Boredom can be Good for You...

Embracing boredom can calm the brain.... I pass on a science-for-the-general-public Neuroscience News summary of an article from The Conversation:

Summary: Boredom, often seen as a negative state to avoid, may actually serve an important role in emotional regulation and brain health. When we’re bored, the brain shifts away from external attention networks and activates introspective systems like the default mode network, encouraging creativity and self-reflection.

In an age of constant stimulation and overscheduling, allowing boredom to occur can help reset the nervous system and reduce anxiety. Short, intentional pauses from stimulation may foster creativity, strengthen emotional resilience, and reduce dependence on external gratification.

Key Facts:

• Brain Shift: Boredom activates the default mode network, encouraging introspection and creativity.
• Stress Buffer: Embracing boredom can counteract overstimulation and reduce anxiety.
• Mental Health Tool: Regular pauses from constant activity support emotional regulation and nervous system reset.

Source: The Conversation

We have all experienced boredom – that feeling of waning interest or decreased mental stimulation. Eventually we lose focus, we disengage. Time seems to pass slowly, and we may even start to feel restless.

Whether it be watching a movie that disappoints, a child complaining that “there’s nothing to do”, or an adult zoning out during a meeting – boredom is a universal experience.

Generally defined as difficulty maintaining attention or interest in a current activity, boredom is commonly viewed as a negative state that we should try to avoid or prevent ourselves from experiencing.

But what if there’s another way to view boredom, as a positive state? Could learning to embrace boredom be of benefit?

The brain on boredom

The brain network is a system of interconnected regions that work together to support different functions. We can liken it to a city where suburbs (brain regions) are connected by roads (neural pathways), all working together to allow information to travel efficiently.

When we experience boredom – say, while watching a movie – our brain engages specific networks. The attention network prioritises relevant stimuli while filtering out distractions and is active when we commence the movie.

However, as our attention wanes, activity in the attention network decreases, reflecting our diminished ability to maintain focus on the unengaging content. Likewise, decreased activity occurs in the frontoparietal or executive control network due to the struggle to maintain engagement with the unengaging movie.

Simultaneously, the default mode network activates, shifting our attention toward internal thoughts and self-reflection. This is a core function of the default mode network, referred to as introspection, and suggestive of a strategy for coping with boredom.

This complex interplay of networks involves several key brain regions “working together” during the state of boredom. The insula is a key hub for sensory and emotional processing.

This region shows increased activity when detecting internal body signals – such as thoughts of boredom – indicating the movie is no longer engaging. This is often referred to as “interoception”.

The amygdala can be likened to an internal alarm system. It processes emotional information and plays a role in forming emotional memories. During boredom, this region processes associated negative emotions, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex motivates us to seek alternative stimulating activities.

Boredom versus overstimulation

We live in a society that subjects us to information overload and high stress. Relatedly, many of us have adopted a fast-paced lifestyle, constantly scheduling ourselves to keep busy.

As adults we juggle work and family. If we have kids, the habit of filling the day with schooling and after-school activities allows us to work longer hours.

In between these activities, if we have time to pause, we may be on our screens constantly organising, updating, or scrolling to simply stay occupied. As a result, adults inadvertently model the need to be constantly “on” to younger generations.

This constant stimulation can be costly – particularly for our nervous system. Our overscheduling can feed into overstimulation of the nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system which manages our fight-or-flight response is designed to deal with times of stress.

However, when we are constantly stressed by taking in new information and juggling different activities, the sympathetic nervous system can stay activated for too long, due to the cumulative effects of repeated exposure to different stressors.

This is sometimes referred to as “allostatic overload”. It is when our nervous system becomes overwhelmed, keeping us in a heightened state of arousal, which can increase our risk of anxiety.

Eliminating the state of boredom deprives us of a simple and natural way to reset our sympathetic nervous system.

Could boredom be good for us?

In small doses, boredom is the necessary counterbalance to the overstimulated world in which we live. It can offer unique benefits for our nervous system and our mental health.

This is opposed to long periods of boredom where increased default mode network activity may be associated with depression.

