Your brain in the zone: A new neuroimaging study reveals how the brain achieves a creative flow state

Effortless, enjoyable productivity is a state of consciousness prized and sought after by people in business, the arts, research, education and anyone else who wants to produce a stream of creative ideas and products. That’s flow, or the sense of being “in the zone.” A new neuroimaging study from Drexel University’s Creativity Research Lab is the first to reveal how the brain gets to the creative flow state.

The study isolated flow-related brain activity during a creative task: jazz improvisation. The findings reveal the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control – “letting go” – to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.

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Seems obvious but a good reminder. ABN

Elon Musk says ‘the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11’ after Biden administration ADMITTED flying 320K unvetted migrants into the US has national security ‘vulnerabilities’

Elon Musk has bashed the Biden administration after they admitted to flying 320,000 unvetted migrants into the US. 

Musk took to his platform X early Tuesday and said the president’s administration is ‘importing voters and creating a national security threat’ for secretly allowing illegal immigrants in the country. 

‘It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11. Just a matter of time,’ Musk said as he reposted a story from DailyMail.com. 

The Tesla‘s creators comments comment after a secret Biden program was exposed where the administration admitted to flying 320,000 migrants into the US – but officials refuse to say who was flown and to where. 

Lawyers for the administration’s immigration agencies have claimed that revealing the locations of where these undocumented aliens are could create national security ‘vulnerabilities.’ 

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Is it better that Musk says this or not? Clearly, it’s better. This headline will communicate with many millions of viewers who are far less informed than readers of this site.

Is Musk a limited-hangout ensnaring us only to misdirect us at some later date? Could be. But that is the level we need to be paying attention to, not categorical dismissal of Musk or those like him. To simply dismiss everything Musk says or does is not the right way to fight this information war. This same reasoning applies to virtually all public figures, especially those who have risen to prominence quickly (and thus are almost certainly backed by nefarious forces).

We have to accept that there is no master authority that can separate truth from falsehood or always point us in the right direction. All of life is largely a muddle and so is information warfare. We can assess information case by case, person by person, group by group. If a great many of us do this anarchically but in concert, we will succeed is creating a sea of public understanding that even a savage totalitarian elite will have trouble suppressing.

Going forward, this is our best strategy; lean in toward good information and action and people who are better than others at their level with good information and action. Example: Musk is better than Gates or Zuckerberg. He says more good stuff and does more good stuff. Everyone must be viewed with suspicion. No one is worshipped. Trump is better than Biden. Carlson is better than Maddow. X is better than FB. These are our tools—gradations of understanding always subject to change and reconsideration. We have to be pragmatic, probabilistic, broad-minded, able to assess what is better than and not just what is the ideal best. ABN

Israel’s Psych-War Is Relentless, Vicious and Deliberate

One part of Israel’s military operation in Gaza that’s been largely ignored by the mainstream media is the extremely sophisticated psychological war that’s being waged on the Palestinian people. If we look carefully at some of the more unusual elements in Israel’s strategy, we see the outline of plan that is clearly aimed at inflicting maximum psychological damage on its victims.

Take, for example, Israel’s repeated demand that civilians leave a particular city at a designated time. Every time this demand has been made it was followed shortly after by airstrikes on the fleeing civilians. We could easily dismiss this unfortunate action as an operational snafu attributable to human error, but that does not appear to be the case. After all, these airstrikes have not happened just once or twice, but over and over again. This suggests that it is official policy. The same is true of the seemingly random killing of civilians by Israeli snipers, (some of them waving white flags) or the so-called “indiscriminate bombing” of homes, hospitals and refugee camps, or the hyper-belligerent pronouncements by political leaders, or the massive slaughter of civilians peacefully gathering food at humanitarian aid trucks. What we’re saying is that none of these things have any apparent tactical value, rather their efficacy can only be measured in terms of how they help Israel achieve its overall strategic objective which is the expulsion of the entire Arab population. In that regard, the strategy appears to be working quite well because the majority of the population is now convinced that “nowhere is safe”. This, in fact, is the cornerstone upon which Israel has developed its psychological battleplan, to eradicate any sense of personal security prompting feelings of anxiety, confusion and hopelessness. Keep in mind, this mindset did not appear out of thin air. This mindset is the product of a meticulously-plotted and thoroughly-sinister plan to inflict maximum psychological damage on 2 million people so they will be easier to expel from their historic homeland. That is the underlying goal of Israel’s operation, ethnic cleansing. And the psychological aspect of the campaign may be more critical to its success than the relentless airstrikes or nascent ground war.

