Feeling a deep drought of engineering metaphors in my brain right now.
Some things regarding thoughts that would be best to express in the framework of control systems, but I lack the words. Hmm...
Conversation
Okay, with apologies to any engineers or other technical folk in my timeline...
1
1
Thoughts (clarification: mental imagery and self-talk *that you are aware of*) do function as behavioural feedback loops.
Do this -> "this" is done -> now do this other thing.
Each of these tend to trigger their own cascading loops. Sometimes they terminate, often they don't.
Replying to
If you have a lot of behavioural inhibitions - strict socialization, anxieties, addictions etc. - the self-talk can become loud and tangled.
If you have a lot of behavioural inputs - tasks, environmental noise, sensations etc. - the self-talk can become loud and tangled.
1
1
By "loud and tangled", I mean that they start forming infinite loops triggering off each other. They can completely neuter your conscious decision-making.
1
1
Conversely, as with addiction, anxiety or other compulsions, it can take over almost every aspect of your conscious experience, putting the entire weight of your neocortex behind one pattern (or a very limited number of patterns) of behaviour.
1
2
This is bad for any number of reasons, but for one it keeps you from other forms of maintenance behaviour (eating, drinking, socializing and so on).
This increases the amount of confused thoughts & imagery simmering in the liminal space between awareness and subconscious.
1
1
You leave the certainty of your dominant loop, and suddenly you are completely clueless as to what to do. Too much noise on the signal.
Conversely, the confusion can push you towards dominant urges since they are easy to return to - and strongly embedded neuronally.
1
1
But this is just the conscious control system, which indeed controls very little. Most processes are autonomous and require very little self-talk (or none).
1
1
Your conscious control system is trained to overreach. You've been raised to be conscious of yourself, constantly, in some way or another.
It is also clumsy. It does a really shit job of doing anything with any real grace. Flow states quiet down conscious thought, for example.
1
1
So if you're stuck in your default mode of trying to think your way through all your tasks - planning, organizing, systematizing - you are also increasing the noise.
There is no way you can handle all this stuff within consciousness. None. It doesn't have the bandwidth.
1
1
2
Conversely, however, consciousness can work really well as a flow control point between a small number of competing systems, directing effort and attention.
1
3
This is very unlikely to be how you've been trained to use this particular tool, but if you do the amount of self-talk decreases. It becomes superfluous, and anyway your bandwidth is otherwise occupied.
1
2
But there is more - all that thinking causes dysfunctional behaviour, because the system is not up to spec. It can't operate under the strain.
It starts sending bogus requests, queuing important tasks (were you ever told to wait until recess to go to the bathroom?) and so on.
1
1
The net result is that if you don't train yourself to divert tasks to their optimal nodes, they overwhelm you, causing an insane amount of unnecessary suffering.
1
1
The good news: consciousness is the easiest part of the system to game. It can change quickly, even in old people.
The bad news: it doesn't mean anything if you can't align everything else to work with it, or if you get scared or disoriented by the shift and can't cope.
1
2
If you are engrossed in your conscious experience, it feels like being in control.
If you stop that, you realize "you" are a mannequin riding a tall-ass monkey. Whatever you've conceived as "you" is not in control. Maybe it isn't even *real*.
1
2
6
And this is about the point where people pull back, get nauseous and disoriented, or turn into Jim Carrey, or just give in to whatever they were suppressing.
It can seriously, badly mess you up without appropriate training.
1
1
When people invite you to live in the present, not think too much etc., and they offer you some meditation techniques for it, it leads here more often than not.
We really ought to ask for consent first.
1
On the good side, if it starts stabilizing into a pattern of low thought salience, it turns out there were a huge amount of things you could always spend that bandwidth on.
Ever experienced a flow state? Imagine a slightly tuned down version of that, in near-perpetuity.
1
1
Time itself can seem to slow down, but that's just because you're picking up more information per second.
Ever notice how little time you seem to spend asleep? Kind of like that, with reversed polarities.
1
1
And another thing: it turns out most of feeling bad, inadequate, dissatisfied etc. comes from rogue thought patterns.
Certainly, life can be pretty awful, but that's not where most of the *experiencing it as awful* comes from.
5