Starting And Finishing Things

[HII]

#0 Outline

Within a year, I start about 400 things and finish about 4. Drawings, pieces of music, books, projects, habits, everything. 

I want to be able to finish what I start, when I decide to. I don't know how far I want to train this ability. For now, I just know that want to get some of it at all. That's what I want to learn through this journal. 

So here's the idea: I start by setting out a goal. Then, I will try to act it out. When I make progress, I will report and celebrate that progress. When I struggle, I will report and reflect on that struggle. At some point, I hopefully reach the goal. Then ,I will set a new one and start again. 

Maybe sometimes I will decide to drop a goal, maybe none of this will amount to anything. But then at least I want to see where I get stuck and why, so I can try to fix it from there.

That's the outline, let's see where it's gonna take me.

[HII]

#1 How Emotions Are Made

So here's the first goal: Reading (AND FINISHING!) the book "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

The title is pretty self-explanatory, it's a book about how emotions are made. I stumbled upon it on this forum by accident, it was recommended in this book review by @Oliver Saavedra. 

I don't know if it is a smart move to set this out as the first goal, because It's not really connected to any of the main things I want to do in my life these days. But there are other people who also do a lot of things and still read everyday and I also read at least something almost everyday. So there's no real reason why I shouldn't be able to find the time to read this book. It's not a small book and I don't know when I last finished a book this size, but it's not like it's 1000 pages long, so it should be doable for me. I mean come on, I should be able to read a goddamn book  

So, first question will be: Can I finish this book, when I decide to, or will I let other things get in the way and thereby find out that I should choose my goals more wisely?

This evening I will have some time for it, but next week there will be a few days where I won't be at home and there will be some events which might bring in new priorities. So we'll see if I can pick up this goal again afterwards. 

*****

Mainly this is really just an exercise to finish something I started. But I also hope to make practical use of the content, so that I'm not just getting some sort of abstract "understanding of an aspect of the world". That has been my motivation for reading for a decade now, but these days I'm not satisfied with this anymore. But since emotions are pretty damn important in life, there should be some use for this book, if it is any good. To make sure I'm actually getting something out of it, I will also report on this here.

Second question: What practical use can I make of the content?

I already read the introduction and the first two chapters and made notes in my OneNote (I also got infected by the Commonplace Book video). After each chapter, I just write a very short reminder of what has been said, trying not to get lost in a detailed summary of the content. This way, I hope to get a good overview of the book in the end. If any thoughts occur to me that I would like to contemplate further, I will add them. 

Until now, my notes look like this:

Chapter 1:

Meta-analyses suggest:
Emotions do not correspond to one distinctive physiological pattern or brain pattern.
However, a statistical "average/meta brain pattern" can be extracted, which can then reliably match new brain patterns to the corresponding emotions.

Conclusions:
Emotions are better thought of as categories instead of universals.

Chapter 2:

Emotions are constructed by "the mind" ascribing meanings to sensations.
(Does "the mind" really exist? Or is ascription of meanings to sensations just happening as a mechanism of multiple different parts working together in a process, structurally similar to the one constructing emotions?)

*****

Last thing to mention: I will try to read the whole book out loud. I hope to get more acquainted with my voice this way. Not always, but oftentimes, I don't feel at ease when talking and I'd like to improve on that. Maybe just using my voice more by reading out loud will help a little. 

Third question: Will I notice any difference in using my voice in everyday life?

I even thought about recording myself and make it into an audiobook. But this would be a large project with a lot of work. And there already is an audiobook of this book. But I'd like to do something like this at some point in the future, maybe with something that doesn't already exist as an audiobook.

Now, I'll try to read (AND FINISH) the 3rd chapter.

[guillaumeS]

2 hours ago, HII said:

Maybe sometimes I will decide to drop a goal, maybe none of this will amount to anything. But then at least I want to see where I get stuck and why, so I can try to fix it from there.

I also regret that. That is why now I do set project: a goal with a more or less clear finish line. For example I learnt to play guitar then I stoped. Somehow nothing is left of this experience. However I learnt Russian language by myself and I did record 3 videos and shared them on YouTube. Now I have got some unexpected success - 50.000 views. That is motivating. The same for travelling during holidays - now I try to write a small blog for my family and build a nice Facebook album of pictures (I learnt some photography skills for that).

