Some rambling on "Selves" and "Purpose"

I've decided to re-post the following text from a MindBlog post of Oct. 9, 2007, which I found while cruising old posts. A bit terse and disjointed, but I like the general sentiments.

Self conscious "Purpose" of the sort we humans experience, in the service of crafting new political movements or environments, is an evolved psychology that (sometimes) helps pass on our genes, and requires our distinctively human self reflective "I". Our behavior and that of other animals also reflects a kind of purpose that has been formed by our evolutionary and developmental history. In other animals such behaviors are acted out on the cusp of an eternal present - there is no evidence that they "know that they know" in the way that we can.

Both modern neuroscience and Buddhist psychology inform us that the self and the purpose that each of us experiences is an illusion or confabulation of our brains - hopefully a useful one - whose utility is tested by how it enhances our energy and individual survival. This 'illusion' is a powerful instrument of downward causation, regulating our psychological, immune, neuro-endocrine robustness.

What is especially amazing is that our human body/brain can sometimes use meditative or other techniques to bootstrap to a level of metacognition that rests antecedent to - and can be the detached observer of - the generation of this illusion of a self and its purposes.

The maximum power of our self illusion, for most of us, goes with our heartfelt immersion and belief in it (i.e., our delusion). From such a immersion, it can be more difficult to discern or appreciate the different selves and purposes of other humans, and their cultures and historical eras.

Feeling bad is not bad.

MindBlog is passing on the link to each of Arthur Brooks' biweekly articles in his series "How to Build a Life". This latest installment deals with negative emotions, using them to grow and develop resilience rather than pushing them away. It is more difficult to summarize in a tidy way as I have some previous installments in the series. I suggest you read the whole piece. I will note the last two paragraphs:

One last thought: In 2019, the comedian Stephen Colbert was asked in an interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about a plane crash that killed Colbert’s father and two of his brothers when he was 10 years old. Cooper quoted a previous statement by Colbert that he had learned to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” He asked Colbert to clarify this extraordinary remark. “It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering,” Colbert replied. “I don’t want it to have happened … but if you are grateful for your life … then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.”

Colbert’s words resonated deeply with me, and perhaps they do with you, too. No normal person skips merrily into a tragic loss, nor usually seeks out even minor discomfort. But those things find us, over and over again in life. This is especially true today, in the era of COVID-19. The meaning from this pain, and the benefits it can bring to our lives and society, comes from how we choose to use it.

The psyche is not inside us but between us.

I want to pass on a few clips from an article by psychotherapist James Barnes on the work and ideas of Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), a central figure in mid-20th-century psychoanalysis, whose theory was:

...radically at odds with the Freudian model and indeed the models employed by modern psychiatry and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)...he saw the area in between self and other as the proper domain of mental life and the place where it develops. He largely circumvented the subject-object dualism inherent in the Freudian model of mind (which both the Ego-psychologists and the Kleinians subscribed to) and espoused, or at least regularly insinuated, a fundamentally unitary conception of self and other...Freud and the schools that followed him saw any apparent continuity of self and other – an experience common to the infant, ‘psychotics’ and ‘regressed patients’ alike – as a narcissistic delusion that had to be confronted. By taking the continuity of self and other seriously, Winnicott flipped this picture on its head. He thought of it, in fact, as primary.

Winnicott believed that separate minds give way to experiential units – that subjects with minds emerge out of the domain of interpersonal relations: the ‘social matrix of psyche’... Thus, far from being separate, closed-off entities that somehow manage to figure out each other externally, we are, according to Winnicott, radically open beings in immediate contact with each other.

Winnicott expressed this idea enigmatically when he said: ‘There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.’ His perspective is most relevant for understanding a baby’s experience with her parents, but it’s at the core of all experience, even though we don’t usually recognise it as such. Experience of the world and others is the primary given, and minds – rather than traversing an existing separation – are in a certain sense responsible for creating it. Effectively, this is an inversion of Freud’s dualistic model.

Winnicott’s divergence from subject-object dualism is perhaps most clearly illustrated by his firm belief that we never extricate ourselves from this transitional realm and its subject-object mix-up – nor would we want to. For Freud, and for reductive psychiatry and CBT alike, there is a fundamental assumption that objective states of affairs in an independent world are the basic truth of experience. Indeed, the models rise and fall with the veracity of this picture.

