I did quite a bit of EEG neurofeedback at the age of about 11 or 12. I may have learned to concentrate a little better, but I’m really not sure. The problem is that once I was off the machine, I stopped getting the feedback!
Consider the following interior monologue:
“Am I relaxing or focusing in the right way? I don’t have the beeping to tell me, how do I know I am doing it right?”
In theory, EEG is a truly rational way to learn to relax, because one constantly gets information about how relaxed one is and can adjust one’s behavior to maximize relaxation. In practice, I’m not sure if telling 12-year-old me that I was going to have access to electrical feedback from my own brain was the best way to relax me.
The EEG did convince me that physicalism was probably true, which distressed me because I had a lot of cached thoughts about how it is bad to be a soulless machine. My mother, who believed in souls at the time, reassured me that if I really was a machine that could feel and think, there’d be nothing wrong with that.
I wonder how my rationality would have developed if, at that point, she had instead decided to argue against the evidence?
I did quite a bit of EEG neurofeedback at the age of about 11 or 12. I may have learned to concentrate a little better, but I’m really not sure. The problem is that once I was off the machine, I stopped getting the feedback!
Consider the following interior monologue:
“Am I relaxing or focusing in the right way? I don’t have the beeping to tell me, how do I know I am doing it right?”
In theory, EEG is a truly rational way to learn to relax, because one constantly gets information about how relaxed one is and can adjust one’s behavior to maximize relaxation. In practice, I’m not sure if telling 12-year-old me that I was going to have access to electrical feedback from my own brain was the best way to relax me.
The EEG did convince me that physicalism was probably true, which distressed me because I had a lot of cached thoughts about how it is bad to be a soulless machine. My mother, who believed in souls at the time, reassured me that if I really was a machine that could feel and think, there’d be nothing wrong with that.
I wonder how my rationality would have developed if, at that point, she had instead decided to argue against the evidence?