My response to understimulation is isomorphic to overload, which happens if I am overstimulated because I’m autistic. “Underload” occurs when I have no interesting sensory or conceptual data to process. I haven’t unpacked it completely, but it feels sort of like my brain decides it’s not wanted and it shuts down to save energy, and then takes a long time to boot back up, during which period I don’t have it handy to help me do things. Having a mostly-asleep brain is not at all fun. Boredom is not like underload because boredom stimulates a search pattern to find an activity, while underload usually doesn’t stimulate anything at all, and if it does, it’s not for an activity I find “interesting”.
I can usually avoid “underloading” myself via fairly simple mechanisms like playing with my own hair, so it’s not a huge problem—it only comes up in contexts where any of the things I’d normally do are proscribed by the circumstance, like if I’m supposed to be meditating.
but it feels sort of like my brain decides it’s not wanted and it shuts down to save energy
is the state that meditation is supposed to induce. In other words, a controlled shutdown of certain parts of the brain. Julie Taylor’s description of how it feels to have a stroke is pretty much exactly the same as Sam Harris’s description of how it feels to meditate.
And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and—total silence.
And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.
Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help.” So it’s like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful—and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says “Hey! you’ve got to pay attention, we’ve got to get help,” and I’m thinking, “I got to get help, I gotta focus.”
because I’m autistic
Have you mentioned that before? Because I didn’t know that about you until now. I’m just guessing, but not being neurotypical may have something to do with your reaction to meditation.
When did you switch from saying Asperger’s to saying autism? Does it mean much? eg, did you learn something about yourself, neuro-typicals, or common usage? DSM-V?
I say “autistic” because a) the word is more aesthetically pleasant, b) it has better general recognition (same reason I say I’m a vegetarian than being specific and saying “pescetarian”), and c) it acknowledges for solidarity-ish reasons that it’s all one spectrum.
Since Alicorn has politely asked that I not respond to her comments, I will reply to yours and speak in general terms:
Autism is marked by inability to pick up on social cues and form relationships that neurotypicals do naturally.
If someone repeatedly gave sincere advice on social skills which assumed away such problems, and required constant re-clarification (“just get out of the house”, “strike up a conversation with random people”, “meet local people on the internet—I did, it’s not hard”, “just get your friends to introduce you to others”), that, to me, looks like strong advice that the person is not autistic.
Those of you who have seen me post can make your own guesses about my autism status. And, FWIW, when meditating, I’ve never been able to get my inner voice to shut down for more than a few seconds. The best I can do is to replace it with non-thinking thoughts (counting, observing my breathing, etc) and even then only for a short while.
My impression from reading meditation and doing some of it is that shutting down one’s internal monologue is something that happens after a practicing for quite a while. (Months? Years?) It isn’t an initial goal.
It’s not a binary thing, either. One common technique is to be aware of one’s internal monologue without investing emotionally in it or trying to suppress it; (this is described in lots of different language) this tends to reduce its intensity and ubiquity over time.
From my limited reading on meditation, I gather that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid is getting dull, dopey and zoned out. Meditation is supposed to involve ongoing concentration, rather than shutdown. Were you trying to maintain concentration? What CronoDAS said aside, I’m not sure you got the intended result.
I think I have a similar thing, only in my case it activates when I’m trapped in a vehicle on a long journey. I find it hard to resist “sleep”—it isn’t regular sleep, because I can “wake” on a whim, but it leaves me dopey and zoned out for a bit, although I can reduce it by deep-breathing after I wake. It feels like “nothing to do, brain shutting down now”.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Meditation isn’t about “shutting down” anything, or at least certain types of zen meditation aren’t. They’re about shifting your awareness to a third-party perspective on those processes, rather than identifying with them as “self”.
So for example, if you have a thought that comes up that the situation is intolerable and you can’t handle it, then you notice it in the way you might notice that an update message has popped up on your computer, or that you’ve just received some email or something. Like, “Ah, that’s nice.”
You notice your brain’s activity (and anything else happening around you) as merely information, rather than as reality. Zen meditators are advised to treat everything in this way, whether it’s a vision of Hell or a glimpse into Heaven, and not to be distracted even if they seem to be growing psychic powers or having meetings with the Buddha.
The objective is both the active realization that your thoughts and experiences are neither as truthful nor urgent as they appear, and the development of your ability to act from centered awareness, rather than being tugged this way and that by your cached thoughts.
That’s nifty and interesting too - can you identify the “processors”? What threads are you running?
I can’t multitask worth a damn on anything but one conscious thread and N unconscious threads—and those tend to drag to a crawl if one of them is important and needs monitoring.
