The problems with this approach is that availability isn’t always assigned the way we’d prefer it. If I’m at a bar and want to tell a hilarious story, I can’t just think of “funny stories” and activate all my great bar stories—they have to be triggered by some memory.
Thinking “funny stories” doesn’t work because the information isn’t filed that way. However, those stories likely are filed with connections to states of fun and humor, so if you get into that emotional state first, you’ll likely find contextually-funny stories coming to mind… or simply make situational humor in the first place.
A better way might be to leverage your mind’s propensity for habituation—force yourself to trace your chain of belief down to the base, and eventually it will start to become something you do automatically. This isn’t perfect either—it’s not something you can do for the fast pace of day-to-day life, and it in itself is probably subject ot a whole series of biases.
All of your strategies have the problem that they’re focused on the wrong part of the brain: your abstract intellectual beliefs don’t mean anything anyway, as they’re stored in the part of your brain that was designed for bullshitting, rather than actually doing anything.
The belief systems that actually run your behavior have to be parsed out by engaging concrete imagination, not intellectual abstractions… in precisely the same way that your funny stories aren’t going to come out when you think the words “funny stories”, instead of the feeling of being funny.
Thinking “funny stories” doesn’t work because the information isn’t filed that way. However, those stories likely are filed with connections to states of fun and humor, so if you get into that emotional state first, you’ll likely find contextually-funny stories coming to mind… or simply make situational humor in the first place.
All of your strategies have the problem that they’re focused on the wrong part of the brain: your abstract intellectual beliefs don’t mean anything anyway, as they’re stored in the part of your brain that was designed for bullshitting, rather than actually doing anything.
The belief systems that actually run your behavior have to be parsed out by engaging concrete imagination, not intellectual abstractions… in precisely the same way that your funny stories aren’t going to come out when you think the words “funny stories”, instead of the feeling of being funny.