(Note: This post is speculation based on memory and introspection and possibly completely mistaken. Any help in clarifying my thinking and gathering evidence on this would be greatly appreciated.)
I suspect that I’m also affected by this and just haven’t conciously noticed. Feels like I’m a lot more comfortable with analytical modes than more intuitive/social ones and probably spending more time inducing them than I should.
I’d like to be more aware of my mental modes and find more effective ways of influencing them. Any suggestions?
ETA: Now that I think about it I get a weird feeling. Certain types of concentration seem to act a lot like emotions. The duration seems right, there seems to be a certain mutual exclusivity: strong emotions make it harder to concentrate and intense concentration makes it harder to feel those emotions. Are mental modes emotions?
You might want to take a look at Open Focus—the premise as I understand it is that if you cultivate the ability to have slow synchronized brain waves, you spontaneously get better at having the appropriate sort of mental focus for what you’re doing.
I’ve worked with it a little, and gotten better body awareness, and probably some psychological gains. It’s hard to judge exactly what of the assorted things I’m doing have particular good effects, but Open Focus is scientifically based and working with their attention exercises has some short term good effects for me.
I don’t like body awareness. Whenever I start having body awareness, I usually end up noticing various tiny aches and pains that I’d rather not be aware of. (For example, my glasses often cause me pain behind my ears—and getting them adjusted doesn’t really help that much.) In fact, trying to pay attention to my body often seems to trigger such pains...
Whereas I’ve been fascinated for years by improving my body awareness, so take this as possibly risky, but Open Focus talks about making pain less salient (and sometimes go away) by increasing awareness—partly because pain is increased by trying to fight it so that accepting it helps, and partly by putting it into a larger context of non-painful sensations. I’ve tried this (on minor pains) and it works some of the time.
(Note: This post is speculation based on memory and introspection and possibly completely mistaken. Any help in clarifying my thinking and gathering evidence on this would be greatly appreciated.)
I suspect that I’m also affected by this and just haven’t conciously noticed. Feels like I’m a lot more comfortable with analytical modes than more intuitive/social ones and probably spending more time inducing them than I should.
I’d like to be more aware of my mental modes and find more effective ways of influencing them. Any suggestions?
ETA: Now that I think about it I get a weird feeling. Certain types of concentration seem to act a lot like emotions. The duration seems right, there seems to be a certain mutual exclusivity: strong emotions make it harder to concentrate and intense concentration makes it harder to feel those emotions. Are mental modes emotions?
You might want to take a look at Open Focus—the premise as I understand it is that if you cultivate the ability to have slow synchronized brain waves, you spontaneously get better at having the appropriate sort of mental focus for what you’re doing.
I’ve worked with it a little, and gotten better body awareness, and probably some psychological gains. It’s hard to judge exactly what of the assorted things I’m doing have particular good effects, but Open Focus is scientifically based and working with their attention exercises has some short term good effects for me.
I don’t like body awareness. Whenever I start having body awareness, I usually end up noticing various tiny aches and pains that I’d rather not be aware of. (For example, my glasses often cause me pain behind my ears—and getting them adjusted doesn’t really help that much.) In fact, trying to pay attention to my body often seems to trigger such pains...
Whereas I’ve been fascinated for years by improving my body awareness, so take this as possibly risky, but Open Focus talks about making pain less salient (and sometimes go away) by increasing awareness—partly because pain is increased by trying to fight it so that accepting it helps, and partly by putting it into a larger context of non-painful sensations. I’ve tried this (on minor pains) and it works some of the time.