So I can totally relate to your vision of life. Start small things and make them visible is my current moto. That is so much fun and I encourage you to do so.

[HII]

#2 How Emotions Are Made

So I read three paragraphs, but then I got bored and watched a bunch of porn. 

I'm kidding, I just finished the 3rd chapter  

It explains how the studies which seem to support the classical view of emotions rely on culture specific concepts by demonstrating it on a few specific cases. That's basically it. 

Aside from that, my notes only include some quotes that I found worth extracting:

"When we asked our Himba subjects to freely label their piles, smiling faces were not “happy” (ohange) but “laughing” (ondjora). Wide-eyed faces were not “fearful” (okutira) but “looking” (tarera). In other words, the Himba participants categorized facial movements as behaviors rather than inferring mental states or feelings." (p. 49)

This is something that I thought of a lot in the past: People in the society I live in seem to infer all kinds of things from everything. I often ask myself why and I'm not so sure it's healthy. I was also often bothered by it and sometimes I felt it is somehow deeply unfair towards the person about whom the inference is made. Why isn't it enough to just observe what is happening? Maybe there is some use to this behavior, but I feel like it is often used in an unethical way. It's really cool for me to now read about a culture which doesn't seem to do this at all.

The next quote is taken from Paul Ekman, I've already seen it in one of his books. That's one of those books I started to read a couple of years ago and then never finished it. To be fair, the pdf I had downloaded only contained 4 of the (if I remember correctly) 7 chapters. But that is only half an excuse, even more so since I stopped in the middle of chapter 3. Anyways, here's the quote:

"I asked them to make up a story about each facial expression [photograph]. “Tell me what is happening now, what happened before to make the person show this expression, and what is going to happen next.” It was like pulling teeth. I am not certain whether it was the translation process, or the fact that they have no idea what it was I wanted to hear or why I wanted them to do this. Perhaps making up stories about strangers was just something the Fore didn’t do." (p. 53, quoted from Ekman)

Same story as above, why do we have to make up stories about other people all the time?

Last one, also interesting:

"Not all cultures understand emotions as internal mental states. Himba and Hadza emotion concepts, for example, appear to be more focused on actions. This is also true of certain Japanese emotion concepts. The Ifaluk of Micronesia consider emotions as transactions between people. To them, anger is not a feeling of rage, a scowl, a pounding fist, or a loud yelling voice, all within the skin of one person, but a situation in which two people are engaged in a script—a dance, if you will—around a common goal. In the Ifaluk view, anger does not “live” inside either participant." (p. 53)

So I'll be gone for a few days from now on. After that, I want to find out if I manage to continue the book and this journal.

[HII]

#3 How Emotions Are Made

I sort of made progress, but feel kind of stuck at the same time. I've read through the 4th chapter 3 times, used weed once as an attempt to make better sense of it and went through 6 hours of YouTube material on the book with the same intent. But I still couldn't come up with notes that I'm satisfied with. I guess I'll proceed to the next chapter anyways and decide that this one is just badly written  

My problem with it are two things:

1) It is purely a narration of the new paradigm, without mentioning a single piece of evidence and therefore without ever explaining anything about how these conclusions were being made. There are end notes to further literature, but that's mostly scientific articles I can't get access to. So as it's written, it's just a bunch of claims. That makes it super boring, I get no chance of questioning what is being said and I don't feel like learning anything. 

2) It's really badly structured. A ton of concepts are being introduced in an order that makes no sense and there's no concise, comprehensive overview of how they are connected. It's just a mess.

*****

I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't explicitly declared it as a goal to finish the book, I would not have applied all that effort and instead headed towards other things and probably not picked up the book again. This shows me that making goals explicit and committing to achieving them can get me at least one step further than I usually go, namely to keep trying instead of just stopping the first time it gets difficult.

There are many things I'd rather devote my time to instead. Maybe next time I should choose a goal I care more about. 

I started my day with reading the book because I thought I'd make progress with this goal that I had set and then after 2 hours I had the whole day left for more important things. But then I ended up working on it pretty much the whole day and even leave it with a bad feeling because I didn't get where I wanted to be. So in the future, I will only devote the last 2 hours of the day to read a chapter and then that'll be it. 

