Carl-Richard

I guess one clarification can be that the fatigue has to be generalized to be indicative of the general load-bearing capacities being trained. For example, you can practice playing guitar very intensely and experience strong fatigue in your hands, but you might not be as fatigued in the rest of the body. Likewise, if the fatigue from a mental activity is very localized to that specific activity, then it's harder to say whether it trains your mental general load-bearing functions or not. But even within that, one would expect a sliding scale or gradient of effects going from more specialized to generalized. For example, playing guitar intensely might train your fingers the most, then your forearm muscles and wrist the second most, then your overarm muscles, then your shoulders and torso, then your neck and leg muscles, etc. So for some exercises, the gradient can be more skewed to generalized or specific. And to determine what this gradient is, you simply determine how much fatigue you experience across different faculties. Personally, if I do very intense brain training, it takes a little while before I'm able to do things like reading and writing at an optimal level of performance, which suggests that a generalized training is happening.

Sure, but the point is to see people as being in different stages of growth or development and that pushing standards on them that they might not be ready for can be counterproductive. When you see that somebody isn't being "stupid" but just need to grow, then that puts a lot of pressure off trying to change them or convert them to your point of view. Let people grow at their own pace. But of course, it's up to you how much you want to surround yourself with kids.

If a kid is being stupid, do you call them out on it, or do you laugh with your belly and say "oh you"?

If you're the grown-up, act like one. Literally treat them like kids who don't know any better.

Arguing about solipsism of course 😋

You just have to understand what working memory is. It's the basis of all active/intentional/voluntary mental activity, of all active thinking, visualization and imagery. It's the general workspace of your mind, and it has general load-bearing constraints, such as the 7 ± 2 rule, speed of processing, limits on detail resolution. These are analogous to how much weight you can lift off the ground or how fast you can run; very general measures of load-bearing capacity. Anything that loads your working memory, which is virtually anything, "trains" your working memory. It's just that if you load it with a bigger load (and in the right way), you will train it better (or in the direction of higher load-bearing capacity). How big the load is (and whether you load it in the right way), is related to how quickly you experience fatigue or loss in performance. And why do you develop fatigue? Say if you are chopping wood all day and you experience fatigue, what is happening to your body? What is happening to your muscles, your glucose stores, your lungs and oxygen levels? Well, everything points to that your general load-bearing systems, e.g. the musculoskeletal system or cardiovascular system, have been working hard. And just like a full-intensity sprint develops fatigue much quicker than e.g. going for a jog, some brain training develops fatigue much quicker than other forms of mental activity. So if you do something intense with your mind that you can only do for a short time before you experience fatigue or loss of performance, then those are signs that the general load-bearing functions of your mind are being efficiently trained. And of course, working memory has physical correlates which has metabolic constraints just like your lungs and muscles (particularly parts of the "Extrinsic Mode Network" in the brain, certain patterns of activity in frontoparietal areas). And also of course, there is some data on the benefits of brain training. Some do show increases in working memory capacity. The most controversial findings are more specifically related to IQ, but even there, you have some mixed findings with albeit small effect sizes. Despite that, I think the studies only show a fraction of what is possible, because getting a good study design that would truly test these things is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, and is something you would never expect to find in any normal research setting. Yes. Literally stare at a point on your desk right now and try to focus in on finer and finer details (grainy and well-lit desk surfaces are better). Try to literally find the smallest detail you can possibly find and then try to find an even smaller detail, and then an even smaller detail, then an even smaller detail, etc. Do this for 5-10 minutes and see what happens.

Resistance to emotions and experiences is a part of the problem. Keep meditating and allow yourself to express these energies, give them some space, don't instinctively see them as something to get rid of. Now, you don't have to necessarily start lashing out at people or making rash decisions based on every emotional impulse, but simply allow emotions the benefit of the doubt and the starting assumption of openness. Meditating a lot like you do makes you very aware of your emotions. You see more of them, their causes and consequences, and you might have a strong desire to get rid of them because of that, but you might be setting your sights a bit too high and being a bit too harsh on yourself, at least for now. So allow yourself some emotions, allow yourself some emotional control, and keep meditating, and you might see things get a lot better quite quickly.