There are several benefits of giving ourselves permission to be occasionally bored:

• improvements in creativity, allowing us to build “flow” in our thoughts
• develops independence in thinking and encourages finding other interests rather than relying on constant external input
• supports self-esteem and emotional regulation, because unstructured times can help us sit with our feelings which are important for managing anxiety
• encourages periods without device use and breaks the loop of instant gratification that contributes to compulsive device use
• rebalances the nervous system and reduces sensory input to help calm anxiety.

Embrace the pause

Anxiety levels are on the rise worldwide, especially among our youth. Many factors contribute to this trend. We are constantly “on”, striving to ensure we are scheduling for every moment. But in doing so, we are potentially depriving our brains and bodies of the downtime they need to reset and recharge.

We need to embrace the pause. It is a space where creativity can prosper, emotions can be regulated, and the nervous system can reset.

 

When the Self Dissolves, the Precuneus Goes Quiet: A Rigorous Test of Meditation’s “Many-to-(n)One” Continuum

 A recurring question on this blog is how much of what we take to be fixed about experience—time, space, agency, the bounded self—is actually a construction the brain assembles from past experience and could, in principle, take apart. Laukkonen and Slagter’s 2021 paper “From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind” gave that question its most ambitious recent framing. Their proposal is elegant in its simplicity: the three meditation styles most studied in contemplative science—focused attention (FA), open monitoring (OM), and non-dual awareness (ND)—are not separate practices but points on a single continuum. Each one, in turn, relinquishes a more deeply engrained habit of prediction, bringing the practitioner closer to the here-and-now and progressively flattening the predictive hierarchy until even the sense of self falls away. Meditation, in their metaphor, “prunes the counterfactual tree.”

It is a beautiful theory. The harder question is whether the brain imaging literature actually supports it, or whether the data have been arranged to fit a staircase that was drawn in advance. I want to use one study to think this through, because it is the rare case where the methodology is strong enough to bear the interpretive weight: a 2024 preregistered MEG study from Trautwein, Schweitzer, Dor-Ziderman, Berkovich-Ohana and colleagues, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, titled “Suspending the Embodied Self in Meditation Attenuates Beta Oscillations in the Posterior Medial Cortex” (Trautwein et al., 2024).

What the older evidence looked like

First, the backdrop. At the coarse level, the imaging literature does rhyme with the continuum. Focused attention is the best-characterized rung: meta-analysis associates it with activation in attentional-control machinery—dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate, insula—and with deactivation of the default mode network, the system tied to self-referential thought and mind-wandering (Fox et al., 2016). That DMN quieting is exactly what the framework needs to claim FA pulls one out of the “narrative self.” Open monitoring shifts the picture toward more distributed, less object-bound dynamics and reduced coupling within posterior default-mode regions. And the non-dual end—self-dissolution—had been linked, in a series of small studies, to attenuation of beta-band activity in right parietal cortex and to reductions in the precuneus (Dor-Ziderman et al., 2013; Josipovic, 2014).

The problem is that the non-dual evidence, which is where the theory makes its most startling claims, rested on the thinnest foundation. The canonical neurophenomenological studies in this lineage ran on twelve subjects (Dor-Ziderman et al., 2013). They typically used rest as the comparison condition—a notoriously leaky baseline, since long-term meditators’ resting brains already drift toward meditative configurations. And the interpretive leap from “beta drops in the parietal cortex” to “the self-model has dissolved” is the reverse-inference trap in its purest form: those regions and rhythms do many things. This is the kind of literature the fifteen-author “Mind the Hype” consensus paper had in mind when it warned that small samples, flexible analysis, and post-hoc storytelling in contemplative neuroscience could mislead the public and the field alike (Van Dam et al., 2018).

So the right question is not “does some imaging study support the continuum”—several do, loosely—but “does any study support it under conditions rigorous enough that we should believe the correlation means what it is claimed to mean.” That is what makes the 2024 paper worth dwelling on.

A study built to fail honestly

The design corrects, one by one, the weaknesses of the work that preceded it. Forty-six long-term meditators (mean lifetime practice around 3,800 hours) were trained to volitionally modulate their embodied self-experience inside an MEG scanner (Trautwein et al., 2024). Hypotheses and the analysis plan were preregistered, and the researchers were blinded to the experimental condition during preprocessing—two practices that close off the garden of forking paths where false positives flourish.