Luminosity in general lets me drag the “unconscious threads” into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don’t know how many processors I have and they don’t have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
My response to understimulation is isomorphic to overload, which happens if I am overstimulated because I’m autistic. “Underload” occurs when I have no interesting sensory or conceptual data to process. I haven’t unpacked it completely, but it feels sort of like my brain decides it’s not wanted and it shuts down to save energy, and then takes a long time to boot back up, during which period I don’t have it handy to help me do things. Having a mostly-asleep brain is not at all fun. Boredom is not like underload because boredom stimulates a search pattern to find an activity, while underload usually doesn’t stimulate anything at all, and if it does, it’s not for an activity I find “interesting”.
I can usually avoid “underloading” myself via fairly simple mechanisms like playing with my own hair, so it’s not a huge problem—it only comes up in contexts where any of the things I’d normally do are proscribed by the circumstance, like if I’m supposed to be meditating.
From what I’ve read,
is the state that meditation is supposed to induce. In other words, a controlled shutdown of certain parts of the brain. Julie Taylor’s description of how it feels to have a stroke is pretty much exactly the same as Sam Harris’s description of how it feels to meditate.
From a transcript of Julie Taylor’s TED talk:
Have you mentioned that before? Because I didn’t know that about you until now. I’m just guessing, but not being neurotypical may have something to do with your reaction to meditation.
Interesting. So I get the right result and instead of going “aaaaahhhh...” I go “AAAAAHHHH!”
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it. I’m not extremely autistic, but people who know what to look for spot it.
When did you switch from saying Asperger’s to saying autism? Does it mean much? eg, did you learn something about yourself, neuro-typicals, or common usage? DSM-V?
I say “autistic” because a) the word is more aesthetically pleasant, b) it has better general recognition (same reason I say I’m a vegetarian than being specific and saying “pescetarian”), and c) it acknowledges for solidarity-ish reasons that it’s all one spectrum.
Since Alicorn has politely asked that I not respond to her comments, I will reply to yours and speak in general terms:
Autism is marked by inability to pick up on social cues and form relationships that neurotypicals do naturally.
If someone repeatedly gave sincere advice on social skills which assumed away such problems, and required constant re-clarification (“just get out of the house”, “strike up a conversation with random people”, “meet local people on the internet—I did, it’s not hard”, “just get your friends to introduce you to others”), that, to me, looks like strong advice that the person is not autistic.
Those of you who have seen me post can make your own guesses about my autism status. And, FWIW, when meditating, I’ve never been able to get my inner voice to shut down for more than a few seconds. The best I can do is to replace it with non-thinking thoughts (counting, observing my breathing, etc) and even then only for a short while.
My impression from reading meditation and doing some of it is that shutting down one’s internal monologue is something that happens after a practicing for quite a while. (Months? Years?) It isn’t an initial goal.
It’s not a binary thing, either. One common technique is to be aware of one’s internal monologue without investing emotionally in it or trying to suppress it; (this is described in lots of different language) this tends to reduce its intensity and ubiquity over time.
several times, notably here
Well yeah, but which parts of the brain? The difference in the two stories suggest very different parts of the brain were inactive.
From my limited reading on meditation, I gather that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid is getting dull, dopey and zoned out. Meditation is supposed to involve ongoing concentration, rather than shutdown. Were you trying to maintain concentration? What CronoDAS said aside, I’m not sure you got the intended result.
I think I have a similar thing, only in my case it activates when I’m trapped in a vehicle on a long journey. I find it hard to resist “sleep”—it isn’t regular sleep, because I can “wake” on a whim, but it leaves me dopey and zoned out for a bit, although I can reduce it by deep-breathing after I wake. It feels like “nothing to do, brain shutting down now”.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Meditation isn’t about “shutting down” anything, or at least certain types of zen meditation aren’t. They’re about shifting your awareness to a third-party perspective on those processes, rather than identifying with them as “self”.
So for example, if you have a thought that comes up that the situation is intolerable and you can’t handle it, then you notice it in the way you might notice that an update message has popped up on your computer, or that you’ve just received some email or something. Like, “Ah, that’s nice.”
You notice your brain’s activity (and anything else happening around you) as merely information, rather than as reality. Zen meditators are advised to treat everything in this way, whether it’s a vision of Hell or a glimpse into Heaven, and not to be distracted even if they seem to be growing psychic powers or having meetings with the Buddha.
The objective is both the active realization that your thoughts and experiences are neither as truthful nor urgent as they appear, and the development of your ability to act from centered awareness, rather than being tugged this way and that by your cached thoughts.
That’s nifty and interesting too - can you identify the “processors”? What threads are you running?
I can’t multitask worth a damn on anything but one conscious thread and N unconscious threads—and those tend to drag to a crawl if one of them is important and needs monitoring.
Luminosity in general lets me drag the “unconscious threads” into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don’t know how many processors I have and they don’t have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
That’s really interesting. Kind of cool that you’re aware of that.