Tag: brain science

New study supports FIML practice

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This study—Neural Correlates of People’s Hypercorrection of Their False Beliefs—supports the contention that FIML practice can produce deep, wide-ranging, and enduring changes within the brain/mind of practitioners.

The basic finding of the study is:

Despite the intuition that strongly held beliefs are particularly difficult to change, the data on error correction indicate that general information errors that people commit with a high degree of belief are especially easy to correct. (Emphasis added.)

According to the study, this happens due to …enhanced attention and encoding that results from a metacognitive mismatch between the person’s confidence in their responses and the true answer.

This is exactly what happens when a FIML query shows the questioner that his/her assumptions about what their partner’s thoughts or intentions were were wrong.

Initially, FIML partners may experience some embarrassment or disbelief at being wrong, but since FIML queries are generally based on negative impressions, being shown to be wrong will also produce feelings of great relief and even delight.

A FIML query will generally arise out of a state of “enhanced attention” and usually further increase it by being spoken about. Incidentally, this is probably the most difficult aspect of FIML practice—controlling the emotions that accompany enhanced attention, especially when that attention concerns our own emotional reactions.

With continued practice of FIML, however, even strongly held erroneous interpersonal beliefs will be fairly easily corrected whenever they are discovered during a FIML discussion. Correcting core false beliefs (mistaken interpretations) has a wide-ranging, beneficial effect on all aspects of a person’s life.

Since the hypercorrection effect discussed in the linked study only occurs during moments of enhanced attention, the FIML technique of focusing quickly on good data agreed upon by both partners can be seen as a way of inducing states of enhanced attention that will lead to deep changes in both partners. This technique (using good data) also turns the discussion from one about feelings to one about “information,” which the study finds makes errors “especially easy to correct.”

Furthermore, since FIML practice tends to deal with very small incidents, the enhanced attention FIML induces works like a laser that quickly and painlessly excises erroneous thoughts and feelings while they are still small and have not been allowed to grow into full-blown emotional reactions.

the absent voices here are academic and organized medicine

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This link is to a good post about misdeeds in Big Pharma and the absence of any serious push-back from psychiatrists.

I for one don’t think there is any idea or any professional or governmental approach that can fix the greed and self-deception inherent in virtually every social system ever devised by human beings.

The only hope I see will come from technology. We are getting close to having brain scans that are able to discover human lies and self-deception with 100% accuracy. Will humans be able to use them to eradicate fraud from government, finance, and science?

Brain plasticity and “critical periods” for learning

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Neurodevelopment: Unlocking the brain

This is an interesting article on brain plasticity and “critical periods” for learning some skills (e.g. stereo-vision, language acquisition, etc.). It seems there may be ways to reset or reopen critical periods through chemical or behavioral interventions.

Vision therapy, which aims to correct adult amblyopia and other eye conditions, already has shown that basic visual skills can be relearned and some visual problems corrected by proper training.

Incidentally, FIML practice retrains us to listen, speak, and think differently. In doing this, FIML may be reopening a critical period for language/semiotic processing or even for the fundamental organization of consciousness itself. Once acquired, FIML skills have far-reaching effects on virtually all aspects of human social and psychological awareness.

If Buddhist practice is thought of in a light like this (that new cognitive skills are learned as some old ones are unlearned), it may remove some of the mystical aspects of how people understand the Dharma while also making Buddhist teachings more appealing to people with science training or an affinity for objective science.

Why Smart People Are Stupid

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This short article by Jonah Lehrer shows an important reason why FIML works so well.

From the article:

The problem with the introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.” (Emphasis added.)

I chose this quote because it is relevant to the introspective practices of Buddhism and other disciplines.

I love introspection. But introspection without a way to check our work can and will lead us astray.

FIML practice corrects our (very numerous) mistakes in assessing the thoughts and intentions of other people. FIML also disabuses us of the errors we hold about ourselves based on our mistaken understandings of others.

The psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, as quoted in the article says: “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

I believe him. This is how our minds (don’t) work.

FIML will probably not correct your general tendencies toward bias and misplaced confidence, but it will vastly reduce the number of mistakes you make about your partner (and thus yourself). This a huge benefit because when you have clarity with your partner, you gain an emotional and psychological security that is deeply satisfying.

For Buddhists, FIML helps us to avoid the mistakes inherent in pure introspection as well as the mistakes inherent in accepting only the generalities of the Buddhist tradition while missing its profound experiential depths.

How to talk to people

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I am going to mention a book and an interview in this post and want to emphasize from the outset that I am just using these items as a springboard to briefly say something about generalized techniques for communication or getting along with people. My comments have next to nothing to do with the authors of the book or what they say in the interview. I haven’t read the book and don’t know anything about it.

That said, I for one, can’t stand it when people consciously use communication techniques when they talk to me. I can see a place for this sort of thing for salespeople or people who often have to deal with the public. No problem there. What bothers me is when people use these kinds of techniques with friends and even spouses.

