I was on the radio talking about my study

[Carl-Richard]

This is what I'm spending my time on these days  (click for English subtitles):

Thank you to @Nilsi for planting a seed in my mind about doing paid social media ads for recruiting to my study (and the rest of the free marketing consultations). I would otherwise not have gotten the exposure needed to get journalists aware of my study.

People say I did pretty well for being my first live radio appearance. However, (and now I will dump my OCD thoughts), I did have to deal with an unnecessary amount of adrenaline before going on air, because I thought I would not have time to ask an important question to my advisor before that. That must have reduced my fluid intelligence by honestly like a half (or a quarter).

I also had 4 hours of sleep (not really from being nervous the day before but because of my sleep schedule), and I can get by on that, but combined with mind-numbing levels of adrenaline, it's surprising I got a single word out. (And now for peak OCD: combined with being fasted and being on the most mellow part of my workout regimen, you got to hear the most "faint" version of me ever 😶‍🌫️).

Anyways, always fun to get to do stuff like this.

Edited Friday at 02:35 PM by Carl-Richard

[Nilsi]

Glad I could help.

I'd actually be really interested to hear your take on psychoanalysis. From what I gather, your practice seems aimed at eliminating mind-wandering by cultivating awareness and eventually arriving at a kind of radical presence - what you might call enlightenment.

But from a psychoanalytic perspective, especially in Freud and Lacan, this "involuntary mental activity" - the drifting, the unbidden thoughts, the slips - is precisely the terrain of the unconscious. And far from being a distraction, it's seen as constitutive of the subject. That is, the unconscious isn’t just noise - it’s what structures our experience of the world and ourselves.

Lacan, in particular, encountered many analysands who were trying to bypass or foreclose the unconscious - seeking some purified state of unity, wholeness, or presence. He saw that when this drive is taken to its extreme, one inevitably encounters what he called the Real - that which resists symbolization, the raw traumatic core beneath language and fantasy.

Traditionally, the Real is unbearable. It’s what erupts when the symbolic order collapses. But in his later seminars, Lacan suggests that there are subjects who manage to develop a new relation to the Real - not to be annihilated by it, but to endure it, and perhaps even find a strange kind of jouissance in it. He called this figure the saint. So in that sense, what you’re doing strikes me as quite saintly.

I've run my own experiments in that direction - extended periods of radical presence over several weeks - and I found it profoundly destabilizing. Not peaceful at all, but rather boring to the point of existential horror. My body felt on the verge of imploding under the sheer intensity of simply being - as if every breath was echoing into a void too vast to process. (Just to be clear, I wasn’t sitting in a room staring at a wall the whole time. I was going about my normal life, but with a kind of relentless, all-consuming attentiveness - drawing heavily on the methods and ideas of Peter Ralston)

That’s why I find it fascinating that your practice is framed as something desirable or beneficial for ordinary people. To me, it feels more like a radical asceticism - something closer to mystical ordeal than mainstream wellness. But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing entirely, in which case feel free to ignore my rambling.

Edited Thursday at 08:41 PM by Nilsi

[Carl-Richard]

On 27.3.2025 at 9:35 PM, Nilsi said:

That’s why I find it fascinating that your practice is framed as something desirable or beneficial for ordinary people. To me, it feels more like a radical asceticism - something closer to mystical ordeal than mainstream wellness. But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing entirely, in which case feel free to ignore my rambling.

The practice is intended to simply "treat" rumination. Whether somebody wants to go all the way or just become a little less bothered by negative thoughts, that's up to them. The next step for this research would be to test it on groups with diagnoses like depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, etc., (which my advisor also advised me to look into as a potential next step).

I think the point about "bypassing" is an important one, in that I think most people who struggle with these thoughts, do so because of the reality or structure of their life (the unconscious), and that it's this structure that needs to be addressed before the thoughts lift. Merely shifting your focus to something else or elevating your state temporarily through some practice is ultimately merely a temporary Band-Aid.

