I think the underlying mechanisms for several of these is distinct, but there’s a neural mechanism that acts as a kind of shared bottleneck. Analogy: a word processor and a video player will get started up for different reasons, but they both make OS calls to read files from disk, and disrupting the file read operation will disrupt both.
In the case of clinging, I think the shared bottleneck is largely what Romeo described:
Tanha is more literally translated as ‘fused to’ or ‘welded to’. It immediately follows the mental moment that you zoom in with the attentional aperture on something. It could be that a flower or an item on the shelf at the supermarket captures your attention, or you turn your head to catch more detail as you pass by an accident on the road. Many hundreds of thousands of such events take place in the course of a single day. With most of them attention then relaxes and makes space for the next thing. But with some small proportion you find the mind doesn’t quite ‘unclench’ from the object or some aspect of the object. This tension aspect is why it is sometimes translated as ‘grasping’ which is closer. Imagine something you aren’t finished with being pulled out of your hand and you tensing your fingers to resist.
For emotional avoidance, my experience is that the thought of doing something will feel bad, and then my mind will seize upon the thought of doing something that would feel less bad. There’s an unpleasant email I should reply to and hmm, suddenly it feels hard to resist the thought of playing Slay the Spire. The thought of it clings to my mind even if I try to think about something else. Without clinging, it might be that the thought of playing StS would come up—maybe repeatedly—but it wouldn’t cling to the mind in the same way and keep pulling at my attention.
So the behavior itself is triggered by a subsystem trying to avoid discomfort by projecting the thought of something more pleasant into the workspace, but the clinging strengthens the effect and makes the discomfort persistent in a way it wouldn’t be without the clinging.
I think the mechanism might be something like, a subsystem sends the thought of playing StS to the global workspace, and then it’s emotionally charged in a way that will cause some separate subsystem to seize upon the signal and strengthen it so that it stays in the workspace. That means that on top of the avoidance-subsystem contributing signal strength to it in face of other sources of signal, the clinging gives the signal an extra boost. (Though that’s just speculation for what might explain the phenomenal experience, so this particular story turning out to be correct or wrong isn’t cruxy for me.)
For longing, there’s a similar thing—there’s some subsystem that sends up a thought of what one is longing for. That subsystem may be something entirely different than the emotional avoidance system. But once it sends its signal, clinging will amplify that signal and make it more persistent.
I think the underlying mechanisms for several of these is distinct, but there’s a neural mechanism that acts as a kind of shared bottleneck. Analogy: a word processor and a video player will get started up for different reasons, but they both make OS calls to read files from disk, and disrupting the file read operation will disrupt both.
In the case of clinging, I think the shared bottleneck is largely what Romeo described:
For emotional avoidance, my experience is that the thought of doing something will feel bad, and then my mind will seize upon the thought of doing something that would feel less bad. There’s an unpleasant email I should reply to and hmm, suddenly it feels hard to resist the thought of playing Slay the Spire. The thought of it clings to my mind even if I try to think about something else. Without clinging, it might be that the thought of playing StS would come up—maybe repeatedly—but it wouldn’t cling to the mind in the same way and keep pulling at my attention.
So the behavior itself is triggered by a subsystem trying to avoid discomfort by projecting the thought of something more pleasant into the workspace, but the clinging strengthens the effect and makes the discomfort persistent in a way it wouldn’t be without the clinging.
I think the mechanism might be something like, a subsystem sends the thought of playing StS to the global workspace, and then it’s emotionally charged in a way that will cause some separate subsystem to seize upon the signal and strengthen it so that it stays in the workspace. That means that on top of the avoidance-subsystem contributing signal strength to it in face of other sources of signal, the clinging gives the signal an extra boost. (Though that’s just speculation for what might explain the phenomenal experience, so this particular story turning out to be correct or wrong isn’t cruxy for me.)
For longing, there’s a similar thing—there’s some subsystem that sends up a thought of what one is longing for. That subsystem may be something entirely different than the emotional avoidance system. But once it sends its signal, clinging will amplify that signal and make it more persistent.