*****

Considering the outline of the book in the introduction (which says chapters 4-7 "explain" how emotions are made), the next 3 chapters are going to be just as much of a chore for the same reasons. I will try to continue anyways, because I want to see how far I can get if I persist and probably I can still make great use of the information later when I get through the whole book. 

[HII]

On 19.11.2017 at 8:25 PM, guillaumeS said:

Start small things and make them visible is my current moto.

That's what I'm trying to do as well  

[HII]

#4 How Emotions Are Made

I read chapter 5 yesterday and 6 and 7 today. I'm still having trouble putting into my own words what is being said. Still having trouble with the style, it all seems very abstract and superficial and chaotic to me. It's also very repetitive, which is exhausting. I only noted one sentence or a quote which (I hope) captures the essence of the chapter and then maybe I can try to explain it in my own words later at some point. 

*****

Notes:

Chapter 4:
We experience interoception as affect.

Chapter 5:
We create goal-specific concepts, which is made easier and more efficient with words.

Chapter 6:
"Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaningmaking." (p. 126)

Chapter 7:
"Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real." (p. 151)

*****

I noticed some sort of drive and some stubbornness (that I usually don't experience), which made me want to finish the book as soon as possible, so that I can put that energy into something else that is supposedly more satisfying. 

[HII]

#5 How Emotions Are Made

Read chapters 8 and 9. Wasn't at home for a week, that's why I didn't keep on reading for a while. Everything is going more or less as planned. 

Didn't really get the essence of the 8th chapter. The writing seems so vague to me... Not a huge deal though, I'll try again to capture the essence of each chapter when I finished the book, maybe it's going to be easier when seeing the whole picture. I noticed that writing the headline for each chapter into my notes definitely helps.

*****

Notes on chapter 9:

Chapter 9: Mastering Your Emotions

Keep body budget in good shape:
- Eat healthy
- Exercise
- Proper sleep & rest
- Body contact (e.g. massage)
- Yoga
- Get sunlight
- Spend time in greenery
- Have houseplants
- Take care of your living space
- Read good novels, watch good movies
- Set up regular lunch dates with a friend taking turns treating each other
- Have a Pet
- Take Walks

Increase emotional granularity by increasing emotional vocabulary by:
- Taking trips
- Reading books, watching  movies
- Trying unfamiliar foods
- Try on new perspectives
- Learn new words for emotions
- Invent own emotion concepts
- Describe experiences, feelings/emotions with greater granulartiy

In the moment:
- Move your body
- Change location/situation
- Recategorize emotions into physical sensations
- Deconstruct your "self"
- Mindfulness meditation
- Cultivate awe (being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself)

*****

[HII]

#6 How Emotions Are Made - FINISH (sort of, final reviewing still left to be done)

Yaaaaay, I've read the last four chapters, thus finished the body of the book.

Not too enthusiastic about it though (yet), for the following reasons:

1) I couldn't come up with notes for every chapter, which were supposed to concisely summarize what was being said. For some chapters, I rather wrote down what it was about, without explaining it in a comprehensive way. For some chapters, I just quoted striking paragraphs. And for two chapters I have nothing at all. 

2) I don't feel like I really got the message of the book. I think I wasn't able to really think through in my own mind the main important processes in their entirety of how emotions are made according to this book.

3) I'm not completely done yet, as I'm about to explain. Just wanted to record this intermediate result to allow myself to take a step back and recognize it and take a little break from it to focus on other things.

*****

My goal was to read and finish the book and I have done that. So this much is good (more than I had expected actually). I have to keep in mind that I didn't read the book for the book, I read it to learn committing to a decision. Still, I feel like I can extract more value by taking one last step, which will consist in the following points:

- There are two appendices I still want to read. Maybe they will help elicit some understanding of some points where it's still missing. 

- I feel like I should at least make another effort to come up with better notes for those chapters where I slacked. 

- Evaluating the 3 questions I set out in the beginning:
  1) Can I finish this book, when I decide to, or will I let other things get in the way and thereby find out that I should choose my goals more wisely?  - Yes, I could actually finish it. Choice of goals will be addressed in the final review.
  2) What practical use can I make of the content? - So far none that I could think of. It changed some beliefs I held about emotions, but I don't see any practical benefits from this yet. 
  3) Will I notice any difference in using my voice in everyday life? - I can kind of make myself believe that I notice slight gains, but I've also spent some time in a community of climate activists lately, which probably has more effect on this than reading a book out loud. I will still do this more in the future.