However, Winnicott had a very different vision. He wrote of culture – its artifacts and its activities – as extensions of the transitional phenomena of childhood, themselves rooted in the original mix-up with the parent. He thought that the very worlds we inhabit and take for granted are always partly of our own making. For Winnicott, it is only because the worlds we experience are coextensive with ourselves that they feel alive, alluring and psychically experienceable in the first instance, rather than like cold, mathematical structures, as scientific materialism would have us believe. In this way, Winnicott’s psychological paradox of subject and object becomes a philosophical paradox of idealism and materialism...These fundamental views now lie at the heart of what’s known in modern parlance as relational and intersubjective depth psychotherapy.

Barnes proceeds to argue that the one-person psychologies of the Freudian and cognitive behavioral therapy models have caused social damage, and that we would do well to go:

...back to Winnicott - to his vision of the psyche as intimately interpersonal and social in nature; to his centralisation of interpersonal trauma and deficit at the root of our suffering; and to his profound insights into the area in between, which come into focus when we do so.

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

(Note: I have begun to slowly go though the posts on MindBlog, which began in Feb. of 2006, over 14 years ago.  Here I repeat the post that appeared on March 14, 2006.  I could have written it yesterday, without changing a word.)

The classical Christian apostle's creed, over 1600 years old and formulated soon after the writing of the New Testament, is a series of "I believe....." statements. Without thinking too much about it, I've decided to quickly write down a few sentences to suggest the very different creed that I follow. Here they are:

I believe the most fundamental content of our minds to be the sensed physical breathing and moving body, a quiet awareness that underlies our surface waves of emotions and thoughts.

I believe that this awareness can begin to experience a larger process, closer to the machinery that is generating a self, a process that observes rather than being completely defined by the current narrative "I" chatter of who-I-am or what-it-is-I-do.

I believe that this awareness can expand to feel its part in a a drama of evolving life on this planet and an evolving universe - a theater much more universal than conventional cultural or religious myths.

I believe that this awareness can enhance the depth, sanity, and sensed completion of each moment. It provides a sense of wholeness and sufficiency from which actions rise. It makes contact with other humans more sane and whole.

Rules for identifying your life's work.

During this time of virtual or postponed college graduations, Arthur Brooks does a relevant installment in his bi-weekly series for Atlantic Magazine. I'm going to pass on just sentence or two of each of his rules for graduates in finding your calling, and suggest you read the whole article:  

Rule 1. The work has to be the reward.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in their careers is to treat work primarily as a means to an end. Whether that end is money, power, or prestige, this instrumentalization of work leads to unhappiness.

Rule 2. An interesting career is better than a fun career.

Interest is considered by many neuroscientists to be a positive primary emotion, processed in the limbic system of the brain. Something that truly interests you is intensely pleasurable; it also must have meaning in order to hold your interest. Thus, “Is this work deeply interesting to me?” is a helpful litmus test of [for] a job.

Rule 3. A career doesn’t have to be a straight line.

Scholars at the University of Southern California have studied career patterns and come up with four broad categories. The first are linear careers, which climb steadily upward, with everything building on everything else...There are three others. Steady-state careers involve staying at one job and growing in expertise. Transitory careers are ones in which people jump from job to job or even field to field, looking for new challenges. Spiral careers, the last category, are more like a series of mini careers—people spend many years developing in a profession, then shift fields seeking not just for novelty, but for work that builds on the skills of their previous mini careers.

Rule 4. Beware of unhealthy passions.

This rule refines Rule 3. Yes, look for something in which you are intensely interested. But go further and ask, “Is my interest obsessive, or harmonious? Does this job or career bring out the best in me? Does it make me a happier, better person, or, in pursuing it, am I neglecting other important things life has to offer?”

Arthur Brooks on "The Hero's Journey" and retirement

In the most recent installment of Arthur Brooks’ biweekly column in The Atlantic, which I suggest that you read, he talks about the classical hero's journey in literature, described by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell as a lens through which many people see their lives:

It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return...The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script...Joseph Campbell...notes that...“The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.” In other words, the end of the true hero’s journey is coming home and finding a battle to be waged not with an external enemy, but with one’s own demons...your skills will decline, and life’s problems will intrude. If you try to hang on to glory, or lash out when it fades, it will squander your victories and mark an unhappy end to your journey.

