkegaard was right: sleeping is the height of genius.

If this all sounds like scientific justification for afternoon naps, long showers, and Russian literature, you’re right. “We always assume that you get more done when you’re consciously paying attention to a problem,” Schooler told me. “That’s what it means, after all, to be ‘working on something.’ But this is often a mistake. If you’re trying to solve a complex problem, then you need to give yourself a real break, to let the mind incubate the problem all by itself. We shouldn’t be so afraid to actually take some time off.”

Schooler has tried to apply this hypothesis to his own life. Although he used to take piles of work with him on vacation—he’d read papers and grant proposals on the beach—he now finds that he has better ideas when he lets himself really get away. “The good news is that there’s no reason to feel guilty when taking a break or not checking your e-mail,” he says. “Because it turns out that even when you’re on vacation, the unconscious is probably still working on the problem.”

A daydream, in this sense, is just a means of eavesdropping on those novel thoughts generated by the unconscious. We think we’re wasting time, but, actually, an intellectual fountain really is spurting.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/the-virtu
es-of-daydreaming.html#ixzz2Ev2K5I9x

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Thursday, December 13, 2012 4:40 AM

BYTEMITE

Caffeine is a good focuser. The downside is it's an addictive drug, and I suspect it permanently reduces your processing power at all other times.

Also writing out the problem and potential solution pros and cons often helps, especially when you're talking with someone else. For some reason talking to other people is a big generator of eureka moments.

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