Crazy idea to bring mindfulness to this blog. I don’t personally advocate or actively practice it, but some fundamental concepts are particularly important for Game and we will cover them. Before anything, let’s put everything in order.
Basic Summary
Mindfulness is the practice of bringing your focus on what is called “here and now”, the present moment. Take a moment… breathe… pause and focus on your toes of your legs, move them around… maybe now focus on the feeling of the air in your skin… you can feel it, warm and soft right? Focus on the sounds and the images around you… turn off your brain and just observe. This is the “here and now” – the present moment.
By doing this, assuming you sufficiently turned off your brain from its logical functions, you should feel the world much more vibrant, you should have felt more alive, and with excitement building up inside of you. Crazy right? There are two directions to understand the concept, one stemming from Eastern mysticism with a focus on meditation and the other from a neuroscientific perspective. You can already guess the direction we will take, so strap on for the latter.
The basic idea comes from brain functions. Brain itself is a very recent invention of evolution, and even more so is the ability to use logic (the voice in your head), and even, even more so, is the ability to maintain memory and future projection. The running narrative is that humans are the only animals that can “remember” and “think ahead”; in contrast, all of what we call skill and learning in other animals is akin to Pavlovian response, just hardwired behaviour.
You protest… how is that even possible to be arrogant like this? Well… let’s understand this from an even more basic concept: the concept of theory of mind. For a behaviour to be non-Pavlovian, it has to be able to independently respond to signals. You ring the bell, then there is a processing moment, then the dog decides to salivate or not, depending on whether you gonna bring food to it. That would be the non-Pavlovian version, correct?
For this to happen, the subject (the dog) should be able to understand the setting, think from your perspective (i.e., whether you intend to bring it food or not), and then decide to make the connection that bell implies food is suitable or not for this occasion. If the subject decides to think only from its perspective (“what I think is correct” – without second-guessing), disregarding the rest of the signals, then the pre-established response “bell → food” would automatically dominate all alternatives. Precisely this distinction – perspective shift – makes the difference between a sovereign skill (choose how and when to use it) and a scheduling or input/output task, not unlike how a computer operates. Therefore, for a skill to not be hardwired, theory of mind is a prerequisite.
Ok, we have something measurable now… which animals display theory of mind? Which animals can think from different perspectives? This is limited to only some apes, primates, and dogs. To understand this, think of the following experiment: point with your finger at a toy; if you are with a cat, the cat will just stare at your finger, failing to understand what pointing means. If you are with a dog, the dog will understand that pointing means not the finger itself, but to redirect attention to the direction of the finger, the finger leads to the toy! This is the difference between theory of mind and not.
All well and good so far, but our original objective was to arrive at the concept of past and future. Well, past and future can only exist if there is theory of mind, otherwise, there is no use for the function, it might as well be hardwired. The whole point of past and future is to make an action sovereign, to give nuance to it. Hence, their existence only makes sense if they are practical, and they can only be practical with presence of theory of mind.
However, let us investigate the current literature in memory. Because the concept of memory is not a simple mental replaying of events, it is an active reconstruction of the scene based on limited information. It is not a movie, it is an active process, and a very inconsistent one at that. Time and time again, the malleability of human memory and its own self-falsification is observed. Even when people were 100% convinced of certain facts based on their memory, the reality proved to be quite different. This has been documented in trials and courts, with victims being convinced that the perpetrator was a totally innocent person. Therefore, not only theory of mind is a prerequisite for the usefulness of “memory”, but memory itself is the same as future projection: they are the same mental system. The past and the future are both just a fleeting reconstruction of events in the brain, and in the brain only.
Therefore… what is happening with past, present and future? From our prior discussion, past and future are mental simulations… but does the present exist, or is it also a brain trick? Well… it doesn’t either. The present moment cannot exist as a thing in itself due to the nature of the sense organs: vision, hearing, touch, etc. The sensor, for example, the eyes, has to collect the signal and send it into brain, then the brain has to process the signal into an image. But signal collection operates at different speeds and at different stages of processing. Vision is collected faster than sound (because light travels faster than sound), but has to go through a more complicated path in the brain before it ends up as a mental image. Sound is collected slower, but actually processed faster. Therefore, when you sit opposite to your friend and you watch him speak, the “image part” is collected and processed at different speeds than the “sound” part. But you don’t experience your friend with sound delay, the “image” and “sound” parts are synced…. because the brain is playing tricks on you!