I am sure I don’t always spot it when someone does use a technique with me, but often I do. I see it as a kind of lying or a way of deceiving your interlocutor so you can get something from them. Even if all you are getting is companionship or friendship, it still seems low to me to employ techniques you have read in a book or learned in a seminar. No doubt many benefit from those sorts of books and seminars, but many of these techniques are indistinguishable from outright manipulation. I don’t see them as a good way to deal honestly with friends.

Some of the techniques I am talking about are deliberately using positive language for effect; speaking briefly with special intent; smiling more than you feel; deliberately mirroring others’ expressions, gestures, tones of voice, word choices, etc.; using people’s first names as a way to get close to them; hugging people for the same reason; pretending to agree when you don’t; omitting important facts to keep things “positive”, and so on.

I got started on this post after reading an interview at this link: Your words matter. As mentioned, this is probably a very worthy book by two very worthy people. The interview just caused me to think about how much it bothers me that we humans are forced to spend so much of our time in inauthentic communication with others.

Life is too short to be working angles or using techniques with friends and loved ones. For one thing, when we do that we are withholding our deep selves from the people we most care about. And for another thing, those same people will be able to sense what we are doing. At some level, they will feel that that they are being manipulated.

We often refer to FIML as a technique, but it is not a general technique like the ones described above. FIML is a process that helps partners dispense with techniques, manipulation, and all other kinds of bullshit and misunderstanding that can, and will, harm their relationships if not dealt with.

Thalience: The successor to Science

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Thalience is, I believe, the brain-child of Karl Schroeder. It describes a post-science world (or very advanced science) where all science is done by science bots rather than humans. The bots not only do the science, they also ask the questions.

As Schroeder puts it “…it is an attempt to give the physical world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is, reality itself can tell us.”

I think thalience is an interesting idea and may have extra value because by removing human beings and thus human failings from the activity of science, we will get less cheating and conflict of interest in addition to having robots ask really interesting questions we might never think of.

Add to Schroeder’s idea, Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument and you start wondering if we are already living in a thalient world, but just don’t know it.

We do not experience our world continuously but in discrete snapshots, a Buddhist therapeutic interpretation

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This report — Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not experience the world continuously — supports the core activity of FIML practice, which entails noticing the first instant(s) of the arising of an emotional sensation (that is typically tied to a much more involved “mistaken interpretation” within the brain). By interfering with the first instant(s) of arising, FIML practice forestalls the habitual wave of neurotic interpretation that normally follows. Instead, new information — better data obtained from the FIML partner — is used to replace the cue that led to the initial sensation, thus redefining that cue.

Professor Gregor Thut of the University of Glasgow, where the study was conducted, says of its results: “For perception, this means that despite experiencing the world as a continuum, we do not sample our world continuously but in discrete snapshots determined by the cycles of brain rhythms.”

I would further hypothesize that the same holds true for our “perceptions” of inner emotional states. In this context, recall the five skandhas of Buddhism — form, sensation, perception, activity, consciousness. A form can arise in the mind or outside of the mind. This form gives rise to a sensation (which is the first initiation of a FIML query), which gives rise to perception, followed by activity (mental or physical), and lastly consciousness.

In Buddhist teachings, the five skandhas occur one after the other, very rapidly. They are not a continuous stream but rather a series of “discrete snapshots,” to use Thut’s words. In FIML practice, partners want to interfere with what has become a habitual “firing” of their five skandhas based on (neurotic) learned cues. FIML practice strives to prevent full-blown neurotic consciousness (the fifth skandha) from taking control of the mind by replacing the source of that consciousness with a more realistic interpretation of the neurotic cue. The cue corresponds to form in the five skandhas explanation while our emotional reaction to it begins with the second skandha, sensation. The more realistic interpretation of that cue is based on the true words of the partner.

The five skandhas can also help us understand how FIML is different from more or less normal psychological analysis. In normal, or traditional, analysis we use theories and schema to understand ourselves. In FIML we use a specific technique to interfere with habitual neurotic “firings” of the five skandhas. FIML partners are encouraged to theorize and speak about themselves in any way they like, and it is very helpful to do this, but the core FIML activity cannot be replaced by just theorizing or telling stories.

Here is a link to the study itself: Sounds Reset Rhythms of Visual Cortex and Corresponding Human Visual Perception.

Allen J. Frances on the overdiagnosis of mental illness

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“It’s always better to under-diagnose than over-diagnose.”—Allen J. Frances

This talk is worth watching.

As a side note, I hope that readers of this site, especially Buddhists and/or those practicing FIML, will understand at least some of what Frances is saying as being about how societies organize their semiotics. We still use priest-like figures with esoteric knowledge and identifiable clothing and mannerisms to write large tomes (the DSM) that define what is real or healthy or normal.

