And how bad you are at interpreting what others say to you?
If not, you are living in a very muddled world that is probably “anchored” to nothing more than your “feelings,” your “identity,” or some form of extrinsic “belief” or “faith” in your nation, group, religion, career.
Either you are a sort of slave to a public semiotic (religion, ethnicity, career, etc.) or you are a sort of slave to your muddled interior—your volatile emotional sense of “who” you “are.”
The only way I know of to fully comprehend how badly you speak and listen is to do FIML practice.
You may understand in the abstract how wrong and ambiguous speech and listening frequently are, but if you don’t do FIML you won’t be able to see with any specificity how wrong you are and where and why. If your understanding is only general or abstract, it will function as just another level of ambiguity, another source of mistakes.
Mildly sorry for being so blunt, but it’s true. Only FIML, or something very similar, can give you and your partner real-time access to objectively agreed upon communication mistakes being made between you. And there is no general or abstract substitute for that.
Even a single mistake can have massive consequences. But we all make dozens of mistakes every day.
Human perception is massively based on human memory, expectations, and schemas already formed and present in the brain.
A recent study on visual perception came to this conclusion:
Altogether, these results show that many neurons in the medial temporal lobe signal the subjects’ perceptual decisions rather than the visual features of the stimulus. (source)
This study is about visual perception and it focuses on neurons in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, but it’s conclusions have been discovered in many other studies—that is, we very often perceive what we already know or expect to perceive visually, aurally, verbally, semiotically.
Humans are capable of seeing new things and forming new conclusions and perceptions, but our default brain state is that most of the time we react to what we already think we know, consciously or unconsciously.
And how could it be otherwise? We could not function if we had to reassemble every pixel in a photo or our visual field every time we looked at anything. Same for sounds, sentences, concepts, and semiotics in general. If we are unable to quickly generalize and categorize something as something we already know about, we will find ourselves utterly lost in a maze of astounding complexity every second of our lives.
We cannot live without that default state, but when we use it during interpersonal communication we frequently run the risk of applying an erroneous “perceptual decision” about what someone is saying or about how we think they have heard us.
If you make erroneous perceptual decisions at a normal pace, which can be several times per hour, you will almost certainly begin to build up bigger and bigger wrong perceptions of the person you are doing it to. If that person is a spouse or close friend, you will have problems.
How do we usually deal with or work around problems of that type?
We ignore them.
We spend time away from the person.
We get mad openly or seethe quietly.
We resort to the simple generalities of basic friendship—shared activities, safe topics, declarations of loyalty or friendship.
We believe or hope that mistakes will average out and not matter much.
In order:
1) If we ignore problems that arise from erroneous “perceptual decisions,” we are merely pushing them aside where they will continue to fester. Some people are truly able to completely ignore or forget, but do you really want to do that to your memory? And what replaces what you have forgotten? Isn’t it just another false “perceptual decision?”
2) This works to dilute feeling and perception, but not to improve or upgrade it. In most cases, this is a losing strategy with close friends.
3) Getting mad is better than most responses if you have the tools to fix the problem. Seething silently is a horrible way to go, though unfortunately a very common one. The worst of all is “not getting mad but getting even.” People who do this with friends are universally idiots.
4) Sad way to go but probably the most common halfway-decent thing people do. This describes most friendships and marriages. They become sort of lifeless card games that go on and on because no one knows what else to do. And the longer they go on, the less likely there will be change.
5) I think this is an unrealistic belief because false perceptions can go off at many different angles. They don’t cancel out. At best, this belief may produce an outcome similar to item four above.
There is a way to handle these problems and that way is FIML. With practice, FIML partners will find that they have no festering false perceptions about each other and that they have not been forced to compromise the integrity and complexity of their relationship by resorting to any of the above strategies.
If you read about morality in books and essays, it is all usually very philosophical. What is it? What are the foundations of it? How does fairness contribute? Is it emotional? Cognitive? Non-cognitive? Etc.
But how do you do it? Not how do you do it in the big sense of politics or global warming or philosophy, but how do you do it with just one other person? Can you do that? Have you ever done that? Can you conduct a complex and moral relationship with even one other person?
How can you be psychologically healthy if you cannot? I think most people are stuck, at best, on level four above. The reason is not that they want that but that they do not see another way.