Plan to spend the last part of your life serving others, loving your family and friends, and being a good example to those still in the first three stages of their own hero’s journey. Happiness in retirement depends on your choice of narrative.

Why does awe have prosocial effects?

An interesting perspective from Perlin and Li:

Awe is an emotional response to stimuli that are perceived to be vast (e.g., tall trees, sunsets) and that defy accommodation by existing mental structures. Curiously, awe has prosocial effects despite often being elicited by nonsocial stimuli. The prevailing explanation for why awe has prosocial effects is that awe reduces attention to self-oriented concerns (i.e., awe makes the self small), thereby making more attention available for other-oriented concerns. However, several questions remain unaddressed by the current formulation of this small-self hypothesis. How are awe researchers defining the self, and what implications might their theory of selfhood have for understanding the “smallness” of the self? Building on theories regarding psychological selfhood, we propose that awe may interact with the self not just in terms of attentional focus but rather at multiple layers of selfhood. We further reinterpret the small self using the notion of the quiet ego from personality psychology. Linking awe to an enriched model of the self provided by personality psychology may be fruitful for explaining a range of phenomena and motivating future research.

Non-invasive DIY brain stimulators are a bad idea.

I must admit that I've been sorely tempted to have a try with one of the transcranial magnetic or direct current stimulators, easily ordered from web vendors, whose use is claimed to enhance your smarts or chill you out. A meta-analysis by Smits et al. casts cold water on the prospects of these working as advertised.

Excessive emotional responses to stressful events can detrimentally affect psychological functioning and mental health. Recent studies have provided evidence that non-invasive brain stimulation (NBS) targeting the prefrontal cortex (PFC) can affect the regulation of stress-related emotional responses. However, the reliability and effect sizes have not been systematically analyzed. In the present study, we reviewed and meta-analyzed the effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the PFC on acute emotional stress reactivity in healthy individuals. Forty sham-controlled single-session rTMS and tDCS studies were included. Separate random effects models were performed to estimate the mean effect sizes of emotional reactivity. Twelve rTMS studies together showed no evidence that rTMS over the PFC influenced emotional reactivity. Twenty-six anodal tDCS studies yielded a weak beneficial effect on stress-related emotional reactivity (Hedges’ g = −0.16, CI95% = [−0.33, 0.00]). These findings suggest that a single session of NBS is insufficient to induce reliable, clinically significant effects but also provide preliminary evidence that specific NBS methods can affect emotional reactivity. This may motivate further research into augmenting the efficacy of NBS protocols on stress-related processes.

Stress can be enhancing.

Beibowitz and Crum do an Op-Ed piece that is worth a read, noting:

Over a decade of research — ours and that of others — suggests that it’s not the type or amount of stress that determines its impact. Instead, it’s our mind-set about stress that matters most.

The Authors note research showing that adopting a “stress-is-enhancing” mind-set does not diminish the amount of stress being experienced, but does minimize its harmful effects. They describe a three step process to harness the benefits of stress: Acknowledge your stress, own your stress, then leverage your stress to achieve your goals and connect more deeply with the things that matter most.

Self Help during the COVID-19 crisis.

MindBlog is getting bombarded by emails from websites and organizations wanting to advertise their advice on how to cope with our current crisis. The "infographics" that are offered are fronts for commercial sites wanting to sell you something, and I don't pass them on. I do want to pass on one Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook meme pointed out by a friend:

Also,  David Brooks' piece on mental health in the age of the coronavirus is worth reading...

The pandemic spreads an existential feeling of unsafety, which registers in the neurons around your heart, lungs and viscera. It alters your nervous system, changing the way you see and perceive threat..It’s very hard to grasp what’s going on so deep inside. “All trauma is preverbal,” Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in his book “The Body Keeps the Score.” “Rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”...The best way to combat this visceral sense of fear and disassociation is by having ... experiences of deep reciprocal attunement with others that make you feel viscerally safe...I asked the experts whether they thought it was possible to have this sort of deep, visceral attunement over the internet. They thought it was, as long you can see the other person’s face and hear vocal tone. “The internet is a huge variable in this pandemic,” Dr. van der Kolk told me. “We have a profound new way to comfort one another.”

