“Mental training” is not the ideal concept handle for the activity I have in mind. “Metacognition” is relevant, but is more an aspect or basis of mental training, in the same way that strategy and tactics are an aspect and basis for a sports team’s play.
We have numerous rationality “drills,” such as forecasting practice, babble and prune prompts, making bets. To my understanding, many were pioneered by CFAR.
The practice of rationality involves studying object-level topics, drawing conclusions, and executing on decisions. In the sports metaphore, this is the analysis that precedes a game, and the game itself.
Drills and gameplay also require preliminary logistics. In literal sports, that involves buying equipment, preparing meals, finding transportation. The analogy in rationality is downloading and familiarizing yourself with software, finding relevant papers, contracting with a teacher, planning an experiment, and so on.
“Mental training,” as I conceive of it, is not analogous to any of these activities. As one further anti-example, athletes do a lot of strength and conditioning. The analogous activity in the sphere of rationality might involve memorizing widely useful bits of information, such as Baye’s theorem, getting more sleep, practicing dual n-back, or any other activity that is hoped either to make it easier to do certain specific calculations or to make your brain “stronger” in a way analogous to bulking up a muscle.
If “mental training” is not about doing any of these things, then what is it?
As I see it, “mental training” is equivalent to something like “body awareness.”
Body awareness is the ability to closely observe the movement and sensations in your body. It’s the ability to observe, identify, and predict the limits of your strength and endurance. It’s about building spatial awareness, learning when something you ate doesn’t sit right in your stomach, and how to move with grace without overthinking every individual motion.
When I got physical therapy a long time ago, one of my complaints was that I had trouble sleeping. My PT told me that I needed to learn how to make myself comfortable. I asked her “how?”, and she told me I just needed to figure it out for myself. Until that point, I hadn’t conceived of “making yourself comfortable” as a concrete skill you could learn, and was not at ease with the idea of learning such an ill-defined skill. However, I can now recognize that my PT was advising me to practice “body training” to build an awareness of how to be comfortable when I’m in bed trying to sleep.
Analogously, “mental training” is meant to build up your “mind awareness,” as opposed to your mental strength, your command of any specific set of facts, or any principles or techniques of rationality as we commonly discuss them on LessWrong. Although dealing with emotional problems commonly addressed in therapy is an aspect of “mental training,” we consider primarily the way that anxiety can impair (or sometimes help) with intellectual cognition.
“Mental training” doesn’t promise to directly make you mentally “strong.” Instead, it’s about developing awareness of your mental activity, expanding your sense of what’s possible and where your limits are, gaining a better sense of how your intellectual brain state can interface more appropriately with your activities and physical environment, and developing a useful language with which to discuss all this.
Out of the “mental awareness” that “mental training” seeks to inculcate might then arise a greater ability to use your present, ordinary intellect to greater effect. Instead of thinking “faster,” or having a “bigger” memory, we aim with “mental training” to use your brain speed and memory more efficiently and with better organization. It’s about getting the most out of what you have.
The parallel to “physical therapy” being so apt, I’m tempted to label this “intellectual therapy.” That’s a problematic label, though. Therapy implies a false promise of a scientific basis, it sounds too close to other things like “cognitive behavioral therapy,” and it might make some people think that it’s some sort of euphemism for propaganda. Furthermore, “intellectual” makes it sound like it’s all about academic knowledge, when in fact I am primarily interested in manipulating and controlling the qualia of conscious experience and applying that faculty to rationality. I’m more interested in learning how to build and trigger patterns of thought, not in evaluating propositions for their correctness except as a way to test those fundamentals.
It’s also important that the label not imply a one-size-fits-all, fast-results approach. Whatever this is, it’s a practice for enthusiasts that probably requires a lot of idiosyncratic adaptation and creativity, and pays off gradually over the course of years as people fit it into their own particular activities.
The activity isn’t just about the brain in isolation, though. So it’s closer to occupational therapy in that regard. We’re specifically interested in the brain as a tool, which we interface with other external tools in order to accomplish intellectual occupations.
I sort of want to call this “mentitation.” This word is almost unknown to Google, suggesting that the word doesn’t already have connotations to other people. Mentitation.com is available. I like that it avoids the word “therapy,” refers to something mental, and has the same reflective and no-instant-results vibe as “meditation.” I may start playing with the word “mentitation” and see if it feels like an apt concept handle for what I’m trying to promote.