You absolutely have to do something like FIML. If you don’t, false perceptions will accumulate and lead to one of the five things mentioned above.
An important part of FIML practice is understanding signal intensity. That is, how big or strong or important the signal in question is.
FIML practice was designed to work with small signals and works best when close attention is paid to small signals. These “small signals” can be ones you send to your partner, ones your partner sends to you, or the ways in which either one of you interprets any signal at all.
Small signals are of great importance because they can be signs or aspects of larger or habitual ways of interpreting signals. Small signals can also generate mistaken interpretations that have the potential to snowball.
An example of a habitual way of interpreting signals might be a person who grew up in a less wealthy environment than his or her partner. The less wealthy partner may tend to interpret spending or not spending money differently than the other partner. This could manifest as stinginess, being too generous, or as mild anxiety about money in general. Of course, both partners will be different in the ways they interpret signals dealing with money. Their semiotics about money will be different.
FIML partners would do well to deal with these differences by paying close attention to small signals of that type the moment they come up. This is where partners will come to see how this entire class (money) of signals is affecting them in the moments of the lives they are actually living. It’s good to also have long general discussions about money, but be sure to pay close attention to the appearances of small signals.
From this example, please extrapolate to the signaling areas that matter to you and your partner. These may include anything that causes mistakes in communication or anything that causes either partner to feel anxiety or discomfort.
A good way to gain access to this perspective is to also pay close attention to how often you and your partner miscommunicate about trivial material things. Notice how often—and it happens a lot—you misunderstand each other about even the simplest of concrete, material matters. For example, what kind of rice to buy, where you left the keys, when to adjust the temperature, etc.
All people everywhere make many communicative mistakes in matters as small as those. If we do that in the material realm, where mistakes are easy to see and correct, consider how much more often and how much more serious are signaling mistakes in the emotional, interpersonal realm.
When you do a FIML discussion with your partner, be sure to frequently include an analysis of how big or small the signals in question are—how intense they are. Remember that FIML practice strongly encourages discussing even the very smallest of signals. FIML does that because small signals are easier to isolate and analyze; clearly seeing a small signal often is sufficient to understanding a big habit. Small signals can snowball, so they should not be ignored.
In the field of neuropsychology, the term dissociation is used to describe various ways of identifying the neural substrate of specific brain functions.
One way this is done is by studying “lesions,” or damaged areas, in people’s brains and figuring out how that damage affects such functions as perception, speech, memory, vision, and so on.
Neuroimaging is another method for observing particular brain regions and thus “dissociating” them from the larger brain system in order to understand their unique functions.
While FIML practice does not rely on lesions in the brain and has not (yet) been studied in an fMRI machine, it does employ a kind of dissociation.
When a FIML partner stops a conversation and makes a query, the partner being questioned is essentially being asked to dissociate a few moments of communication from the large welter of brain function that had been going on before the query.
By isolating, or dissociating, that small segment of communication, both partners gain insight into how they express themselves and how they interpret what they are hearing or perceiving.
Seeing many dissociated segments of communication teaches partners that their communication is frequently more random, ambiguous, misleading, and just plain wrong than they had realized prior to doing FIML practice.
Dissociation in FIML practice also teaches partners how to sharpen their overall communication by frequently adjusting and fine-tuning small segments of it through FIML queries and follow-up discussions.
I can imagine more advanced neuroimaging devices than we have today showing what part of the brain is being used to do the “macro-perception” required by a FIML query. I hope that a more advanced device will also show how small mistakes in communication can often lead to very large mistakes in mutual understanding.
Ideally, an advanced neuroimaging device would dissociate the initial error in both partners’ brains and show how that error then quickly spreads chemically and neurologically throughout their brains.
For now, all we have is shared self-reporting between FIML partners, but this is still a very large improvement over not doing FIML at all. By clearing up many micro-errors in communication, FIML practice also greatly improves macro-functionality of the brain.
Weber’s law, also called Weber-Fechner law, historically important psychological law quantifying the perception of change in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus. It has been shown not to hold for extremes of stimulation. (Weber’s Law)
Hang in with this, it’s interesting.