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself.

I am going to start occasionally doing MindBlog posts on ideas that I think might have the potential of developing into longer pieces of work, but that usually remain as notes in my personal journal. This first one follows in the thread of Monday’s post on the work of Sam Harris. It came together when I woke during the middle of the night to find my mind clogged with a traffic jam of discursive thought. Then what appeared in my mind, in what felt like a mini-epiphany, was the words that I pass on below. They may make little sense to many readers, but please be assured that I have not gone wacko or nutter....

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?)

(I would add the note, as I did to Monday's post, that experiences of the sort I describe here can be very disorienting to some people, and should be approached with caution. A google search for the names Willoughby Britton and Jarred Lindahl will take you to their papers on this issue.)

Optimism and longevity.

I want to point to recent articles relevant to an issue most of us mull about: "Is my glass half empty or half full?" Jane Brody describes a number of studies linking greater optimism to a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and other chronic ailments and to fostering “exceptional" longevity, defined as living to 85 and beyond. And Susan Shain does a self-help piece, citing numerous studies on how to be more optimistic. Finally, Parker-Pope, in the NYTimes Well section summarizes her recipe:  

Spend time with optimistic people. Optimism, like pessimism, can be infectious.  

Reframe negative situations. When something bad happens, ask yourself if there is a potential upside. A setback at work can be an opportunity to rethink your goals. By mindfully looking for a positive, we retrain our brains, and optimism will come more naturally.  

Minimize your exposure to negative news. Don’t bury your head in the sand, but when bad news hits, educate yourself and then turn it off. We don’t need to expose ourselves to a 24-7 bad news cycle just because it’s there.

Start a gratitude practice. Try writing a nightly journal documenting three good things from your day. Or start meals with a family conversation about how you dealt with a daily challenge.

Try meditation. A daily meditation practice is a great way to ease your mind and shift yourself into more positive thoughts.  

Adopt a mantra. When times get tough, fall back on a mantra that can put you in the right frame of mind. “I’ve got this!” or “Accept what you can’t change” can help you get through tough times.

A magic mushroom nose spray for psychedelic microdosing?

Rich Haridy does an interesting article in New Atlas. A few clips:

Alongside the rapidly progressing psychedelic science movement, with researchers rigorously exploring the medical and therapeutic uses of previously taboo psychoactive compounds, is a growing grassroots movement to decriminalize some of these substances...The movement ostensibly started with the passing of a ballot initiative in the City and County of Denver back in March. The publicly voted initiative essentially decriminalized the personal use and possession of magic mushrooms...The long game here is looking toward the 2020 US elections and getting a variety of measures on state ballots...Predicting a wave of psychedelic legalization over the coming decade, Oregon-based start-up Silo Wellness has reportedly developed a magic mushroom nasal spray focused on delivering exact, controlled psychedelic microdoses via an easy inhaler...The product is currently being developed in Jamaica, one of the only countries in the world where magic mushrooms are completely legal.

The science is certainly still out over whether psychedelic microdosing confers real benefits or whether the technique is a glorified placebo, akin to psychedelic homeopathy. As scientists work to clinically verify the effects, and safety, of sustained tiny psychedelic drug doses, there is debate over how much of a dose actually constitutes a microdose.

...there is little agreement in the psychedelic community over whether the movement should push for broad legalization, or a more limited decriminalization...Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling psychedelic science book How To Change Your Mind, summed up these divisions in an influential New York Times op-ed earlier in 2019 titled “Not So Fast on Psychedelic Mushrooms”.

Pollan’s general argument is that while psilocybin seems to be traveling a similar path to legalization as cannabis traversed, we should be clear in understanding they are two very different substances. He supports decriminalization of some psychedelic drugs, and enthusiastically promotes the growing medical and therapeutic uses being researched, but is concerned recreational legalization of psychedelics could be dangerous to unleash into a culture dominated by capitalist sentiment.

