How much do you think?

[EEVILMURRAY]

One thinks alot. I go from passive to active, pr0 style. One leads into the other. I can be walking somewhere, thoughts dancing around then a thought catches or something prompts a thought which then warrants proper consideration. Maybe even physical exertion. An example of this is last night doing a pub quiz, a question was "What game has its name derived from the Persian for 'King'?" The answer was chess but beforehand was just thinking of games which had random names. Buckaroo came to mind. Jokingly I asked the Quiz Baron was that it and naturally he said no. But now we both got thinking about the origin of the name.

Does anyone else end up thinking about about 10 things simultaneously and then, when writing it, you suddenly merge them and end up with a short story about a person who went to town for some beans but then found that he has a Fatal Exception in PHP error; Memory Over Limit 1542353476323 (tried to allocate 15 bytes) on line 214 with a large sandwich?

Never.

 

Although it might be worth a go.

[Ville]

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Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Heh, first lesson: don't believe everything your mind says...It lies a LOT, but you can't see this until you take a step back first...which just takes practice. If you have spent your life thinking nonstop, you cannot expect to detach from it in an instant either...but gradually, it sure is possible.

 

Again, there's a difference between active and passive thinking. Even if you stop thinking (active), the mind will continue to push out random thoughts (passive). This is completely normal...All you need to do is just witness and let go, again and again...

Haha! Trust me, I know! My brain has tried countless times and continues to try to fool me.

 

Well, when I try to sleep, I'd say my thinking is primarily passive. What you're saying I should practice is just letting these thoughts happen without thinking actively about them?

[EEVILMURRAY]

Do you go to your cave and meet your power animal?

 

 

Slide?

[Ville]

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Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Yep, just witness...You can also do this anytime during daily life, like walking or eating etc.

So is this the main point of meditation? Not to stop thinking, but to just let the thoughts happen and pass?

[Diageo]

How does your mind lie to you? You must have an evil mind, mine makes mistakes but doesn't lie to me. I'd notice if it was, it's my mind.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

How does your mind lie to you? You must have an evil mind, mine makes mistakes but doesn't lie to me. I'd notice if it was, it's my mind.

None of those terms are accurate. Don't take them literally. But it's easy to get fooled by your mind. From something as simple as optical illusions to something as intricate as your perception of yourself, your brain can easily become convinced of something you know isn't true.

[Diageo]

Like what?

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Like what?

Like confidence. A person's confidence is easily influenced way too much in either direction.

[Diageo]

I don't see how that is your mind fooling you.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

I don't see how that is your mind fooling you.

Because you're convinced of something that's not actually true. You might even be able to see that it's untrue if you think rationally, but you still feel like it's true because the part of your brain believing it's true is not the rational part of your brain. Without knowing much about how the brain works, I think it's the emotional part of your brain that is easily fooled.

 

I suck at explaining this, and there are probably better examples, but the point still stands.

[Ellmeister]

You walk into a room and this girl looks at you, your brain tells you that she's has made eye contact with you because she likes you. Instead she hasn't its simply that your eyes met. Your brain tells you she's into you when really she isn't. If you thought rationally you'd probably realise that it was just a coincidence, but your brain has said "Mate you look damn good, of course that lass fancies you!"

 

 

Something like that D-boy?

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

You walk into a room and this girl looks at you, your brain tells you that she's has made eye contact with you because she likes you. Instead she hasn't its simply that your eyes met. Your brain tells you she's into you when really she isn't. If you thought rationally you'd probably realise that it was just a coincidence, but your brain has said "Mate you look damn good, of course that lass fancies you!"

 

 

Something like that D-boy?

Exactly. And it works the other way as well, where you dismiss a girl who's obviously coming on to you because your self-esteem is low and you think: "I'm a total loser, of course she's not coming on to me."

[Frank]

I'll try my best at explaining it as I think this is a good example.

So, it's not that you're mind is a seperate entity altogether and planning evil stuff behind your back. In a way, it's being fooled along with you.

 

For example, if you know any 2 year olds or just any child really, you could show them the colour/shade of white and tell them that it's called black. Most probable outcome is that they'll believe you and think white is black and hence, their mind is almost 'lieing' to them.

 

I hope that made sense and I worded it properly :p

I think you hit the nail on the head Ellmeister too.

[Diageo]

Just seems like you are making a mistake yourself, a quick decision, but when you think about it further you realise you made the mistake. All you, all one.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Just seems like you are making a mistake yourself, a quick decision, but when you think about it further you realise you made the mistake. All you, all one.