About 200 years ago, the German physician Ernst Heinrich Weber made a seemingly innocuous observation which led to the birth of the discipline of Psychophysics – the science relating physical stimuli in the world and the sensations they evoke in the mind of a subject. Weber asked subjects to say which of two slightly different weights was heavier. From these experiments , he discovered that the probability that a subject will make the right choice only depends on the ratio between the weights.
For instance, if a subject is correct 75% of the time when comparing a weight of 1 Kg and a weight of 1.1 Kg, then she will also be correct 75% of the time when comparing two weights of 2 and 2.2 Kg – or, in general, any pair of weights where one is 10% heavier than the other. This simple but precise rule opened the door to the quantification of behavior in terms of mathematical ‘laws’. (NEUROSCIENTISTS MAKE MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN 200-YEAR-OLD PUZZLE)
What’s new today is Time–Intensity Equivalence in Discrimination (TIED):
We investigated Weber’s law by training rats to discriminate the relative intensity of sounds at the two ears at various absolute levels. These experiments revealed the existence of a psychophysical regularity, which we term time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), describing how reaction times change as a function of absolute level. (The mechanistic foundation of Weber’s law)
Simply stated TIED says that the intensity of the stimulus determines the time it takes to “just notice” a change in it and that that scales linearaly as intensity changes up or down. For example, changes in louder sounds are noticed quicker than proportionally equal changes in quieter sounds and this can be scaled mathematically.
TIED is a new theory and needs more research, but whether it works out perfectly or not, I think it shows something very important about our individual and shared subjective perceptions of words, gestures, meanings, intentions, implications, and so on including all semiotics.
At present, we do not have machines that can measure our subjective perceptions, but we can surely feel them. And with training, we can also decently calibrate them.
Most of us can already vaguely talk about our subjective perceptions of each other, but few of us know how to do that with the precision of Weber’s Law or TIED. This is because we are all unique and we all react uniquely to each other. On top of that, few are able to employ language efficiently enough to capture significant detail when describing subjective responses or impressions.
FIML provides a very useful method for isolating and calibrating individual, idiosyncratic subjective perceptions.
Consistent, repeated use of FIML gradually recalibrates and reorganizes the entire psychologies of both partners.
FIML has virtually no content.. FIML is a method, and as such it allows partners to gradually identify, isolate, measure, and reorganize their entire body of psychological data, however they construe it.
FIML completely fixes this problem! 100% guaranteed! The deep roots of philosophical emptiness (not the Buddhist kind) is people almost universally do not know how to talk to each other. Humans are blessed with complex minds and complex subjectivity, while at the same time being cursed with miserably inadequate speech habits. Habits which are so bad they all but force our complex minds to become evil, bored, selfish, greedy, scheming, depressed and suicidal. Anyone with a normal brain can learn FIML and benefit immensely. If you get only FIML from this website, you have gotten the best 99% of everything I have to offer. What’s even better is I do not advertise or charge a penny for it. Hmmm…. maybe that’s why FIML has not taken off as it should… If you know John Vervaeke, please convince him to do FIML. I am sure he will promote it better than I can. FIML should be taught in schools. The whole world will benefit from it. One day, when people have learned the technique, they will look back at history amazed at how stupid we have been. So easy to learn and do. So much good comes from it. Just do it! ABN
Since virtually everything we do, think, and feel has some linguistic component it follows that our perceived valences of words and phrases will be reliable indicators of our psychological makeup.
This is especially true if our perceptions of these valences is “captured” in fraught contexts in real-world, real-time situations.
To be even clearer and more precise, it is fair to say that it is only possible to capture actual real valences in real-world, real-time situations.
When we do not work with real-world, real-time situations, we are capable only of working with the idea of them, a theory of them, a memory of them. And none of that can possibly capture the actual valence as it actually functions in real-life.
The theory, memory, or idea of a psychological valence associated with words and phrases occurs at a different level of abstraction or cognition from the valence itself.
Theories, memories, and ideas of psychological valences can be very interesting and are worth pursuing, but they are not the thing itself and as such have only a weak capacity to grasp the psychology exposed by actual valences in action in the real-world.
From these maps we can see that word groups have idiosyncratic arrangements, associations, and emphases.
And from this we can understand how analysis of interpersonal communication details can lead to beneficial changes in word group arrangements and thus also human psychology.
The video is very helpful for visualizing how words and word groups are organized in the brain. And this illustrates how and why FIML works as well as it does.