“I see cannabis being promoted and pushed to people, as capitalism will do,” Pollan said at an event in Melbourne in July. “When I come home from this trip on Monday and I cross through Bay Ridge from the airport to Berkeley, I’ll see three or four billboards for companies that can deliver cannabis to my home in two hours, and I just don’t think we know enough to legalize these [psychedelic] drugs.”

“We should take lessons from cultures that have been using psychedelics for thousands of years,” he said in July. “They’re always used in a very careful cultural container. They’re never used casually, people don’t take them alone, there’s always an elder involved and there’s always an intention involved … We haven’t devised that proper container and I think we need to do that before we legalize it.”

MindBlog reviews the HealthyMinds App

The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, established by my former University of Wisconsin colleague Richard Davidson, is trying to export the results of its basic research into practical forms - workplace programs, school programs, and now an App for tablets or cell phones.

I've put the App on my iPhone, and want to report my experience of going through its sequence of mini-lectures and exercises, organized under five categories: Foundations, awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. The basic science presented and the exercises were familiar to me, and I was struck by how effectively the essence of each was presented in its most simple and accessible form. (I would have liked to have been able to see the brief voice lectures also offered in text form.) For example, the instruction most often seen for the exercise of paying attention to breathing suggest counting each breath, from one to nine or ten, then repeating, and returning to this practice when one notices having been distracted by other thoughts.  Why not just count to three, as instructed by the App.  It is more simple, and equally effective.  For each of the exercises, one can choose a sitting or active version (active meaning doing routine, but not novel, activities),  a male or female narrator, and varying duration from 5 to 30 min.  It was not until I had finished the available series of lectures and exercises and tried to go back to earlier stages and examine them in more detail that I encountered a requirement that a subscription be purchased (~$5/month, but see below).   If the ideas and exercises presented were less familiar to me, and I was not already fairly settled in my various practices, I'm sure I would purchase a subscription to the App.

(added note: Please see the comment below.  A subscription is not required to repeat the Foundations section I was describing. It is  offered for further engagement of the Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose modules.) 

Feeling grateful - a shortcut to virtuous behavior.

Psychologist David DeSteno, in an Aeon essay, summarizes his experiments suggesting that moving towards a more virtuous life might accomplished by simply cultivating gratitude, a more simple route than through deep deliberation on noble qualities such as honesty and generosity. Subjects were asked to report the results of a coin toss in which heads yielded a larger financial reward than tails. The coins were rigged to always come up tails.

The percentage of cheaters fell by half (from almost 49 per cent to 27 per cent) among those who had just recalled a time when they felt grateful, compared with those who described a time when they felt happy or no particular emotion at all.

They then did a second experiment that..

...had two key differences. First, the coin flip determined whether any given participant would have to complete an enjoyable 10-minute task or a difficult 45-minute one. Second, we led participants to believe that the next person to come would be assigned to complete whichever task remained.

In deciding to cheat by reporting that the virtual coin flip came up heads, people were giving themselves a much shorter and more enjoyable task, but in so doing, were also unfairly dooming another person to a more onerous task.

As one might imagine, the overall frequency of cheating was lower. Nonetheless, gratitude worked in the exact same way. Whereas 17 per cent of people cheated when feeling neutral or happy, only 2 per cent cheated when feeling grateful.

The empirical literature shows a similar influence of gratitude on other virtues. People feeling grateful are more likely to help others who request assistance, to divide their profits in a more egalitarian way, to be loyal even at cost to themselves, to be less materialistic, and even to exercise as opposed to loafing.

Psilocybin + Mindfulness Meditation change brain connectivity - lasting positive effects

Dolan points to work by Smigielski et al.:

Both psychedelics and meditation exert profound modulatory effects on consciousness, perception and cognition, but their combined, possibly synergistic effects on neurobiology are unknown. Accordingly, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 38 participants following a single administration of the psychedelic psilocybin (315 μg/kg p.o.) during a 5-day mindfulness retreat. Brain dynamics were quantified directly pre- and post-intervention by functional magnetic resonance imaging during the resting state and two meditation forms. The analysis of functional connectivity identified psilocybin-related and mental state–dependent alterations in self-referential processing regions of the default mode network (DMN). Notably, decoupling of medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, which is thought to mediate sense of self, was associated with the subjective ego dissolution effect during the psilocybin-assisted mindfulness session. The extent of ego dissolution and brain connectivity predicted positive changes in psycho-social functioning of participants 4 months later. Psilocybin, combined with meditation, facilitated neurodynamic modulations in self-referential networks, subserving the process of meditation by acting along the anterior–posterior DMN connection. The study highlights the link between altered self-experience and subsequent behavioral changes. Understanding how interventions facilitate transformative experiences may open novel therapeutic perspectives. Insights into the biology of discrete mental states foster our understanding of non-ordinary forms of human self-consciousness and their concomitant brain substrate.