- One more thing I could do: Asking other people who have also read the book certain questions that are still left unanswered for me. 

- One more thing I wanna do: At least once, I want to think through in my mind the whole process of how emotions are made according to this book, with a clear image on an ontological level for each component that is asserted to be involved. If I won't be able to pull that off by the time of the final review, I'd like to come back to it at some point later in the future. But way later, like weeks or months or half a year later.

*****

After writing the above, I can see more clearly that I actually made a successful step towards learning to commit to a decision and finish something I started. Dealing with the specific content of the book is more of a bonus and not the main point here. 

I didn't expect to finish a book I don't particularly care about just because I decided to do so. And I didn't expect to write such long posts about the process of reading it. This shows me that I do have some willpower and energy and time after all. Maybe, if I learn to channel these resources correctly, I can achieve more than I currently think I'm capable of.

Edited December 11, 2017 by HII

[HII]

#7 How Emotions Are Made - Final Review

Jeez, this took me one heck of a long time to do this final step. Mainly because I was busy with other things. But also because I kicked it down the road and procrastinated a bit. But I mainly procrastinated with practicing piano and composing, so it's okay. 

*****

Assessment of the aforementioned substeps:

- Read the appendices, they were helpful. 

- Reread the two chapters for which I hadn't had any notes and made notes for them.

- Evaluation of 3 questions below.

- Didn't ask other people about the book. Probably would've sped up the process of understanding it better. Maybe with the next book I read.

- Was able to think through the process of how emotions are made on an ontological level (according to the book). Description of that below.

*****

Evaluation of questions:

1) Can I finish this book when I decide to, or will I let other things get in the way and thereby find out that I should choose my goals more wisely? 

I knew already in the beginning why I chose a goal I didn't particularly care about: Had I chosen a goal that was connected to something that was actually important to me, there would have been fear of failure and the danger that I interpreted my not achieving it as "I failed at attaining that goal, so I'm a failure at that thing now, so I can't pursue it, so I have to drop it, so I can't pursue it in the future, so I'll always stay a failure". Something along those lines. Have done that many times before. 

Now that I successfully proved to myself that I can stick with a goal until I reached it, the next one will be something that is connected to what I'm actually supposed to do with my life at the moment (which I have some doubts about, but this is not the place to worry about that).

2) What practical use can I make of the content? 

Now that I cognized a few times at least roughly the full process of how emotions are supposed to be made according to the book, I internalized all these ideas to some extent and I see this enriching my mental landscape. It gave me a perspective on emotions that I can now use productively whenever I reflect on emotions or work with them in some other way. That's cool.

3) Will I notice any difference in using my voice in everyday life?

I am in fact more at ease with using my voice in everyday life than I was when I started reading the book, but I'm not sure if reading the book out loud contributed to that at all. 

Right now I'm leaning more towards trying out some speed-reading techniques, so no reading out loud gonna happen with that. If I felt the need to work on my voice I'd probably go with singing. Still wanna do the audio-book thing at some point though.

*****

I could do a book review, but I don't feel like it.

This was never about the book anyways goddammit, I just wanted to finish something. I got so sucked up by the book being a book  

Still I feel like adding my description of the core idea and my notes, so that I have a proof for myself that I actually did some work here and the journal doesn't just say "I wanna do X, I did X, hooray". Shit will be in a separate post not to make this one a long-ass mess.

[HII]

Appendix to #7

My current best messy description of the core idea:

Within our bodies, there happens lots of vital stuff all the time (blood-flow, breathing, digestion, etc.).
All the vital stuff that is happening is being represented in the brain (="interoception").
Interoception is experienced in two dimensions - valence: spectrum from pleasant to unpleasant, and arousal: spectrum from calm to agitated (this two-dimensional experience of interoception is called "affect").
Our nervous system creates goal-specific concepts by wiring a large collection of sensory neurons (wiring = forming synapses) to other neurons up to a small collection of default network neurons, which represent the concept.
Emotions are concepts we create, to interpret and give meaning to the affect we feel in the context of a given situation.

My aspiration when I state the core idea of something I've read is usually that a hypothetical Me that would not have read that thing would be able to grasp the core idea from reading my description of it. Not too confident about that in this case. But I genuinely did the best I could  I would be able to refine it by putting more work into it, but ain't nobody got time for that shit right now, I want to move on to something else finally for Christ's sake.