By “capturing” actual verbal psychological valences in real-time, real-world situations, partners gain immense insight into how their psychologies actually function in the real-world, how they actually deal with real life.
Focusing on very brief real-life valences has another very large benefit: though the valences are as real as they come, they are also very small, comprising nothing more than part of the working memory load at the time.
This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Virtually all of us have been trained by years of theorizing about our psychologies to see even very small incidents of real psychological valence as aspects of some theory or story about them.
No, no, no. Don’t do that. Just see each one for what it is—a brief valences that appeared briefly in working memory; and that has been “frozen” by the FIML technique as a small snapshot to be identified and understood as it is.
First get the evidence, get the data. Those valence snapshots are the data. Get plenty of them and you may find that you do not even need any theory about what they are or what caused them.
They just are. Indeed, theorizing about them makes them different, bigger or worse, while simultaneously hiding their real nature.
Most of us do not know how to think about real-world, real-time valences because we tend to always fit them into into an a priori format, a format we already believe in. That could be a theory of psychology or a take on what our personality is or what the other person’s personality is.
In the maps shown in the video, that would constitute a whole brain response to a small valence that appeared only briefly.
By using the FIML technique, you will find it is much easier and much more beneficial to reorganize small parts of the verbal map one piece at a time than to reorganize the entire map all at once based on some idea.
In practice, FIML deals with more than just words and phrases, but the whole practice can be largely understood by seeing how it works with language. FIML treats gestures, tone of voice, expressions, and so on in the same way as language—by isolating brief incidents and analyzing them for what they really are.
I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.
Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.
I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.
My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:
The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.
It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.
The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.
Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.
I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.
Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.
Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.
If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.
Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.
The laws of the physical universe—the ones we know—do not say much about the evolution of life. And they have even less to say about the evolution of human societies and human consciousness.
Good moral behavior is essential for the scientific method to work. If many scientists lie or cheat, we won’t get good science.
On the interpersonal level, FIML practice both requires and encourages moral behavior. At first, partners may only notice that they are required to tell the truth, but as they continue practicing, they will come to want to tell the truth.
This happens for very concrete, even objective, reasons. I know that if I don’t tell my partner the truth, we will both lose. And if I do tell her the truth, we will both gain.
Morality in FIML practice—i.e. telling the truth—is not difficult because the units of a FIML discussion are typically very small, usually entailing just a few seconds of conversation/communication. The payoff for telling the truth in FIML practice, however, is huge. Partners will notice profound and beneficial changes in all aspects of their psychologies. This happens because partners’ senses of who they are will shift from a core with a secretive ego to a core with an interactive truth-telling process. Clean, clear language and a clear conscience transform human being.
FIML may prove that morality is fundamental to human consciousness. This statement is not based on feeling or wishful thinking because you have to behave morally to do FIML at all. For individual psychology, the payoff from FIML can be greater than from science in many important areas.
…French Gates, 61, became visibly emotional when discussing Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose ties to some of the world’s richest and most powerful men continues to cast a shadow years after his death.
Asked what it was about Epstein that disturbed her so deeply when she met him, French Gates struggled to contain her emotions.
‘My heart is racing,’ she said, according to The Guardian, before asking a striking question of her own.
‘Have you ever in your life been around somebody that you just know is evil?’
‘There you go. You just have your answer. We need to listen to our feelings about people.’
The reaction was so intense that French Gates briefly attempted to end the conversation before eventually continuing.
Have you ever in your life been in a country where only two people have faced serious consequences for their depraved associations with Jeffrey Epstein? Though the Epstein spy/ blackmail/ torture/ sexploitation and human trafficking enterprise was rife with a majority of Jews and Jewish supremacists, there have only been two people—Bill Gates and ex-Prince Andrew, both non-Jews—who have suffered any consequence for their contacts with Epstein, which were probably milder than most. Ofc, the top perps have seen consequences — Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail and Epstein has either absconded (my view) or been killed. But none of the other many depraved co-perpetrators have suffered any consequence except mild and temporary notoriety for a few of them. Incidentally, I do sort of agree with Melinda that ‘we should listen to our feelings about people’ but also am well-aware that our feelings about people are frequently deeply mistaken. Anyone who does FIML for just a few months will see how deeply deluded our feelings can be. My guess, however, is Epstein probably radiated evil. If you have ever knowingly been in the company of a Jewish Supremist, they do give off an evil vibe but are also extremely good at concealing it. Deceit is their foremost social weapon. I myself have been fooled by them many times. ABN
A psychological morpheme is defined as the smallest unit of a psychological response.