Training wisdom - the Illeist (third person) method.

I think my most sane moments are those when I experience myself as watching, in third-person mode, rather than “being” Deric, the immersed actor. Science journalist David Robson does an essay on this perspective in Aeon, “Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser,” noting that this ancient rhetorical method, used by Julius Caesar and termed ‘illeism’ in 1809 by the poet Coleridge (latin ille meaning ‘he, that’) can clear the emotional fog of simple rumination, shifting perspective to see past biases. Robson notes the work of Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada, whose aim is:

...to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom, which had long been considered too nebulous for scientific enquiry. In one of his earlier experiments, he established that it’s possible to measure wise reasoning and that, as with IQ, people’s scores matter. He did this by asking participants to discuss out-loud a personal or political dilemma, which he then scored on various elements of thinking long-considered crucial to wisdom, including: intellectual humility; taking the perspective of others; recognising uncertainty; and having the capacity to search for a compromise. Grossmann found that these wise-reasoning scores were far better than intelligence tests at predicting emotional wellbeing, and relationship satisfaction – supporting the idea that wisdom, as defined by these qualities, constitutes a unique construct that determines how we navigate life challenges.

The abstract from Grossmann et al.:

We tested the utility of illeism – a practice of referring to oneself in the third person – for the trainability of wisdom-related characteristics in everyday life: i) wise reasoning (intellectual humility, open-mindedness in ways a situation may unfold, perspective-taking, attempts to integrate different viewpoints) and ii) accuracy in emotional forecasts toward close others. In a month-long field experiment, people adopted either the third-person training or first-person control perspective when describing their most significant daily experiences. Assessment of spontaneous wise reasoning before and after the intervention revealed substantial growth in the training (vs. control) condition. At the end of the intervention, people forecasted their feelings toward a close other in challenging situations. A month later, these forecasted feelings were compared against their experienced feelings. Participants in the training (vs. control) condition showed greater alignment of forecasts and experiences, largely due to changes in their emotional experiences. The present research demonstrates a path to evidence-based training of wisdom-related processes via the practice of illeism.

Robson finds this work particularly fascinating,

...considering the fact that illeism is often considered to be infantile. Just think of Elmo in the children’s TV show Sesame Street, or the intensely irritating Jimmy in the sitcom Seinfeld – hardly models of sophisticated thinking. Alternatively, it can be taken to be the sign of a narcissistic personality – the very opposite of personal wisdom. After all, Coleridge believed that it was a ruse to cover up one’s own egotism: just think of the US president’s critics who point out that Donald Trump often refers to himself in the third person. Clearly, politicians might use illeism for purely rhetorical purposes but, when applied to genuine reflection, it appears to be a powerful tool for wiser reasoning.

For an example of third person usage reflecting not wisdom, but a narcissistic personality, look no further than our current president, Donald Trump, as noted in this Washington Post piece by Rieger.

More diversity in Flow-land.

I will pass on part of an email from Mr. Todd Denen occasioned by my 8/16/19 post, in which he assures me, that unlike the Flow Genome Project and Flow Collective Research Project discussed in that post, his Flow Research University is legit:

“ My name is Todd Denen and I just came across your post on the FGP guys. I just wanted to say not all Flow training programs are bullshit.....

I'm the founder of the Advanced Flow University which teaches the Flow state from the perspective of the Yogi Flow Experts.

In my book, PEAK PERFORMANCE SECRETS, I reveal the Advanced Flow Techniques which have been used by the Yogi Flow Experts for over 5,000 years. This has allowed them to achieve the highest level of Consciousness, the 7th Level of Flow.

If you are interested, I'm doing a promotion on it right now and you can get it for free on Amazon….."

