Several weeks ago, I bought myself a nice little gadget, the Muse S brain sensing headband, which is a consumer-grade EEG device for sleep tracking and neurofeedback. I use it predominantly for recording my brain waves during unguided meditation so that I can play around with the resulting EEG data. Being the overzealous data scientist that I am, I quickly (and likely prematurely in terms of data volume) jumped into all sorts of statistical tests and time-series analyses, partly reproducing, … [Read more...]

If your will—what you want—is determined by what you have learned through your environmental, parental, and sociocultural conditioning in conjunction with mimetic processes, then how is individuality possible? For one thing, all the learned contents, coming from an innumerable amount of different sources, are intermingled in a way that is perfectly unique to you: it is your personal learning history, which, in addition, is not linearly imposed onto you, but dynamically shaped by how you react … [Read more...]

You don't have your own will, and neither do I. Nobody has an individual will. In many posts on this blog I have assumed the opposite: that you must look within yourself in order to find out what you truly want—to find your True Will. I have now come to realize that I was constructing a mirage. In reality, your will is not some mystical individualistic force within you that demands excavation by digging into the depths of your "self." Rather, it is the dynamic result of everything you have … [Read more...]

In order to do what you want, you must know what you want and, ideally, why you want it. The most common reason why we want something is because others want it (this is called the mimetic theory of desire). We want a high-quality partner, successful children, a nice home, an expensive car, a purpose in life, financial freedom, and so forth—because that's what everybody else wants. Our desires are imitations of the desires of others. Differences in desires between people typically stem from … [Read more...]

Not matter how intelligent you are, you will still say and do stupid things to the extent that your mind is not cool. Only in a state of mindcoolness, unperturbed by distracting thoughts and emotions, can you access the full capacity of your intelligence. One prominent emotion that diminishes intelligence is anxiety, and it does so by restricting working memory capacity, which we need for processing information using complex cognitive operations, that is, for all tasks we typically associate … [Read more...]