Most importantly, the study did not rely on a rest baseline alone. It used an active control: meditators alternated between dissolving their sense of self-boundaries (the condition of interest) and maintaining a clear sense of self-boundaries while meditating just as hard. This is the crucial move. A meditation-versus-rest contrast differs in dozens of ways beyond the phenomenology you care about. A dissolution-versus-maintenance contrast, within the same person in the same posture doing the same kind of effortful practice, isolates the self-boundary variable itself.

And then they did something I find methodologically beautiful. Rather than validating the meditative state with a checkbox questionnaire, they ran detailed microphenomenological interviews after the scan and used them to define, in advance of looking at the brain data, a subgroup of “full dissolvers”—participants who reported the most complete suspension of agency, first-person perspective, and self-location.

What they found

The headline result confirms the framework’s boldest prediction. When dissolution states were contrasted with the active control, power dropped specifically in the high-beta band, source-localized to the posterior medial cortex—the posterior cingulate and precuneus—and to lateral parietal regions. The peak frequency was 27 Hz, replicating an earlier single-case study to the hertz.

The effect was graded in a way that genuinely echoes the continuum. Broader reductions in somatomotor and dorsal parietal regions appeared even at lower levels of dissolution across the whole sample, whereas the posterior-cingulate/precuneus reductions distinguished only the full dissolvers. This is a real neural gradient tracking increasingly basal dismantling of the self—just what “unraveling increasingly basal forms of selfhood” would predict. And the effects scaled with both lifetime hours of meditation and, within the dissolution experience, with the reported loss of first-person perspective and self-location. The brain change tracked the depth of the experience, not merely the instruction to have it.

The authors themselves reach for predictive processing to explain it. They speculate that the beta reductions reflect the suspension of body- and agency-related predictions, leaning on models in which beta-band oscillations carry top-down predictions and precision estimates that modulate the bottom-up signaling of prediction errors. In other words, the convergence between this data and the Friston-style account is not something Laukkonen and Slagter imposed from outside. The experimentalists arrive at the same place.

The finding that should unsettle the field

Here is the result I keep returning to. The neural changes correlated with the interview-derived experiential measures—but not with the classical self-report instruments. The widely used five-dimensional altered-states questionnaire produced an “oceanic boundlessness” score that did not correlate at all with the phenomenological summary derived from the interviews (r = 0.06). The deep first-person interview and the standard psychometric checkbox were, in effect, measuring different things, and only the former tracked the brain.

Sit with what that implies retroactively. A large fraction of the prior imaging literature validated its meditative “states” precisely with the kind of thin, questionnaire-based measure that here failed to predict the neural signature at all. If the checkbox doesn’t track the brain, then studies that used the checkbox to certify that their subjects were “in” the non-dual state may have been correlating brain activity with a label rather than with the experience the label names. The 2024 study’s strongest contribution may be less the precuneus finding than this quiet demonstration that phenomenological rigor is not optional decoration—it is load-bearing.

Where this leaves the continuum

So does brain imaging confirm the many-to-(n)one model? My honest reading is: partially, gradedly, and only under conditions most of the supporting literature did not meet.

The reservations remain real. The studies that compare FA, OM, and ND almost always do so within expert meditators who already hold the three-category taxonomy as their own theory of their practice—so the taxonomy is an input as much as an output, and “the brain states differ” does not establish “the brain states lie on a single monotonic dimension.” The most comprehensive meta-analysis found the practices reliably dissociable but found convergence across them to be the exception rather than the rule, and offered only suggestive evidence for the non-dual category specifically (Fox et al., 2016). Effect sizes across the field are medium, not large, with substantial heterogeneity. The scanner environment itself—noise, supine posture—has been shown to shallow and distort the very states under study. And the framework absorbs apparently disconfirming results (Pagnoni’s reading of just-sitting Zen as increasing counterfactual richness, for instance) by partitioning state from trait, a plausible move that also makes the theory harder to falsify.

But against all that, the 2024 study stands as something the older work was not: a preregistered, blinded, actively-controlled, phenomenologically-anchored demonstration that the most radical claim in the whole framework—that advanced practice can dismantle the embodied self—corresponds to a specific, replicable, dose-dependent neural signature, read by its own authors in predictive-processing terms (Trautwein et al., 2024). The staircase metaphor still outruns the data. The top step, at least, now has a floor under it.