Here is a screen shot showing only three of the numerous free books by Mr. Denen available from Amazon's Kindle offerings.

I couldn't resist downloading and having a look at "Peak Performance Secrets" and "FLOW STATE SEX TEST" (Advanced Flow University Book 3).

Unbelievable stuff.   Kudos to Amazon for its carefully vetted high quality Kindle offerings!

A Schism in Flow-land? Flow Genome Project vs. Flow Research Collective

In Nov. 2017 I did a scathing review of  the "Stealing Fire" book by Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler - in support of expensive workshops offered by their "Flow Genome Project" - purporting to show the latest science relevant to the flow states of enhanced human performance described in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s original writings on this subject. I judged the book a mess, with very little of substance to offer. A follow up post in Sept. 2018 passed on an exchange between one dissatisfied customer and a representative of the flow genome workshops.

Given this background, I can't resist passing on to MindBlog readers an email I just received indicating that there has been trouble in Flow-land... Mr. Kotler and Mr. Wheal have apparently split up and are now present competing websites, both very slick, with Mr. Kotler's (https://www.flowresearchcollective.com) radiating a bit more gravitas than Mr. Wheal's (https://www.flowgenomeproject.com.) Here is the email:

Hey there, 

I work with Steven Kotler who is featured in this article on your site. I have a critical request to change the text and link from Flow Genome Project to Flow Research Collective as this is Steven's new company. 

Currently there is traffic that is being directed from your site to the old company that Steven resigned from and so it's important that we get this updated so that the piece is accurate and up to date. 

We are not requesting that the mention of Flow Genome Project must be withdrawn in relation to Jamie, just that we need it to be clear that Steven is with the Flow Research Collective and that we're directing toward's [sic] that site. 

Please confirm that this is possible. Thanks, 

Gabby-- Gabby Nuñez Chief Of Customer Service and Satisfaction 

W: flowresearchcollective.com

Continuing in the tradition of the "Stealing Fire" book the link in the email "this article on your site" is not to either of the posts I mention above (Nov. 2017, Sept. 2018), but to all the posts done in Nov. and Dec.  of 2017.

I'm not taking the time to look further into this, but would suggest that any potential clients of these expensive purportedly transformational programs do due diligence. CAVEAT EMPTOR!

Correlating our our physical and mental experiences of stress linked to psychological and physical well-being

Davidson and colleagues at the Univ. of Wisconsin show that individual differences in the ability to associate subjective stress and heart rate are related to psychological and physical well being. Here is a description of the work from a newsletter, followed by the abstract from Psychological Sciences. They:

...analyzed data from 1,065 participants in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, a longitudinal effort looking at well-being as adults age. Participants completed a series of stressful computer tasks, including a mental math task and a color identification task.

Before, during and after the tasks, researchers measured participants’ heart rate and asked them to rate their stress on a scale of one to 10 throughout the study.

After the participants completed the stress tests, researchers compared each person’s heart rate to the stress levels they reported — a measure called “stress-heart rate coherence”— and found that some people’s stress levels aligned with their heart rate better than others.

To examine the link between stress-heart rate coherence and people’s emotional well-being, researchers used psychological questionnaires focused on well-being, depression, anxiety and coping as well as blood samples measuring inflammation markers. Researchers found that people with greater stress-heart rate coherence had fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, greater overall psychological well-being and lower levels of inflammation.

Here is the journal article's abstract:

The physiological response to stress is intertwined with, but distinct from, the subjective feeling of stress, although both systems must work in concert to enable adaptive responses. We investigated 1,065 participants from the Midlife in the United States 2 study who completed a self-report battery and a stress-induction procedure while physiological and self-report measures of stress were recorded. Individual differences in the association between heart rate and self-reported stress were analyzed in relation to measures that reflect psychological well-being (self-report measures of well-being, anxiety, depression), denial coping, and physical well-being (proinflammatory biomarkers interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein). The within-participants association between heart rate and self-reported stress was significantly related to higher psychological well-being, fewer depressive symptoms, lower trait anxiety, less use of denial coping, and lower levels of proinflammatory biomarkers. Our results highlight the importance of studying individual differences in coherence between physiological measures and subjective mental states in relation to well-being.

And here is a PDF of the article.