*****

Complete notes:

 

Chapter 1: The Search for Emotion's "Fingerprints"

Meta-analyses suggest:
Emotions do not correspond to one distinctive physiological pattern or brain pattern (= "fingerprint").
However, a statistical "average/meta brain pattern" can be extracted, which can then reliably match new brain patterns to the corresponding emotions.

Conclusions:
Emotions are better thought of as categories instead of universals.

 

Chapter 2: Emotions Are Constructed

Emotions are constructed by "the mind" ascribing (body-budgetly-relevant) meanings to sensations.
(Does "the mind" really exist? Or is ascription of meanings to sensations just happening as a mechanism of multiple different parts working together in a process, structurally similar to the one constructing emotions?)

 

Chapter 3: The Myth of Universal Emotions

The studies which seem to support the classical view of emotions rely on culture specific concepts.

"When we asked our Himba subjects to freely label their piles, smiling faces were not “happy” (ohange) but “laughing” (ondjora). Wide-eyed faces were not “fearful” (okutira) but “looking” (tarera). In other words, the Himba participants categorized facial movements as behaviors rather than inferring mental states or feelings." (p. 49)

"I asked them to make up a story about each facial expression [photograph]. “Tell me what is happening now, what happened before to make the person show this expression, and what is going to happen next.” It was like pulling teeth. I am not certain whether it was the translation process, or the fact that they have no idea what it was I wanted to hear or why I wanted them to do this. Perhaps making up stories about strangers was just something the Fore didn’t do." (p. 53, quoted from Ekman)

"Not all cultures understand emotions as internal mental states. Himba and Hadza emotion concepts, for example, appear to be more focused on actions. This is also true of certain Japanese emotion concepts. The Ifaluk of Micronesia consider emotions as transactions between people. To them, anger is not a feeling of rage, a scowl, a pounding fist, or a loud yelling voice, all within the skin of one person, but a situation in which two people are engaged in a script—a dance, if you will—around a common goal. In the Ifaluk view, anger does not “live” inside either participant." (p. 53)

 

Chapter 4: The Origin of Feeling

We experience interoception as affect.

Interoception = the brain's  representation of all sensations from
- internal organs and tissues
- hormones in the blood
- immune system

"Think about what’s happening within your body right this second. Your insides are in motion. Your heart sends blood rushing through your veins and arteries. Your lungs fill and empty. Your stomach digests food. This interoceptive activity produces the spectrum of basic feeling from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery, and even completely neutral." (p. 56)

Affect = phenomenological experience of interoception
- Valence-spectrum: Pleasant  --------------------  Unpleasant
- Arousal-spectrum:       Calm  --------------------  Agitated

"Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect." (p. 72)

 

Chapter 5: Concepts, Goals and Words

Concept = category
Category = collection of objects, events or actions

In order to navigate ourselves in the world, our nervous system creates goal-specific concepts by wiring a large collection of sensory neurons (wiring = forming synapses) to other neurons up to a small collection of default network neurons, which represent the concept. Words make this process more flexible and more efficient.

 

Chapter 6: How the Brain Makes Emotions

"Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaningmaking." (p. 126)

 

Chapter 7: Emotions as Social Reality

"Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real." (p. 151)

 

Chapter 8: A New View of Human Nature

Dividing line between self and world is permeable or nonexistent: Brain constructs world via simulation, world wires brain via sensory input creating synapses.
Culture helps wiring your brain, which in turn makes you behave in certain ways, wiring the brains of others and future generations.
All your actions, emotions, etc. are an active construction by your brain, having wired itself to issue the actions/emotions/etc., in order to regulate body budget. You can change your brain-wiring and therefore your behavior of tomorrow by changing your experiences today.

