I don’t have this one! My ADHD in my youth and throughout my life has painfully and eternally etched into my mind that I do not have the ability to insert things into my future contexts through the will of my mind alone, and often physical interventions like notes can still fail. A classic example is writing a note that I fail to ever reference in the relevant context. So afaik I basically never think “I can let this detail leave my current context knowing I can remember it.” I can’t. Instead what I think is “I can keep this in my current context from now until it’s relevant” or “the amount of effort to return this to my future context is more expensive than what I hope to gain by having this detail in my future context”. I am still regularly blindsided by unforeseen failures in my strategy to insert details into future contexts. For example, setting three reminders on my phone, then turning off my phone for an exam and forgetting to turn it back on after.
(2) Local Optima of Comfort
I definitely have this one! I noticed one I called “sleepiness in the morning is because you are coming out of sleep, not because you didn’t get enough sleep” but “local optima of comfort” is a really good generalization.
Recently I’ve started swimming in the ocean again (about 9℃ where I live). I feel really good after, but always have an aversion to going in. Interestingly, I find myself motivated by eating a granola bar after as a motivation. It seems like the pre-swim version of myself still requires the future granola bar to motivate swimming even though the post-swim version of myself that actually eats the granola bar enjoys the feeling of being capable of regulating my temperature and the relaxed calming feeling of having swum much more than eating the granola bar.
(3) Interpersonal Conflict
I’m not sure about this one. I think in conflict I’m somewhat likely to try to depersonalize and describe myself and the people I’m in conflict with in 3rd person… but I think I do experience similar effects around stubbornness and feeling like people owe me communication, for example, when people downvote without saying why I get irritated, like, how am I supposed to understand why you are downvoting if you don’t say anything! But of course taking the time to put things into words is a scarce resource that strangers on the internet are in fact, not obligated to spend on me.
(4) Bonus: Recognizing I’m in a Dream
I really like lucid dreaming and dream incubation. One strategy I used to use is regularly “trying to teleport to a predetermined location”. If I fail to actually teleport there, I conclude I’m awake. If I do teleport there, I conclude I’m dreaming and start doing whatever dream exploration I wanted to do in that location. A very fun one I used to do is teleporting to an open field and increasing the amount of force I can jump with to the point I can jump a hundred feet in the air and try to do flips and focus on the feeling of my legs pushing against the ground and the way the world seems to spin around me as I am in the air.
Thanks for the comment! I like your granola bar example. Maybe survival-relevant properties like food are just more convincing to the mind than merely “feeling great afterwards”. :)
Regarding 3 / conflict, I also realize now it’s less general than I made it sound. I mostly react that way when explicitly blamed in the “you did something wrong and you really should have known better” sense, when I have the feeling that that wasn’t obvious for me at all. But even then, it’s always interesting to observe how my impression of reality can quickly shift when the circumstances change.
That makes sense. I read somewhere that in hunter gatherer contexts we evolved in, being shunned from the tribe could be life or death. I think to a certain extent that’s still true, but less so than in the past. In any case, it feels like a compelling reason that we would be hard coded to find interpersonal conflict really innately compelling.
I don’t have this one! My ADHD in my youth and throughout my life has painfully and eternally etched into my mind that I do not have the ability to insert things into my future contexts through the will of my mind alone, and often physical interventions like notes can still fail. A classic example is writing a note that I fail to ever reference in the relevant context. So afaik I basically never think “I can let this detail leave my current context knowing I can remember it.” I can’t. Instead what I think is “I can keep this in my current context from now until it’s relevant” or “the amount of effort to return this to my future context is more expensive than what I hope to gain by having this detail in my future context”. I am still regularly blindsided by unforeseen failures in my strategy to insert details into future contexts. For example, setting three reminders on my phone, then turning off my phone for an exam and forgetting to turn it back on after.
I definitely have this one! I noticed one I called “sleepiness in the morning is because you are coming out of sleep, not because you didn’t get enough sleep” but “local optima of comfort” is a really good generalization.
Recently I’ve started swimming in the ocean again (about 9℃ where I live). I feel really good after, but always have an aversion to going in. Interestingly, I find myself motivated by eating a granola bar after as a motivation. It seems like the pre-swim version of myself still requires the future granola bar to motivate swimming even though the post-swim version of myself that actually eats the granola bar enjoys the feeling of being capable of regulating my temperature and the relaxed calming feeling of having swum much more than eating the granola bar.
I’m not sure about this one. I think in conflict I’m somewhat likely to try to depersonalize and describe myself and the people I’m in conflict with in 3rd person… but I think I do experience similar effects around stubbornness and feeling like people owe me communication, for example, when people downvote without saying why I get irritated, like, how am I supposed to understand why you are downvoting if you don’t say anything! But of course taking the time to put things into words is a scarce resource that strangers on the internet are in fact, not obligated to spend on me.
I really like lucid dreaming and dream incubation. One strategy I used to use is regularly “trying to teleport to a predetermined location”. If I fail to actually teleport there, I conclude I’m awake. If I do teleport there, I conclude I’m dreaming and start doing whatever dream exploration I wanted to do in that location. A very fun one I used to do is teleporting to an open field and increasing the amount of force I can jump with to the point I can jump a hundred feet in the air and try to do flips and focus on the feeling of my legs pushing against the ground and the way the world seems to spin around me as I am in the air.
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This was a fun post. Thanks for writing it.
Thanks for the comment! I like your granola bar example. Maybe survival-relevant properties like food are just more convincing to the mind than merely “feeling great afterwards”. :)
Regarding 3 / conflict, I also realize now it’s less general than I made it sound. I mostly react that way when explicitly blamed in the “you did something wrong and you really should have known better” sense, when I have the feeling that that wasn’t obvious for me at all. But even then, it’s always interesting to observe how my impression of reality can quickly shift when the circumstances change.
That makes sense. I read somewhere that in hunter gatherer contexts we evolved in, being shunned from the tribe could be life or death. I think to a certain extent that’s still true, but less so than in the past. In any case, it feels like a compelling reason that we would be hard coded to find interpersonal conflict really innately compelling.