Fair enough; the TL;DR pull-quote for this piece would be:
Annealing involves heating a metal above its recrystallization temperature, keeping it there for long enough for the microstructure of the metal to reach equilibrium, then slowly cooling it down, letting new patterns crystallize. This releases the internal stresses of the material, and is often used to restore ductility (plasticity and toughness) on metals that have been ‘cold-worked’ and have become very hard and brittle— in a sense, annealing is a ‘reset switch’ which allows metals to go back to a more pristine, natural state after being bent or stressed. I suspect this is a useful metaphor for brains, in that they can become hard and brittle over time with a build-up of internal stresses, and these stresses can be released by periodically entering high-energy states where a more natural neural microstructure can reemerge.
Furthermore: meditation, music, and psychedelics (and sex and perhaps sleep) ‘heat’ the brain up in this metaphorical sense. Lots of things follow from this—most usefully, if you feel stressed and depressed, make sure you’re “annealing” enough, both in terms of frequency and ‘annealing temperature’ (really intense emotional experiences are crucial for the emotional updating process).
Possibly the most LW-relevant part of this is the comment left by lsusr, which I’ve appended to the bottom of the version on opentheory.net, i.e. the comment that starts out “This makes sense to me because I work full-time on the bleeding edge of applied AI, meditate, and have degree in physics where I taught the acoustical and energy-based models this theory is based upon. Without a solid foundation in all three of these fields this theory might seem less self-evident.”—he said some things clearly that were only tacit in my writeup.
Fair enough; the TL;DR pull-quote for this piece would be:
Furthermore: meditation, music, and psychedelics (and sex and perhaps sleep) ‘heat’ the brain up in this metaphorical sense. Lots of things follow from this—most usefully, if you feel stressed and depressed, make sure you’re “annealing” enough, both in terms of frequency and ‘annealing temperature’ (really intense emotional experiences are crucial for the emotional updating process).
Possibly the most LW-relevant part of this is the comment left by lsusr, which I’ve appended to the bottom of the version on opentheory.net, i.e. the comment that starts out “This makes sense to me because I work full-time on the bleeding edge of applied AI, meditate, and have degree in physics where I taught the acoustical and energy-based models this theory is based upon. Without a solid foundation in all three of these fields this theory might seem less self-evident.”—he said some things clearly that were only tacit in my writeup.
Currently working on a follow-up piece.