A closing thought

What draws me to this, beyond the meditation question, is what it says about the self as such. The deepest premise shared by the predictive-processing account and this experiment is that the sense of being a bounded, located, agentic first person is not a given but a construction—a model the brain maintains through ongoing prediction, and one that can be set down and, evidently, picked back up. If the self is a modulable predictive construct rather than a fixed seat of agency, then questions about what happens to authorship and agency when we offload regulation—onto a practice, onto a tool, onto an AI machine—become questions about how plastic that construct really is, and at what cost it bends. A meditator dissolving the precuneus’s beta rhythm and a person feeling like a diminished author of their own actions may be probing the same machinery from opposite directions.

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References

Fox, K. C. R., Dixon, M. L., Nijeboer, S., Girn, M., Floman, J. L., Lifshitz, M., Ellamil, M., Sedlmeier, P., & Christoff, K. (2016). Functional neuroanatomy of meditation: A review and meta-analysis of 78 functional neuroimaging investigations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 65, 208–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.03.021

Dor-Ziderman, Y., Berkovich-Ohana, A., Glicksohn, J., & Goldstein, A. (2013). Mindfulness-induced selflessness: A MEG neurophenomenological study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 582. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00582

Josipovic, Z. (2014). Neural correlates of nondual awareness in meditation. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1307(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12261

Laukkonen, R. E., & Slagter, H. A. (2021). From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 199–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.06.021

Trautwein, F.-M., Schweitzer, Y., Dor-Ziderman, Y., Nave, O., Ataria, Y., Fulder, S., & Berkovich-Ohana, A. (2024). Suspending the embodied self in meditation attenuates beta oscillations in the posterior medial cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 44(26), e1182232024. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1182-23.2024

Van Dam, N. T., van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., Meissner, T., Lazar, S. W., Kerr, C. E., Gorchov, J., Fox, K. C. R., Field, B. A., Britton, W. B., Brefczynski-Lewis, J. A., & Meyer, D. E. (2018). Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(1), 36–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589

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Note: Back and forth interactions with Claude Opus 4.8 generated the above text

What a self is.

Reading Michael Pollan’s account of his meeting with Anil Seth in his recent book "A World Appears" has prompted me to write down for my own use what I take a “self” to be. This post archives that summary and shares it with interested MindBlog readers.

So, here’s the summary:*

The self can be understood, to use Seth's phrase,  as a "controlled hallucination." Our brains build this construct to regulate the body using interoceptive signals—internal data about our heart rate, breathing, and chemistry—to maintain stability (homeostasis) in the face of constant disruption. From these signals arise feelings and emotions that drive us to act, biasing behavior toward preserving coherence and pushing back against the entropy that would otherwise dissolve it. Our illusion of having agency, of being able to do things that matter, is one of our most necessary and powerful emotions.

This hallucination is not just about the present moment. It stitches together a historical self from memory and prior experience (the brain’s ‘priors”), then projects that self forward in time, generating a predicted future to act into. We are, in this sense, always living slightly ahead of ourselves. The self is not a fixed entity but an ongoing process: a predictive framework that links memory, expectation, and action.

The self is also a stage — a theater or structural model that evolved to support the regulation of the neuroendocrine machinery underlying our social emotions and feelings such as fear, status, and affiliation - feelings that tie us to others and to our place in the world.  The theater of selfhood enables these processes to operate coherently across time and context.

And here is what I find most striking: once this elaborate scaffolding is in place, it sometimes becomes possible to step outside of it. To temporarily set aside the past and future timeline, the narrative, the predictions — and let awareness rest in the present moment alone. In that open, unhurried awareness, thoughts, feelings, and actions can be observed as they arise, like wisps of vapor emerging from some deeper source.

The self, it turns out, may be most clearly seen from just outside it.

*A note on how I arrived at the above text:    I wrote a paragraph of my ideas, and then presented the prompt “Please do an edit or redraft of this MindBlog post draft to make it more comprehensible to readers:” to four LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek.) I then curated the four versions to select useful improvements of my text and did further editing myself to make the final product.
 