The thoughts do actually serve a purpose as alarm systems for when things are not going the way they are supposed to, and I believe the alarm systems are in the vast majority of cases working as they should, it's just that people generally don't want or aren't aware enough to address the real problems.

And the real problems are most likely in the order of importance life purpose/career/occupation, relationships/community/belonging, and health/state. If you get these things aligned with what you really want (and you don't do things that sabotage these things), your thoughts will be in service of you. And that's very individual what that looks like (except maybe physical health).

 

On 27.3.2025 at 9:35 PM, Nilsi said:

I've run my own experiments in that direction - extended periods of radical presence over several weeks - and I found it profoundly destabilizing. Not peaceful at all, but rather boring to the point of existential horror. My body felt on the verge of imploding under the sheer intensity of simply being - as if every breath was echoing into a void too vast to process. (Just to be clear, I wasn’t sitting in a room staring at a wall the whole time. I was going about my normal life, but with a kind of relentless, all-consuming attentiveness - drawing heavily on the methods and ideas of Peter Ralston)

It's interesting you mention that. I had a similar obsessive period of maybe a year where I literally tried to stop thinking. It made me into an insociable, dissociated rock, and I was still an anxious, awkward kid. That's quite ironically a grotesque example of what happens when you only do practices but don't work on the foundations.

What practices can do however, is to build up your state, which creates a platform of resilience to stand on where you can make the necessary steps towards transformative change. And for some people who struggle with things like depression, this is exactly what they need, to get out of the rut and get the ball rolling.

And that's why music (in combination with mindfulness) can be especially beneficial for them, because practicing mindfulness "on its own" (without music) often requires a baseline of resilience to begin with (because "traditional" mindfulness, staring at a wall, can be quite tough if you don't feel like even getting out of bed). So in a traditional framework of "treating illness", this approach seems, on paper, to actually fit very well.

Edited Friday at 09:04 PM by Carl-Richard

[Nilsi]

18 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

I think the point about "bypassing" (which I will make) is an important one, in that I think most people who struggle with these thoughts, do so because of the reality of the structure of their life (the unconscious), and that it's this structure that needs to be addressed before the thoughts lift. Merely shifting your focus to something else or elevating your state temporarily through some practice is ultimately merely a temporary bandaid.

But the point of psychoanalysis is precisely that these thoughts don’t ever just lift. You can try to escape them in the way I described - and I agree, it’s a futile route - or you can become conscious of the structure of the unconscious and see it for what it is. Trying to address these thoughts is like playing whack-a-mole: every time you knock one down, another pops up somewhere else. That’s one of Lacan’s core insights. And that’s exactly why it’s called the unconscious.

What actually interests me is your take on this - not the therapeutic side effects or the supposed benefits for people dealing with mental health issues. I can’t contribute much there. But I do think I have something to say about the metaphysics of all this.

So I’d really like to know what you think you’re actually working on - not what you’d say to a radio host or write in a master’s thesis, but what’s really at stake for you in this.

Edited Friday at 09:13 PM by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

12 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

But the point of psychoanalysis is precisely that these thoughts don’t ever just lift. You can try to escape them in the way I described - and I agree, it’s a futile route - or you can become conscious of the structure of the unconscious and see it for what it is. Trying to address these thoughts is like playing whack-a-mole: every time you knock one down, another pops up somewhere else. That’s one of Lacan’s core insights. And that’s exactly why it’s called the unconscious.

What actually interests me is your take on this - not the therapeutic side effects or the supposed benefits for people dealing with mental health issues. I can’t contribute much there. But I do think I have something to say about the metaphysics of all this.

So I’d really like to know what you think you’re actually working on - not what you’d say to a radio host or write in a master’s thesis, but what’s really at stake for you in this.

Maybe you’re not aware of this if you haven’t studied psychoanalysis in depth - and I say this having studied a few semesters of psychology myself, where I often debated professors who treated it as little more than a historical footnote - but late Freud and Lacan don’t believe these symptoms can be cured. They don’t disappear; they just shift forms. The best you can hope for is to become conscious of the structure of the unconscious itself - and learn to live with it.