FIML practice is designed to put much more of the process of defining who you are in the hands of partners themselves. My comments are not directed at Frances, who does a good job with his talk. I just want to point out that the ways our common semioses are organized or structured are very much subject to political and economic forces as well as to the power of the media and society’s hierarchical institutions. FIML gives partners an opportunity to rationally discover and redefine the terms and semiotics that contribute to how they see themselves as individuals and how they see the world(s) they live in. I think Buddhism is supposed to do much the same thing, but Buddhism itself has been subject to the same kinds of forces as the DSM, resulting in much of the teachings becoming little more than a static semiotic–or culture-bound standard–that, though good and helpful, is less than optimal.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

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Link. Anyone remotely interested in science or rational thought should read this study. Ioannidis has shown with great clarity how distorted the scientific process can become, has become in many cases.

This opinion piece on DSM-5, Diagnosing the D.S.M, shows a similar problem with the “science” of mental illness, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. From the article: “The association has been largely deaf to the widespread criticism of D.S.M.-5, stubbornly refusing to subject the proposals to independent scientific review.”

This should seem appalling in the 21st century, but we know it is not. Isn’t this partly what is meant by the First Noble Truth? That we humans–even scientists and professional doctors of the mind–tend to be delusional and make decisions based on greed, hatred, ignorance, and pride, decisions that cause needless suffering. Life is like a dream because our assessments of what is real are often so poorly formed.

Autocatalytic systems

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An autocatalytic system is a system that can “catalyze its own production”. Autocatalytic systems are usually called “autocatalytic sets”, but for our purposes using the word system may make the concept clearer.

FIML is an autocatalytic system that allows partners to reestablish the terms of their relationship, their psychologies, and their comprehension of the world around them. Strictly speaking, FIML is a non-autonomous autocatalytic set because FIML uses an abundance of language and ideas that come from outside of itself.

FIML is a small set of precise behaviors that allow partners to communicate with great clarity and without interpersonal ambiguity. Interpersonal ambiguity is the cause of much suffering. FIML does not tell partners what to think or what to believe. It simply provides them with a set of tools that gives them the means to develop in ways that seem best to them.

FIML is primarily a communication technique, but the discoveries it leads to will cause partners to remake their understandings of who they are and how they understand themselves. Once partners have learned the system, they will find that it autocatalyzes, causing them to remake themselves with a freedom that had not been possible before.

FIML differs greatly from mainstream psychology because mainstream psychology is not autocatalytic. It is analytical, theoretical, or medical. The individual sufferer seeks a professional who diagnoses their “problem” based on a static standard and then prescribes medication or some kind of therapy that will also be provided by an expert. In contrast, FIML teaches partners how to communicate with sufficient clarity to comprehend themselves. As it autocatalyzes, FIML quite naturally leads partners to make beneficial changes in themselves as they discover new meanings in each other and the world around them.

I had been searching for a word like autocatalytic for some time. This morning I came across the following piece, which led to this post: The Single Theory That Could Explain Emergence, Organisation And The Origin of Life. The study on which that article is based can be found here: The Structure of Autocatalytic Sets: Evolvability, Enablement, and Emergence.

I am sure I have taken a few liberties with my application of this theory, but went ahead with these ideas anyway because one of the key features of FIML practice is it “auto-generates” or autocatalyzes itself. Once you get going and see how to do it, FIML practice almost runs by itself, allowing partners near infinite freedom to pursue whatever they want with it.

Do antidepressants do more harm than good?

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Link to study (Primum non nocere: an evolutionary analysis of whether antidepressants do more harm than good).

I have seen a good deal of criticism leveled at this paper, but its reasoning seems sound to me and worth considering.

From the paper: “Ultimately, we come down on the side that the benefits of antidepressants are generally outweighed by their costs, though there may be specific populations where their use is warranted.” (Emphasis mine)

Most of the criticisms I have read of this paper are based on anecdotes (they worked for me) or attacking the journal that published the paper or that they didn’t do any studies of their own. Note that the authors’ argument is not based on a particular experiment but rather on the “…principle of evolutionary medicine that the disruption of evolved adaptations will degrade biological functioning.” Note also that their conclusions are qualified: “Because serotonin regulates many adaptive processes, antidepressants could have many adverse health effects.” And: “We conclude that altered informed consent practices and greater caution in the prescription of antidepressants are warranted.”

I tend to agree with this conclusion and though I have seen anti-depressants do much good, it is almost certainly true that they are over prescribed and very unlikely that they do no harm at all. Thus, the conclusion “…that altered informed consent practices and greater caution in the prescription of antidepressants are warranted” seems well-justified, even if some of the reasoning leading to that conclusion may prove to be wrong.

For Buddhists, there are many other practices to try before resorting to anti-depressants. For FIML practitioners, we would hope that in many cases partners will realize that depression is a symptom of living in a crazy world.