Mentitation
“Mental training” is not the ideal concept handle for the activity I have in mind. “Metacognition” is relevant, but is more an aspect or basis of mental training, in the same way that strategy and tactics are an aspect and basis for a sports team’s play.
We have numerous rationality “drills,” such as forecasting practice, babble and prune prompts, making bets. To my understanding, many were pioneered by CFAR.
The practice of rationality involves studying object-level topics, drawing conclusions, and executing on decisions. In the sports metaphore, this is the analysis that precedes a game, and the game itself.
Drills and gameplay also require preliminary logistics. In literal sports, that involves buying equipment, preparing meals, finding transportation. The analogy in rationality is downloading and familiarizing yourself with software, finding relevant papers, contracting with a teacher, planning an experiment, and so on.
“Mental training,” as I conceive of it, is not analogous to any of these activities. As one further anti-example, athletes do a lot of strength and conditioning. The analogous activity in the sphere of rationality might involve memorizing widely useful bits of information, such as Baye’s theorem, getting more sleep, practicing dual n-back, or any other activity that is hoped either to make it easier to do certain specific calculations or to make your brain “stronger” in a way analogous to bulking up a muscle.
If “mental training” is not about doing any of these things, then what is it?
As I see it, “mental training” is equivalent to something like “body awareness.”
Body awareness is the ability to closely observe the movement and sensations in your body. It’s the ability to observe, identify, and predict the limits of your strength and endurance. It’s about building spatial awareness, learning when something you ate doesn’t sit right in your stomach, and how to move with grace without overthinking every individual motion.
When I got physical therapy a long time ago, one of my complaints was that I had trouble sleeping. My PT told me that I needed to learn how to make myself comfortable. I asked her “how?”, and she told me I just needed to figure it out for myself. Until that point, I hadn’t conceived of “making yourself comfortable” as a concrete skill you could learn, and was not at ease with the idea of learning such an ill-defined skill. However, I can now recognize that my PT was advising me to practice “body training” to build an awareness of how to be comfortable when I’m in bed trying to sleep.
Analogously, “mental training” is meant to build up your “mind awareness,” as opposed to your mental strength, your command of any specific set of facts, or any principles or techniques of rationality as we commonly discuss them on LessWrong. Although dealing with emotional problems commonly addressed in therapy is an aspect of “mental training,” we consider primarily the way that anxiety can impair (or sometimes help) with intellectual cognition.
“Mental training” doesn’t promise to directly make you mentally “strong.” Instead, it’s about developing awareness of your mental activity, expanding your sense of what’s possible and where your limits are, gaining a better sense of how your intellectual brain state can interface more appropriately with your activities and physical environment, and developing a useful language with which to discuss all this.
Out of the “mental awareness” that “mental training” seeks to inculcate might then arise a greater ability to use your present, ordinary intellect to greater effect. Instead of thinking “faster,” or having a “bigger” memory, we aim with “mental training” to use your brain speed and memory more efficiently and with better organization. It’s about getting the most out of what you have.
The parallel to “physical therapy” being so apt, I’m tempted to label this “intellectual therapy.” That’s a problematic label, though. Therapy implies a false promise of a scientific basis, it sounds too close to other things like “cognitive behavioral therapy,” and it might make some people think that it’s some sort of euphemism for propaganda. Furthermore, “intellectual” makes it sound like it’s all about academic knowledge, when in fact I am primarily interested in manipulating and controlling the qualia of conscious experience and applying that faculty to rationality. I’m more interested in learning how to build and trigger patterns of thought, not in evaluating propositions for their correctness except as a way to test those fundamentals.
It’s also important that the label not imply a one-size-fits-all, fast-results approach. Whatever this is, it’s a practice for enthusiasts that probably requires a lot of idiosyncratic adaptation and creativity, and pays off gradually over the course of years as people fit it into their own particular activities.
The activity isn’t just about the brain in isolation, though. So it’s closer to occupational therapy in that regard. We’re specifically interested in the brain as a tool, which we interface with other external tools in order to accomplish intellectual occupations.
I sort of want to call this “mentitation.” This word is almost unknown to Google, suggesting that the word doesn’t already have connotations to other people. Mentitation.com is available. I like that it avoids the word “therapy,” refers to something mental, and has the same reflective and no-instant-results vibe as “meditation.” I may start playing with the word “mentitation” and see if it feels like an apt concept handle for what I’m trying to promote.