The polyvagal theory is dead - and HRV isn't a simple indicator of arousal

I was recently struck by Baxter's Substack post (its title copied to be the title of this MindBlog post), which noted work critical of Porges' Polyvagal  theory (or PVT) published iin the journal Clinical Neuropsychiatry, because it calls into question one idea commonly derived from this theory that I have accepted (and repeated in several MindBlog posts): that heart rate variability can be taken as a simple indicator of calm (higher HRV and parasympathetic nervous activity) versus arousal (lower HRV and sympathetic nervous system activity).  A number of bio-monitors such as the Apple Watch and the Oura Ring report ongoing HRV measurements.  Here is a clip from her article, and then the abstract of the multi-author paper she references.

Psychological safety, social engagement, co-regulation, emotional freezing, dissociation — these are real phenomena, supported by decades of research that predate PVT. They come from attachment theory, trauma research, and somatic practices. The (critical paper’s authors explicitly state that body-mind therapeutic methods “may confer benefits on their own.”

So the work stands.

What doesn’t is the specific neuroanatomical story Porges constructed to explain these states, i.e. what drives them. This is the now-familiar three-tier hierarchy: dorsal vagal shutdown, ventral vagal social engagement, sympathetic activation.

Porges got the clinical observations right—or rather, he built upon clinical observations that were already well-established. But the mechanism is wrong.

Concerningly, Porges continued to assert that mechanism for thirty years, even as the evidence mounted against it, and apparently misrepresenting and distorting the work of other scientists to support his claims. Rather than engage with criticism of his theory, Porges ignored the overwhelming scientific consensus and instead promoted this inaccurate framework as sound, misleading practitioners and clients alike.

There is good news in all this mess—for clinicians at least. What you observe in your clients is real. Hyper-arousal is real. The need for safety and co-regulation is real. People really do dissociate, numb, and freeze when overwhelmed. Your interventions still work. They just don’t work for the reasons PVT said they did.

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Here is the Grossman (+38 co-authors) summary:

This article specifically appraises--based upon the current state of knowledge of autonomic function and vertebrate evolution--several major elements of the PVT, as described in Porges (2025a) and elsewhere. These include: 1) the validity of PVT assumptions that respiratory sinus arrhythmia is a direct measure of the extent of central vagal drive to the heart; 2) PVT characterizations regarding the neuroanatomy and functions of two major brainstem vagal nuclei, the ventrally situated Nucleus Ambiguus and the Dorsal Motor Nucleus of the vagus nerve; 3) PVT assertions regarding the evolution of the vagus nerve; 4) PVT claims about the specificity of mammalian social behavior in relation to nonmammalian vertebrates, and 5) PVT interpretations of earlier seminal physiological literature. All co-authors agree that major tenets of the PVT are not supported by past or current knowledge and, in several instances, are inconsistent with the broader evidence base. Since the topics addressed constitute fundamental premises of the PVT, we conclude that the PVT is untenable, because it is not defensible based on existing neurophysiological and evolutionary evidence. The psychological elements composing the superstructure of the PVT are primarily derived from earlier psychological literature and are neither clarified nor strengthened by PVT constructs that lack evidence. This article does not intend to address alternative explanations about relations between vagal function and psychological processes, although such explanations do exist. 

The text of this article is mind-numbingly detailed and complex, as is a rebuttal of the critique by Porges in the same issue of Clinical Neuropsychiatry.   

 

The nature of intelligence and selves.

I want to pass on the result of my extracting what I felt to be crucial chunks of text from Chapters 5 through 9 of Agüera y Arcas’s "What is Intelligence" which can be found at https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/. I found myself unable to hold and summarize the rich array of ideas in these clips of text in my attentional space, so I asked Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT 4.2, and Google gemini to condense and assemble the main points and take home messages from the clips into a narrative roughly two pages long.  The Claude result astounded me.  Here it is:

What Intelligence Is: A Synthesis of Agüera y Arcas

Reality, Models, and the Limits of "Illusion"

A useful place to begin is with the claim, made by philosophers like Dennett, Harris, and Sapolsky, that consciousness, the self, and free will are illusions — polite fictions produced by inexorable physical processes. Agüera y Arcas pushes back, not by defending dualism, but by challenging the word "illusion" itself. We don't call tables and chairs illusory simply because they're made of atoms. A better framework, borrowed from physics, holds that "reality" is our name for a model with good predictive power. No single model covers everything; general relativity doesn't tell you whether your aunt will like your cake. What matters about a model is whether it agrees with observations, makes testable predictions, and serves a useful function within its domain.