 

Chapter 9: Mastering Your Emotions

Keep body budget in good shape:
- Eat healthy
- Exercise
- Proper sleep & rest
- Body contact (e.g. massage)
- Yoga
- Get sunlight
- Spend time in greenery
- Have houseplants
- Take care of your living space
- Read good novels, watch good movies
- Set up regular lunch dates with a friend taking turns treating each other
- Have a Pet
- Take Walks

Increase emotional granularity by increasing emotional vocabulary by:
- Taking trips
- Reading books, watching  movies
- Trying unfamiliar foods
- Try on new perspectives
- Learn new words for emotions
- Invent own emotion concepts
- Describe experiences, feelings/emotions with greater granulartiy

In the moment:
- Move your body
- Change location/situation
- Recategorize emotions into physical sensations
- Deconstruct your "self"
- Mindfulness meditation
- Cultivate awe (being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself)

 

Chapter 10: Emotion and Illness

Many physical and psychological illnesses are explained by flawed regulation of body budget and an imbalance of prediction and correction.

 

Chapter 11: Emotion and the Law

Committing crimes "under the influence of emotion" should not protect you from harsher punishment.

"Take a moment and reflect on your own emotions. Do you tend to feel things intensely or more moderately? When we ask these types of questions in my lab to male and female test subjects —to describe their feelings from memory—the women report feeling more emotion than the men do on average. That is, the women believe they are more emotional than men, and the men agree. The one exception is anger, as subjects believe that men are angrier. However, when the same people record their emotional experiences as they occur in everyday life, there are no sex differences. Some men and women are very emotional, and some are not."

"Judges and jurors infer intent, usually in line with their own beliefs, stereotypes, and current body states. Here is just one example of how this works. Test subjects watched a video of protestors being dispersed by police. They were told the protestors were pro-life activists picketing an abortion clinic. Those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to be pro-choice, inferred that the activists had violent intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred peaceful intentions. The researchers also showed the same video to a second set of subjects, describing the protestors this time as gay rights activists objecting to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This time, those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to support gay rights, inferred that the activists had peaceful intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred violent intentions."

"The law has been slow to accept that memories are constructed, but the situation is gradually changing. The Supreme Courts of New Jersey, Oregon, and Massachusetts are leading the way in this regard. Their jurors now receive instructions that provide step-by-step details — based on years of psychological research — explaining all the ways in which memory can go wrong in eyewitness testimony. They read how memories are constructed and infused with beliefs that can result in distortions and illusions, how the instructions given by lawyers and police can introduce biases, how confidence is unrelated to accuracy, how stress can impair memory, and how eyewitness testimony was a factor in falsely convicting more than three quarters of the people who were exonerated by DNA evidence for crimes that they did not commit.
 Unfortunately, no such guidelines exist to explain to jurors what an emotional expression is, what a mental inference is, or how they are constructed."

"People don’t have a rational side and an emotional side, with the former regulating the latter. Judges can’t set aside affect to issue rulings by pure reason. Jurors can’t detect emotion in defendants. The most objective-looking evidence is tainted by affective realism. Criminal behavior can’t be isolated to a blob in the brain. Emotional harm is not mere discomfort but can shorten a life. In short, every perception and experience within the courtroom— or anywhere else—is a culturally infused, highly personalized belief, corrected by sensory inputs from the world, rather than the result of an unbiased process."

[How could I forget to note the page numbers for these quotes?]

 

Chapter 12: Is a Growling Dog Angry?

Animals feel affect, but likely don't have emotion concepts.

 

Chapter 13: From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier

The Mind is a product of evolution, but not sculpted by genes alone.
The Mind is not a battleground between opposing inner forces (passion and reason).
Brain predicts with its concepts, at least a slew of them are learned, as the brain wires itself to its physical and social surroundings.
Although human brains share basically the same kind of networks, individual minds are structurally different, depending on individual experience and cultural differences.
Overall structure of the brain is similar from person to person, but details vary significantly.
The wiring within a single brain is not static.
The billions of neurons in one brain continually reconfigure themselves from one pattern into another.
Different sets of neurons produce the same outcomes (degeneracy).
The brain is a complex system (its efficiency in creating and transmitting information is highly increased by the fact that every single neuron can be part of a variety of different patterns, which makes possible a huge repertoire of experiences, perceptions and behaviors).
Natural selection favors a complex brain.
Complexity goes against the idea of mental organs, issuing universal concepts (as they would be much less efficient).
A human brain can create many different kinds of minds, yet all minds share some commonalities:
- Affective realism (you experience what you believe, )
- Concepts (human brain is wired to build a conceptual system)
- Social reality (at birth, your body budget is regulated by other people, which determines the building of your conceptual system)
Construction theory advocates skepticism.