[UnbornTao]

Nice. 

[Ulax]

Nice bro 🎉

Imo this is your goat video though:

 

[Yimpa]

@Ulax Go to the principal’s office immediately! 

[Carl-Richard]

8 minutes ago, Ulax said:

Nice bro 🎉

Imo this is your goat video though:

 

🤣 

I might make another one of those considering I've played a bit of the newly released Lost City ("2004scape") 😆

Edited Saturday at 02:22 AM by Carl-Richard

[Yimpa]

@Carl-Richard 

*checks your YouTube page*

Holy shit, you have a face!!

[Carl-Richard]

5 minutes ago, Yimpa said:

@Carl-Richard 

*checks your YouTube page*

Holy shit, you have a face!!

That face is barely me, it's from 10 years ago 😆 I expected to be on camera like some of the other radio shows on that channel, but oh well, you're spared from my balding for a little longer.

[Yimpa]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

That face is barely me, it's from 10 years ago 😆 I expected to be on camera like some of the other radio shows on that channel, but oh well, you're spared from my balding for a little longer.

Pfft, only took me 10 seconds to discover that your latest video is that of a bald man

Subscribed!

Edited Saturday at 05:37 AM by Yimpa

[Carl-Richard]

On 28.3.2025 at 10:23 PM, Nilsi said:

Quote

So I’d really like to know what you think you’re actually working on - not what you’d say to a radio host or write in a master’s thesis, but what’s really at stake for you in this.

Maybe you’re not aware of this if you haven’t studied psychoanalysis in depth - and I say this having studied a few semesters of psychology myself, where I often debated professors who treated it as little more than a historical footnote - but late Freud and Lacan don’t believe these symptoms can be cured. They don’t disappear; they just shift forms. The best you can hope for is to become conscious of the structure of the unconscious itself - and learn to live with it.

Maybe not cured, but severely handled. For example, if I start a PhD thesis in something I have zero passion for, I will become straight out depressed. That's a big difference from starting a PhD thesis in something I'm passionate about. It's certainly the case that following my passion won't "cure" negative thinking full-stop, but it's certainly a night and day difference. So that's the point about choosing the right structure for your life: you can make a big difference.

As for what I'm "working on" (or what I'm passionate about), that would be to do a study that compares the effects of meditation based on spiritual/religious motivations (awakening, enlightenment, "seeking the sacred") vs. "modern", secular, non-religious motivations (e.g. stress reduction, productivity). What has always bothered me with the secularized, sterilized and scientificalized version of "mindfulness meditation", is how tame it seems in comparison to the potential that it truly has (i.e. slight reduction in negative thinking vs mystical awakenings and spiritual transformation; alleviating pathology vs literally cultivating sainthood). So the aim is to point towards this potential and slowly prod the scientific discourse in this direction.

And while this is not a "new" idea at all, by doing it in this way; by comparing two groups in the same study, by looking at "motivations" in people who already practice meditation on their own accord (as opposed to recruiting complete newbies and teaching/forcing them to meditate, giving one group a "spiritual meditation" and the other a secular one), and also by using neuroscientific methods (which I can copy directly from my current study); it seems like an approach that can provide new insight and clarity into the topic, and nevertheless, again, provide attention to it.

 

Side note:

The way I approach science (and the way I think most people approach it fundamentally) is as an activist platform for the things we value and intuitively think is right and true. And we use science to clarify and quantifying those things, testing their limitations, finding out where they apply and where they do not apply. And if you want to be a good activist, you want to ernestly and honestly approach the scientific process and be objective. Or else your activism is empty. But you should also be honest that you're driven by something. And the more driven you are, the better you are. My advisor is probably the epitome of this (he loves doing studies about the benefits of music), and maybe not coincidentally, he is quite successful at what he does. That's another argument for following one's passion: you don't just feel good, but you are good.

Edited Sunday at 12:15 AM by Carl-Richard