Newtonian mechanics isn't an illusion just because general relativity supersedes it — relativity explains when and why the classical approximation holds. The same logic applies to our folk psychology of selves, intentions, and choices. Theory of mind — our intuitive model of other minds — is the "Newtonian mechanics" of social life: powerful, indispensable for everyday prediction, and philosophically incomplete. The task isn't to discard it but to find the more general theory that explains where it works and where it breaks down.

Free Will as a Real Computational Achievement

That more general theory reconceives free will not as a supernatural power nor as a mere illusion, but as a genuine computational process built from four components working together. First, theory of mind applied reflexively: we can model ourselves the way we model others, imagining what our future self will experience, want, and do — which is what makes planning possible at all. Second, internal randomness: to mentally simulate alternative futures, a mind must be able to "draw random numbers," wandering prospectively through possibilities the way daydreaming does, though more directed. Third, dynamical instability (the butterfly effect in neural circuitry): this allows the faintest internal signal — "imagine doing X" — to tip behavior one way or another, making self-directed choice possible. Fourth, selection: guided by theory of mind, we prune the space of imagined futures, favoring some and discarding others, much as AlphaGo's value network prunes its search tree.

Deliberate decisions result from extended exploration before commitment; snap decisions keep multiple paths open until the last moment. In either case, if a modeled self has genuinely sampled alternatives and chosen among them, something meaningful called free will has occurred — with no dualism required. The quantum indeterminacy of the physical world, far from undermining this picture, actually supports it: the future is genuinely open, counterfactuals are real, and choice is underwritten by that openness.

Consciousness as Social Self-Modeling

Consciousness emerges naturally from the same machinery. Because social animals model each other, and because those others are modeling them back, at some point the modeling turns reflexive: you model yourself as a being that others model. Neuroscientist Michael Graziano's Attention Schema Theory adds a further layer — consciousness is what arises when a system models its own attention. Agüera y Arcas endorses this view while again resisting the word "illusion": attention is real computation, and modeling it produces a real entity, a "who," not a fiction. The vertiginous "strange loop" that Hofstadter describes — the self seeing itself seeing itself — is the phenomenological signature of this recursive social modeling.

Crucially, the category of "who" is not fixed or universal. The history of personhood — from the Declaration of Independence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — shows that which entities are granted moral standing has changed dramatically and will continue to change. There is no God's-eye view from which to declare the question permanently settled.

Intelligence: Predictive, Social, Multifractal, Symbiotic

Drawing these threads together, Agüera y Arcas offers a unified account of intelligence: intelligence is the ability to model, predict, and influence one's future; it can evolve in relation to other intelligences to create a larger symbiotic intelligence. Several properties follow from this definition.

Intelligence is predictive at every scale — from bacteria anticipating chemical gradients to cortical circuits implementing predictive sequence modeling. It is social because much of an agent's environment consists of other predictors, making theory of mind an almost inevitable evolutionary development. It is multifractal — intelligences are built from smaller intelligences, with "selves" defined by the dynamic relationships among their parts rather than by any homunculus. It is diverse, because the parts must differ from one another to provide mutual benefit; specialization arises naturally from differences in connectivity. And it is symbiotic: when the dynamic stabilities of multiple intelligences become correlated, they find themselves "in the same boat" and learn to cooperate, producing larger emergent intelligences — from mitochondria to beehives to human cultures.

Language, LLMs, and the Social Brain

Language fits cleanly into this framework. Its primary function is not grammar or syntax but leveling up theory of mind — allowing social entities to share mental states through a mutually recognizable code. Because human language is rich enough to represent everything in our umwelt, and because it functions as a general-purpose social motor output (requesting anything imaginable from others), a neural network trained to predict the next word will tend to acquire something that looks — and may genuinely be — intelligent. The brain itself, Agüera y Arcas argues, is fundamentally an autoregressive sequence predictor, and the Transformer architecture, despite its differences from biological neural circuits, instantiates the same core principle.

The social brain's crowning structure, the prefrontal cortex, specializes precisely in theory of mind, and its dramatic expansion along the primate lineage underscores that human intelligence is, at its core, a collective achievement. We survive by the grace of others, our language exists for listeners, and even our involuntary signals — the blush, the quaver in the voice — are adaptations that make us legible to those around us. The self, in the end, is not a lonely Cartesian theater but a node in a web of mutual prediction, constituted by and for its relationships.