 

Appendix A: Brain Basics

Nervous system
- Central nervous system
     - Spinal cord
     - Brain
          - Cortex
               - Frontal lobe
                    - 4-6 Layers of
                         - Neurons (organinzed in columns, wired into circuits and networks)
               - Parietal lobe
                    - Layers
               - Occipital lobe
                    - Layers
               - Temporal lobe
                    - Layers
          - Subcortex
               - Regions
                    - Clumps of neurons (e.g. amygdala)
          - Cerebellum
- Peripheral nervous system
     - Autonomic nervous system
     - Somatic nervous system

Neurons (receiving and sending electrical energy (= "firing") and neurotransmitters)
- Cell body
- Nucleus
- Dendrites (with receptors receiving neurotransmitters)
- Axons
- Synaptic terminals (sending neurotransmitters)

[in OnNote, this actually looks fine]

 

Appendix D: Evidence for the Concept Cascade

There is a (non-strict) hierarchy of neurons reaching from sensory neurons to default network neurons (bottom-up) and a (non-strict) hierarchy of neurons reaching from default network neurons to sensory neurons (top-down). Sensory neurons represent sensory information, default network neurons represent concepts of sensations.

 

Wow. These are a mess. Definitely could refine these with more work. But I cannot see this shit anymore right now. Bye How Emotions Are Made, was nice talkin' to you, now I gotta move on with my LIFE.

[HII]

#8 Next goal - Sending a video of my hands playing Lubomyr Melnyk's exercise "Meditation Nr. 01-C" to Lubomyr Melnyk

This is the next goal. I'm gonna explain later, now I'm in the mood of doing shit. 

Ah, forgot to mention: The "sending" will be via a YouTube link. So I'm gonna officially start my YouTube channel now O_O 

Edited January 13, 2018 by HII

[HII]

#9 Video uploaded and sent

It's up  

I uploaded it just a few hours ago and already got a response from him. Was very warm and encouraging and he also pointed out things I should work on. 

Still not in the mood for writing/reflecting/thinking too much, so let's move on to next one. 

[HII]

#10 Making this recorded improvisation into a performable piece and creating proper sheet music for it

I just created a soundcloud account to be able to share this publicly:

It's an improvisation that I recorded a little while ago. Thought it was kinda nice, so I decided to make it into a piece that can be performed by me or by others infront of other people.

I just wrote down by ear what I had played without changing much. So far, the score looks like this:

ultramarine.pdf

So just the rough structure being written down in a messy way. I have to find many solutions for how I want to write some things down, because I use quite unconventional structures, where not every single note is rigidly determined. The more I develop my own musical language, the more I realize that I also need to develop my own ways of notation.

This goal will be declared as finished when I have uploaded both a proper sheet music and a recording of a performance of the piece. It's gonna take some more work and I might not be at home for the upcoming week, so it might take a while.

Edited January 14, 2018 by HII

[HII]

#3 Ultramarine - Stuck?

I decided it makes much more sense to number the goals instead of the entries. So "Ultramarine" is the third goal in this journal. 

I've been spending a lot of time in a forest occupation these days, and I've been almost only at home when I had to work. However, when I do take the time for creating music, I make quite a lot of progress. But it still feels very bad to progress with my goals as slowly as I do at the moment. 

Today, I was practicing "Ultramarine" and I could play it fairly well by the end. The sheet music will be a pain in the ass, though. I want to write in a mixture of neumes and regular notes and I yet have no idea how to pull that off in Finale 25. I have a really difficult time at finding proper tutorials for Finale 25 in general. It has a forum though, I guess I should create an account and ask questions there. 

So, intermediate goal in order to progress with the current one: 

-> Create an account at the Finale forum and ask how to combine neumes and regular notes.

(This only came to my mind as I was writing this entry. Shows me how reflection by writing can bring valuable clarity very easily.)

For some reason, I had zero motivation to go at this by force and just find out a way to write the sheet music the way I want. Instead, I was procrastinating with writing a different piece. I wanted to share a photograph of the sheet, but the file is too large and I'm too lazy right now to make it smaller. It's a nice little piece, maybe I will make it bigger someday. And maybe I will share a recording soon. 

I also procrastinated with practicing lots of other pieces, which was nice too. 

Tomorrow I wanna clean my flat. Thursday and Friday I have to work. So maybe I'll go at my Finale issues on the weekend.