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Not to detract from Gaza but to augment: Whoever is attacking the West is using a similar playbook, albeit one based more on clandestine violence and civilizational demoralization through infiltration and ideological capture. The West has been suffering parasitic infestation since WW2 and today we are near the climax of this takeover and obliteration. The only question mark on this relentless psyop is who are its leaders. We can see scores of toadies wherever we look but ultimately who is giving them their orders? Who is directing them? A demoralizing sign of Western ideological capture is the silence on Gaza of so many otherwise respectable alternate news personalities, to say nothing of Western MSM which day-after-day-after-day reads like a memo from a maniac, the silence and misdirection is so disgusting. ABN

What Game Theory (does not really) Reveal About Life, The Universe, and Everything

FIML fixes noise as defined in this video. Cooperation is not always cozy and nice. It also produces subcultural cooperation that defects against other populations, including the host population. This explains the rapid proliferation of parasitism inside USA & West over the past several decades. The nice behaviors of the West (domestically) have invited the formation of a plethora of internal subcultural parasites. Modern Western history is an example of why not knowing how and why to defend yourself against parasites leads to rapid demise and loss of the game. Will the West figure this out in time? I do wonder. The tone of the video above largely supports a delusion. Moreover, the video fails to account for KOBK, the Kill-Or-Be-Killed violent game that is consuming our elites (and us). ABN

Early Buddhist Meditation: The Four Jhanas as the Actualization of Insight — Keren Arbel

“Bhikkhus, just as the river Ganges slants, slopes, and inclines towards the east, similarly, a bhikkhu, who develops and cultivates the four jhanas slants, slopes, and inclines towards Nibbana.” [SN V.308]

“There is no jhana for the one without liberating wisdom, no liberating wisdom for the one without jhana; the one who has jhana and liberating wisdom he indeed is in the presence of nibbana.” [Dhammapada v.372]

These citations from the early Buddhist texts in Pali (i.e., the suttas), and many others in these inspiring texts, captured my curiosity from the first time I heard about the jhanas from my Dhamma teachers and from books I have read on Buddhist meditation. The references to these four specific psych-somatic states, which the Buddha called “the four jhanas”, and the frequentness in which they appear in the path taught by the Buddha, awakened a deep interest in me, first as a practitioner of vipassana meditation, and later on, as a scholar.

I assume that anyone who heard about the jhanas in most traditional Theravada practice environments heard that these states are not necessary for insight and awakening. However, anyone who read the suttas, quickly realize, that these four states, appear repeatedly in the Buddha’s descriptions of the path to liberation. Reading the suttas over many years I have found many passages in which the Buddha refers to the four jhanas as intrinsic and essential to the development of liberating wisdom and awakening.

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I very much like and approve of Arbel’s conclusion to this fine essay:

Thus, I would conclude that the four jhanas should not be conceived as a meditative technique at all. They are not concentration exercises that one can choose to practice as a basis for vipassana meditation; rather, they are the actualization and embodiment of the deepening of insight and non-clinging. Thus, the fourth jhana – as the culmination of this meditative process – is the optimal experiential event for the utter de-conditioning of unwholesome tendencies and for transforming deep epistemological structures. It anticipates an awakened awareness for an un-awakened practitioner, and therefore, it is the threshold of awakening.

Elite life is not a bed of roses

Lady Gabriella Windsor’s husband Thomas Kingston, 45, died from a ‘traumatic head wound’ and a gun was found near his body in outbuilding of his parents’ Cotswolds home, inquest hears

If you have ever spent time around wealthy people, you know that many of them suffer immensely. When we are poor or of modest means, we may envy the rich and powerful, but they do go overboard quite often. A modest life based on sound ethics is a common recommendation among wisdom traditions largely for this reason. ABN

Problem, Reaction, Solution simplified, fake-afied, and chronologically mixed up

Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the ‘Smart Wall’ — Whitney Webb

NOTICE: Icke is referring to the X-embedded video above. That short snippet is from a longer video from seven years ago when Trump was speaking about a system for controlling foreign visa holders and illegals.

All of that being said and understood, consider also that it is irrational to believe anyone can stop the advance of technology, including surveillance technology. It is equally irrational to presume that we the people can stop the application of this technology or that we live in a system designed to ever consider our well-being, let alone the will of a small minority who can see what is happening with surveillance technology. Please read my comments on Webb’s piece here for more on this.

At the risk of exploding people’s heads, I am gonna say this: there are conceivable advantages to more surveillance, particularly in greatly reducing street crime (assuming police are charged with following up and courts apply the law). Yes, of course, there are terrible things to be concerned about but there is no way to stop the tech, just as there is no way to successfully ‘outlaw’ bioweapons or space weapons or violating treaties that pretend they are doing that. We live in a world controlled by elites who are fighting savagely among themselves. The best we can realistically hope for is that the best elites (for us) win. Right now, Trump, Musk, Carlson and others look much better to me that Biden, Zuckerberg, Maddow and their ilk. I am 100% in favor of Webb and Icke and others writing as they do, but let’s not allow their dark visions to keep us from seeing the even deeper reality—elites always rule, some elites are better than others. ABN

Xi Van Fleet describes totalitarianism

UPDATE: Xi provides a crystal clear description of the rise of communism in China and totalitarian parallels in today’s USA & West. Everybody should fully understand what Xi is saying, which is that a savage elite is vying for total control of everything, total power over everyone. Their ideologies are entirely bogus and so is their ‘science’ and all of their rationales. The people in top power positions today are psychopaths who do nothing but lie and kill in their quest for world domination. There is some chance we can slow them down or even replace them with a more beneficent elite. Even if you are well versed in recent Chinese history, Xi’s account is well-worth viewing. She is a master at putting things simply and never dodging the question. ABN

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I know Musk is suspicious, but so is everybody with ‘freedom of reach’. He does appear to have some concern about overdoing the mind-control and actual history. Us vague masses can do some good by liking one kind of emperor over another, possibly. ABN