 

 

I am not my problem

I use this MindBlog to go back and look myself up occasionally, and so pass on this re-post of my 10/26/2025 post:

An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. The title of this post - the (apparently nonsensical) sentence "I am not my problem” - is the latest example. The sentence can to be parsed to indicate in this instance that the "I" is referring to the illusory narrative self that our social brains have been designed by evolution to generate, and the "my" refers to our intuition or sensing of the vastly complex underlying interacting body systems (respiratory, circulatory, neuronal, muscular, endocrine, sensory, etc.) from which this veneer of a self rises. The brain is mainly not for thinking. It appears that several styles of meditation practice can expand our awareness of this fundamental generative layer. The "am not my problem" tries to make the point that distinguishing these systems can prove useful in trying to determine the origins of particular feelings or behaviors. 

As I’m writing these words I begin to realize that my “novel” waking insight isn’t so novel, but more an elaboration or restatement of my post of Friday, March 13, 2020, on “the relief of not being yourself,” which described another spontaneous rising of ideas associated with the transition between sleep and wakefulness. I repeat that text here:

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective personal journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.

There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.

What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

(the above is a re-post of my 6/6/22 post) 

Dangerous Ideas.......

Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original post are as fresh and relevant now as they were then, before the appearance of the iPhone, social media, and contracting attention spans.  The Edge.org link that once took you to the essays supporting the 'dangerous ideas' now takes you to their published version on Amazon. The "Reality Club" and John Brockman's "Third Culture" cohort of intellectuals has largely dispersed, although you will note many names still quite prominent today.   Here is the 2006 post:

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Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are.

I am not my problem

An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. The title of this post - the (apparently nonsensical) sentence "I am not my problem” - is the latest example. The sentence can to be parsed to indicate in this instance that the "I" is referring to the illusory narrative self that our social brains have been designed by evolution to generate, and the "my" refers to our intuition or sensing of the vastly complex underlying interacting body systems (respiratory, circulatory, neuronal, muscular, endocrine, sensory, etc.) from which this veneer of a self rises. The brain is mainly not for thinking. It appears that several styles of meditation practice can expand our awareness of this fundamental generative layer. The "am not my problem" tries to make the point that distinguishing these systems can prove useful in trying to determine the origins of particular feelings or behaviors. 

As I’m writing these words I begin to realize that my “novel” waking insight isn’t so novel, but more an elaboration or restatement of my post of Friday, March 13, 2020, on “the relief of not being yourself,” which described another spontaneous rising of ideas associated with the transition between sleep and wakefulness. I repeat that text here:

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective persona

An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. The title of this post - the (apparently nonsensical) sentence "I am not my problem” - is the latest example. The sentence can to be parsed to indicate in this instance that the "I" is referring to the illusory narrative self that our social brains have been designed by evolution to generate, and the "my" refers to our intuition or sensing of the vastly complex underlying interacting body systems (respiratory, circulatory, neuronal, muscular, endocrine, sensory, etc.) from which this veneer of a self rises. The brain is mainly not for thinking. It appears that several styles of meditation practice can expand our awareness of this fundamental generative layer. The "am not my problem" tries to make the point that distinguishing these systems can prove useful in trying to determine the origins of particular feelings or behaviors. 

As I’m writing these words I begin to realize that my “novel” waking insight isn’t so novel, but more an elaboration or restatement of my post of Friday, March 13, 2020, on “the relief of not being yourself,” which described another spontaneous rising of ideas associated with the transition between sleep and wakefulness. I repeat that text here:

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective personal journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.

There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.

What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

(the above is a re-post of my 6/6/22 post) 

l journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.

There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.

What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

(the above is a re-post of my 6/6/22 post) 

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes.