There is an interesting dynamic that I see when people talk about brain training vs e.g. general self-development or spirituality. When they see claims about brain training causing some improvement, they are generally very skeptical and questions like "is it repeatable though?", "placebo effect?", "is there even an effect?", while with self-development and spirituality, any perceived change or benefit is much more readily taken as proof of concept. It could be because brain training is associated with quantifiable things like IQ which primes a kind of scientific skepticism, while personal development is accepted to be more experience-based and subjective. The effects are also more "enhancements" of what is already there, while the results of personal development are often more tangible and clear cut.

In your mind. A paradox is when you try to superimpose a duality on reality and the duality doesn't seem to work. And often, paradoxes seem like paradoxes from one perspective but not another. Some people may think quantum superposition is a paradox (the particle is in different states at the same time), or the particle-wave duality ("is it a wave or a particle?"), when in reality, they just break with everyday notions of reality and the associated dualities we tend to superimpose on it.

I just wrote it above: Chris Langan 😂 (more in substance than in process I guess). More seriously, the InfiniteIQ guy on YouTube is the guy you're looking for. I guess it's hard to find a suitable generalized concept that already exists other than "somebody who sculpts their brain" ("brainbuilder"). (It's funny, but that distinction, substance vs process, was recently made by my prime minister on TV multiple times and I was like "hey that's my kind of philosophy" and it sounded like it was his favorite way to sound deep without necessarily saying much of substance 😆).

What brain training is to merely challenging your brain, especially intellectually (e.g. by reading, writing and thinking in-depth on difficult topics), is a bit like what weight training is to working in construction (or any job with heavy manual labor, e.g. foresting). Like weight training, brain training optimally taxes "general load-bearing functions". For weight training, this is particularly the musculoskeletal system. For brain training, this is particularly the working memory (the "general workspace" of the mind). Both also tax even more general systems like the cardiovascular system, general metabolic capacity (your brain needs oxygen and sugar), etc. They do this because they consist of short bursts of very intense exercises, broken up by smaller periods of rest (reps, sets) and also longer periods (training days, rest days, maybe even meso-cycles if you're a geek like Dr. Mike Isratael). The intensity is what recruits more of the basic load-bearing structures of your mind or body, again, be it muscles, or your ability to "hold" (carry) and manipulate (move, shape, build, destroy) things in your working memory. On the other hand, challenging your brain intellectually, e.g. by working in science/philosophy/academia, is a bit like working in construction for your brain/mind. You do develop your working memory capacity (or muscoloskeletal capacity) quite a bit, and you also develop quite specialized skills ("functional strength") that are very useful and which you don't get from mere weight training or brain training. But you do not necessarily develop your working memory capacity or muscoloskeletal capacity themselves optimally. For that, you need an optimally balanced and structured schedule of intense work and rest, practiced consistently and with progressive overload. That is training done right, be it brain/mind or body. In a nutshell: construction workers are not bodybuilders, academics are not Chris Langan (that's a convenient inside joke 😂).

🫠🫠🫠

But it does make it a bit weird though, because now her BF should sue her too 😆

Go to high school. That's of course partially a joke, but find something that follows the same patterns: a place where you go to almost every day where people meet people and make friends, not because that is the main goal, but simply because it's bound to happen. Team sports, hobby groups (e.g. I was invited to join a local Facebook group that hosts small events and discussions on psychedelics), even Discord groups are other good alternatives. Notice again that the goal with these groups is not as much to socialize for its own sake but to share something you have in common, something you like, and creating an environment for each other where you fit to and amplify each other. Socializing comes naturally in those environments; it's not something you have to think about. To separate "socializing" from building actual long-term relationships, engaging with a community and congregating around shared values, is to put it mildly, really such an ugly part of American culture especially but also just modern Western culture in general (nightlife, pickup, hookup culture, party culture). Socializing is about connecting your soul to another, and not just many souls, but a larger soul created by those souls.

This guy made a song based on a virtuosic drum solo by Marco Minneman. The songwriting becomes really interesting when you use drums as a starting point, also when you base it on a largely improvised solo. It has a kind of freshness to it and gives a different angle on music than most normal songs, besides that it's a good song and that you're dealing with a genius drummer: