Strong upvote for reporting on measured self-experimentation.
It doesn’t speak directly to your results, but: I was reading a comment elsewhere about the phenomenon of people having a meditative experience (like kensho), feeling very different subjectively, but then when they describe it to their friends/families/colleagues those people don’t notice anything different.
I noticed that I would shocked if a few months of doing something for an hour a day were to outweigh one or more decades of socialization, under the same stimuli as usual, enough that it would be casually obvious.
As a result, my estimation of how much meditation would be required to even make a good test got pushed much higher. Alternatively, and in my estimation more likely, casual observation is a very wrong thing to be looking at for evidence of the effectiveness of meditation.
Related, I suspect that other people are on average just really bad about picking up internal details about someone. For instance, it’s common for people to have depression for years without their friends noticing; people might even be driven to the point of suicide without anyone else suspecting a thing before that.
I think that in general, any outside demeanor is compatible with a huge range of different subjective experiences. Variations in the internal experience will only be noticed to the extent that it’s reflected in some pretty narrow set of variables that we’re picking up on.
I agree, but I suspect the causal relationship lines up the other way—we are very good at behaving a particular way in response to particular situations, regardless of our subjective experiences.
Strong upvote for reporting on measured self-experimentation.
It doesn’t speak directly to your results, but: I was reading a comment elsewhere about the phenomenon of people having a meditative experience (like kensho), feeling very different subjectively, but then when they describe it to their friends/families/colleagues those people don’t notice anything different.
I noticed that I would shocked if a few months of doing something for an hour a day were to outweigh one or more decades of socialization, under the same stimuli as usual, enough that it would be casually obvious.
As a result, my estimation of how much meditation would be required to even make a good test got pushed much higher. Alternatively, and in my estimation more likely, casual observation is a very wrong thing to be looking at for evidence of the effectiveness of meditation.
Related, I suspect that other people are on average just really bad about picking up internal details about someone. For instance, it’s common for people to have depression for years without their friends noticing; people might even be driven to the point of suicide without anyone else suspecting a thing before that.
I think that in general, any outside demeanor is compatible with a huge range of different subjective experiences. Variations in the internal experience will only be noticed to the extent that it’s reflected in some pretty narrow set of variables that we’re picking up on.
I agree, but I suspect the causal relationship lines up the other way—we are very good at behaving a particular way in response to particular situations, regardless of our subjective experiences.
That’s definitely true as well—a lot of the depressed people are putting up an act because that’s what (they feel) is expected of them.