Enlightenment traditions in Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight have a common issue. How can the central canon or dogma of the way things are be renewed and kept fresh? The usual practice is to repeat a liturgy set down by gurus or priests of a given tradition. The problem is that with each repetition the message  begins to loose its force. The transforming clarity of the initial enlightenment fades as the habituation and desensitization associated with all repetitive activities begins to set in. Temporary resets can sometimes be found by turning to different vendors of the central message who  deliver their respective theory or practice sessions in sonorous and calming voices, in person or online. Longer lectures from workshops or retreats have yielded audience share to increasingly  brief presentations that accommodate the diminished attention spans of those under 30 who have never known a world without social media. They can prefer to absorb information in transient instances of tik-tok mind, X/twitter mind, or instagram mind seconds to a few minutes in duration.

I have listened to several hundred instructional lectures. As I see the same basic points reframed in many different ways, it is clear that the fundamental axioms of enlightenment that are expressible in language are being repetitively rediscovered throughout history and repeatedly archived.  I feel like their verbal messages are as ingrained in my consciousness as the language of the mathematical and chemical structures I have known most of my life.

My flippant 'non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes’ phrase in the title of this post is meaning to point to the fact that the market for vendors of enlightenment is a distinctive one. Existential angst, or worrying about value, purpose, and meaning seem most pressing to a relatively small number of highly urbanized and literate humans. I can’t imagine that my two Abyssinian cats, who I sometimes takes to be my best role models, spend a significant fraction of their time worrying about the meaning of it all, or pondering the subtleties of epistemology and ontology. 

So...what beyond words? A space or perspective that doesn’t contain them can only be pointed at by using them in the dualistic linguistic context of a sender and receiver. I can, for example, try to use words to give a crude voice to the mute homeostatic generative visceral organic axes of valence and arousal that underlie and generate everything that I am and experience right now: “Dude, get a grip, I (the visceral one) am the one who is actually running this show, deciding where it goes and whether it works or shuts down. The sooner the “I” you imagine yourself to be realizes this and lets go, the sooner some kind of sane space is attained. All of the surface behaviors acted out for others to see - Deric the family man, the professor, the pianist - are shadow play shimmering on the surface of this basic organic substrate, like water insects skittering around on the surface of a pond. What is writing these words is just another one of the contents of consciousness flitting past. Just turn yourself around to look quickly for the writer…what do you see? What do you see as you imagine being first born into this world? The brief glimpses of expanded naive awareness sometimes elicited by questions such as these have the potential of permitting a scrubbing, refreshing, or renewal of consciousness in a way that permits more choice in selecting which prior individual selves and self habits rise to compose current self conscious life. 

Different iterations of these sentiments, different vendings of the sort mentioned in the first paragraph above, can be found in two previous MindBlog posts. One from Nov. 25, 2022:  

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises.  

And the other from Oct. 26, 2022, , passing on a masterful exposition from James Low that I can not improve on.

If you want stability, if you want real peace, you already have that in the nature of awareness. But if you look to manifestation, to patterning of yourself, to thinking you could establish a stable personalty, to live a life in which you were happy all the time, or in which you were your own person, that way madness lies. To find our original face, to find the ground of our primordial being, we need to release our fixation on the dialogic movement of subject and object, and allow ourselves to be the space within which the movement of experience is occurring. Awareness means being aware that we are present without being something as such. This is a great mystery. When we look at phenomena the world, things exist as something. A car is not a cow, an apple is not an orange, compare and contrast, category allocation. That’s how our cognition, our conceptual elaboration functions to give a seemingly enduring structure to identifications. But awareness can’t be caught. It’s not a thing. You can’t pin a tail on the donkey, there is no donkey there. The mind is not an object for itself, it is self luminous awareness, but you can’t catch it. You can never know your mind but you can be your mind. We are awareness and that’s a very important distinction. 

(The above is an updated,  revised and edited version of my Jan. 2, 2023 post.) 

Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures

Value, purpose, and meaning vary between  religions and cultures, and are best viewed as emergent properties supporting altruistic behaviors bonding us into groups that have proven to be more successful at sustaining themselves over multiple generations.   I take the value, purpose, and meaning of my life as being to exist as an expanded present centered awareness that encompasses all of this - the space in which thoughts, feelings, selves appear and disappear. 

Our transient Anthropocene era is a brief moment in the vast history of this planet and the cosmos. The disappearance of our human species as we know it is a certainty, a transition either to extinction or to a further evolved trans-human form. Understanding and accepting this can be a source of serenity that enables us to live fully in the present moment as grateful witnesses to what is unfolding.