What you experience as “here and now” is actually “just a moment in the past”, the brain collected all the signals, processed them, and synced them together. Fundamentally, you cannot experience the “now” as now; when you experience it, it has already passed a moment ago.
Hierarchies in the brain
Hmm… past/future is a scam… and now is also a scam… so what gives? Well, they are both brain simulations, but they use different systems in the brain. The past/future system is much more recent and hence primitive in its function. Evolution just didn’t experiment enough on it to perfect it. The here and now system, on the other hand, is shared with the majority of the animal kingdom and is quite efficient and effective at its job. This is why you can turn off the voice in your head and still function. However, for our purposes, we will focus on a specific difference between the two systems.
Dopamine
The brain uses neurochemicals to interpret the world, as has been mentioned multiple times in this blog, what we call happiness is a mix of:
- Oxytocin
- Dopamine
- Endorphins
- Serotonin
Unusual release of those chemicals leads to various feelings of happiness, while withdrawal leads to the opposite. In particular, the brain itself becomes accustomed to certain states, for example, if there are 5 units of dopamine constantly released, then the brain will consider this as the new normal, requiring 6 units to detect a difference and translate it as “excitement” (note: the same is true with the other chemicals, not unique to dopamine). The kicker is… that the past/future system only responds to dopamine; it simply doesn’t register the other chemicals [The Molecule of More – Lieberman and Long].
The big happiness shift you feel when you switch to here and now is the perception of the other chemicals in your brain’s thought process and functions. That is why you feel more connected to the world when practicing mindfulness… the effect of oxytocin! Oxytocin is also responsible for the feeling of satisfaction and contentment. Dopamine, on the other hand, is responsible for feelings of excitement, but lacks satisfaction or payoff at the end of it. There is a famous experiment: Scientists hooked up electrodes into a rats brain and connected them to a button. If the rat would press the button it would excite his dopamine centers, leading to the rush/excitement feeling. What happened was that once the rat discovered the mechanism, he became incredibly restless. He would maniacally press the button forgoing food and sleep, eventually leading to his death.
This is the curse of not living in the now; you forfeit your right to oxytocin and the feeling of “enough, I am happy now”. You maniacally chase and chase with no end! You cannot find happiness in your head! You can only find it in the now. If you still don’t believe me, take it from ancient worms [A brief history of intelligence – Bennet]. Primitive creatures that have survived to this day and age, and their functions have been studied by scientists in relation to dopamine/oxytocin. The worms have only one receptor to detect the concentration of food in their environment, not unlike how smell functions for humans. The worms operate on two axes:
- Worm is hungry: excrete dopamine → initiate action, move towards food.
- Worm is full: excrete oxytocin → initiate chilling mode, ignore food.
There is no simpler way to showcase the interplay of dopamine/oxytocin than this. Stick in your head, stick with dopamine, and you operate only in the first mode.
How to do this
Well, we made a case for the here and now. How do we use it in practice? There is no science to it, you just need to train your mind to calm down and focus on stuff positive to now and contrary to past/future. That is where all the advice boils down to. Here are some examples:
- Turn of your logical brain, think nothing at all for a minute or two.
- Slow your movements, focus on the feelings of your body.
- If need, start small, start on your breath or focus on your fingers and tows. Try to move the attention upwards.
- Focus on your surroundings, the feelings and the sounds of people, this will activate oxytocin and take you to present.
Remember, girls are naturally averse to logic, or better put, naturally focused on oxytocin and serotonin. This helps them bond, i.e., understand the social game better, and to later extend care and tend for babies. Especially in Daygame, it is too much to ask them to enter our Male default state (logic), so we enter theirs. It is to our benefit as well, oxytocin naturally speeds up connection, and serotonin naturally establishes power structures (via status), i.e., humor! When coaches advocate to get out of your head, it is precisely for these reasons!
This post is blowing up in size and scope. Stay tuned for part two, where I will analyse the prominent theories on the origins of emotions and their connection to the groundwork established here.