This term is used in FIML practice to distinguish psychological micro responses from meso and macro responses which are more general and less amenable to change and productive analysis.
There are many kinds of psychological morphemes and every individual has a multitude of them that are unique to them. Some are associated with personal memories and emotions that were aroused in the past. Others are new and arise in the present moment.
Still others are internalized social responses which at their most basic feel almost like disembodied responses, responses that precede thought, that begin creating the world we live in before we even know it. They are part of us, but can be slightly astonishing when we notice them for what they are.
A good example of one happened yesterday. My partner was away on a short trip and since it was a warm day I was working at home in my birthday suit. At some point I decided to call my partner, who would think nothing of seeing me in my birthday suit, but before I did I found myself reflexively putting on a pair of shorts.
I stopped and wondered why I was doing that and realized I was being “directed” by an almost completely emotionless and thought-less psychological morpheme.
Since I was going to speak, I was going to engage in a social act. And since I was going to engage in a social act, some part of me decided I needed to put on a pair of shorts.
This morpheme is interesting because it is so elementary. I was going to speak over the phone, long-distance to someone I have been living with for many years. And yet even still a very weak and basic sense of propriety that I had learned from my culture arose in me and got me to put on a pair of shorts.
It was like a single cold spark. And yet it was strong enough to move my system. It was a sort of “logic” like the logic of a small pattern in sand, or a twist in a tree’s bark. It was “me” putting on the shorts, but the “logic” of my doing so seemed to belong more to nature or a physical process than “my” being.
Psychological morphemes of this type are wonderful to observe. They belong to an almost blank class of responses that work like directional signs that induce us to move one way or another, to do something or not.
Other kinds of psychological morphemes induce us to feel, think, or believe something with no more “charge” than the single small spark that got me to put on my shorts.
Psychological morphemes are the most basic data of FIML practice. They are the small signs that make up the “language” of our psychologies, our minds. Understanding them leads to a rich understanding of your own and others’ behaviors, feelings, and thoughts.
“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.” (source)
The unreliability of human memory is not a new topic, but this study fairly convincingly shows how our memories conform to what we are doing and/or how we have been using them.
One can plausibly extrapolate from this that humans change how they remember and understand themselves and others based on the data of now. A moment of extraneous frustration, for example, may cause us to see someone nearby us in a different light, through no fault of theirs.
If our frustration is with how we are being (mis)understood or with our difficulty in expressing our thoughts, the implications for how we understand the person we are speaking with may be even more serious.
Experienced FIML partners will surely have realized that even minor misunderstandings can lead to large acts of “reframing” events in an emotional way that can be seriously distorted.
Beyond innocent misunderstandings (which, unfortunately, can have tragic consequences), this area of shifting memories is where a good deal of interpersonal abuse occurs. In the worst cases, one (or both) partners abuse normal human malleability to lie. In less bad cases, one (or both) partners is easily excited by their own distortions and quickly comes to believe them, effectively lying to themselves as well as their partner.
In other cases, individuals or entire groups of people may decide to tell a significant lie (slanted history, for example) and then hurl their lie passionately at others. This frequently causes the person being lied to to react with shame or concern based on the liars’ emotional display and not on the facts of the matter. A person being subjected to such verbal abuse will often conclude that if the other person is so passionate, they must have a serious point that should be considered; and this can cause large distortions of well-known facts in the victim’s mind.
All of this is a major reason the Human Realm is characterized by delusion and a large part of Buddhist practice is geared toward removing delusion.
A new approach to the study of mental disorder—called computational psychiatry—uses Bayesian inference to explain where people with problems are going wrong.
Bayesian inference is a method of statistical reasoning used to understand the probability of a hypothesis and how to update it as conditions change.
The idea is that people with schizophrenia, for example, are doing a bad job at inferring the reasonableness of their hypotheses. This happens because schizophrenics seem to be less likely to put enough weight on prior experience (a factor in Bayesian reasoning).