You may think so, but that's not the case. What you describe is making an assumption, finding out it's wrong and then correcting yourself. The point is that when your mind tricks you, even though you figure out it's wrong, it still continues to convince you it's right.

 

I don't think I can really explain it any better than this.

Edited August 31, 2010 by Dannyboy-the-Dane

[Ganepark32]

Your mind doesn't lie to you. It all comes down to your own perception of the people and world around you, something which is built up and reinforced from a young age. Being unable to differentiate between say a girl meeting your gaze and a girl who is genuinely interested in you isn't your mind lying. It's confused at the perceived emotion that it is taking in through the senses and for whatever reason through your development as a person or through the limitations of our own abilities, the ability to differentiate between differing emotions or looks results in an active decision that someone is perhaps interested or not when it isn't the case. It's an active thinking process that we actively go after with the decision coming from us and not from our brain, in the sense that the brain would give the answer only in a passive instance and even then a passive instance would simply imply innate characteristics such as survival instincts.

 

A perfect example of this actually comes from some of the work one of my lecturers has done on eye movement and perception. Basically, you see a mask, plain white on both the exterior and interior, and it's slowly rotated round either clockwise or anti-clockwise. We see the mask normally and then when the back is shown, through the limitations of our abilities as a person to perceive objects we see the concave area of the mask as being convex (in other words, the interior protrudes outwards like the exterior). Think I explained that correctly. It's better to see it working. I'll see if I can find a video of it.

 

edit: found it

 

Edited August 31, 2010 by Ganepark32

[Ville]

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Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[Diageo]

I understand what Ganepark said, but I don't think what Ville says is the same. I'll have a better look at it when I can get to a proper computer.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

I think we're all pretty much trying to explain the same thing. But I'm no expert on the subject, just speaking from experience.

[Diageo]

All I know is that I never feel like there's in any way two

Mentalities in my head. Always one that thinks for everything.

[Ville]

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Edited September 12, 2021 by Ville

[jayseven]

I've just skim-read this topic - even though it's probably one right up my street.

 

- Meditation.

 

When I close my eyes, I am immediately aware of my inner voice, streaming chatter and troubles and nonsense. At the same time my visual cortex is wildly active, summoning abstract images that it detects from the back of my eyelids. For me, sleepless nights stem from too much noise - my dreams are mostly visual and audibly numb. This may be due to my deafness, maybe a link to a part of my life before hearing aids meant that reality had a listenable quantity...

 

I try to concentrate on the images, but not in a way where I attempt to maintain a vision, rather I 'label' what I see and let it shift and move on, move through the detritus. What I actually consider 'meditation' is where I try to actually form an image; say, I keep seeing faces in the void, I try and grab one and hold it there. I try to steer my thoughts into constructing something that I tell it to construct, rather than just being a passenger. Slowly the inner-voice silences, and I am left with interpretable images that I can later ponder on, or describe.

 

- Lying

 

Your eyesight accounts for roughly 90% of your sensual input. Personally, my eyesight is borderline 50%-decent, and as such I cannot actually trust what I see completely. Combined with my sense of hearing, there is a legitimate source to my infrequent paranoid thoughts and feelings. If I cannot trust what my own interpretation of reality is saying, then how can I understand what is really happening?

 

With this in mind, I can understand far more easily the constraints of the mind, and the misinterpretations that can occur. I think this had led me, perversely, to be more understanding, my allocating the energy to follow up more than one possible 'reality' that I am experiencing.

 

On the whole, this applies to social dynamics. If I am in a noisy, dark pub with friends I have to go by body language and pitch changes to determine what is being discussed. My brain automatically assumes that certain sounds mean certain words, when in actuality I am not hearing the words audibly formed as a whole. This leads to over-thinking and over-analysis of my situation, and puts a fair bit of strain on communication for me...

 

... And this is where i lose trail of my thoughts.

 

I think too much. I have to emphasise in order to understand what is going on, which is rather autistic, and hard to cope with when my mind is not actually organised in an autistic way. I rely on others to determine my reality because my own senses are not to be trusted, and as such there is a constant battle going on inside my head.

 

Like my sensory deprivation, these are conditions that are not readily observable, and as such it is incredibly difficult to exist in a world where most people take their reality to be all that they can see, and yet I exist as an individual within their reality who readily defies their expectations. Once people get to know me they have to accept my alternate view of reality, and thus have to question their own. For me, this weeds out those who can think deep and those who cannot, and the survivors are those that, I guess, get to be my friends.

 

But having my friendships based upon such a twisted scheme of logic is rather stressful, and leads to whole chapters of mental chatter. TBC?

[Raining_again]

Nice contribution j7, what a fascinating read