Distorted calculations — and the altered versions of the world they create — may also play a role in depression and anxiety, some researchers think. While suffering from depression, people may hold on to distorted priors — believing that good things are out of reach, for instance. And people with high anxiety can have trouble making good choices in a volatile environment… (Ibid)
The key problem with autism and anxiety is people with these conditions have trouble updating their expectations—a major component of Bayesian reasoning—and thus make many mistakes.
These mistakes, of course, compound and further increase a sense of anxiety or alienation.
Like several of the researches quoted in the linked article, I find this computational approach exciting.
It speaks to me because it confirms a core hypothesis of FIML practice—that all people make many, significant inferential mistakes during virtually all acts of communication.
In this respect, I believe all people are mentally disordered, not just the ones who are suffering the most.
I think a Bayesian thought experiment can all but prove my point:
What are the odds that you will correctly infer the mental state(s) of anyone you speak with? What are the odds that they will correctly infer your mental state(s)?
In a formal setting, both of you will do well enough if the inferring is kept within whatever the formal boundaries are. But that is all you will be able to infer reasonably well.
In the far more important realm of intimate interpersonal communication, the odds that either party is making correct inferences go down significantly.
If we do not know someone’s mental state, we cannot know why they have communicated as they have. If our inferences about them are based on such questionable data, we are bound to make many more mistakes about them.
By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses.
In FIML, a neurotic response is defined as “an emotional response based on a misinterpretation.” The misinterpretation in question can be incipient (just starting) to long-standing (been a habit for years).
The response is disrupted by FIML practice and, thus, tends not to consolidate or reconsolidate, especially after several instances of learning that it is not valid.
A neurotic response is a response based on memory. The following study on fear memories supports the above explanation of FIML practice.
Memories become labile when recalled. In humans and rodents alike, reactivated fear memories can be attenuated by disrupting reconsolidation with extinction training. Using functional brain imaging, we found that, after a conditioned fear memory was formed, reactivation and reconsolidation left a memory trace in the basolateral amygdala that predicted subsequent fear expression and was tightly coupled to activity in the fear circuit of the brain. In contrast, reactivation followed by disrupted reconsolidation suppressed fear, abolished the memory trace, and attenuated fear-circuit connectivity. Thus, as previously demonstrated in rodents, fear memory suppression resulting from behavioral disruption of reconsolidation is amygdala-dependent also in humans, which supports an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism.
FIML practice works by partners consciously and cooperatively disrupting reconsolidation (and initial consolidation) of neurotic memory (and associated behaviors). FIML both extirpates habitual neurotic responses and also prevents the formation of new neurotic responses through conscious disruption of memory consolidation.
FIML probably works as well as it does because humans have “an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism” that favors more truth. Obvious examples of this update mechanism can be seen in many simple mistakes. For instance, if you think the capital of New York State is New York City and someone shows that it is Albany, you will likely correct your mistake immediately with little or no fuss.
Since FIML focuses on small mistakes made between partners, corrections are rarely more difficult than the above example though they may be accompanied by a greater sense of relief. For example, if you thought that maybe your partner was mad at you but then find (through a FIML query) that they are not, your sense of relief may be considerable.
FIML is not perfect. Here are some of the problems or difficulties with it:
It takes at least two people to do it
These two people must care about each other deeply
It takes a good deal of time
It requires the formation of new mental skills
It is hard to learn without instruction
It requires that partners have at least some interest in language and how they communicate
It goes against much or most cultural conditioning
It requires high ethical standards
One or more of these difficulties will stop some people from doing FIML. There is not much we can do about that.
At the same time, these same difficulties can be an advantage. As is said in Buddhism, they may constitute “negative conditions that lead to progress.”
For example, FIML practice not only requires high ethical standards, it also shows us how to get those standards and why they work.
If you have at least some interest in language and communication, FIML practice will hone and increase it.
FIML does take time, but it is time well spent. You will enjoy many intriguing conversations with your partner that would not have been possible without FIML.
While FIML does require that we form some new mental skills, those skills are very beneficial and will work in many other situations.
FIML practice does pull partners away from subconscious cultural conditioning, but in doing that it also liberates them to form a subculture of their own, based on conscious choice.
Since it employs mindfulness, self-control, and rational analysis of thought and feeling, FIML practice greatly supports Buddhist practice and mental clarity in general.
American Buddhist Net 