Guided meditation apps have some fascinating media properties!
Their lessons are naturally spread out over time—the author can unfold an idea over hundreds of days of real calendar time, or return to an idea intermittently from different angles. Few mass media forms can do that!
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The mental model for "lessons" is also unusual. When I sit down to meditate, I don't think of myself as "taking a lesson"—I'm sitting down *to meditate*. Yet the sessions actually do include authored lesson-like content!
Contrast this to the experience of a cell biology class:
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In a typical class, lessons are the focus, and activities are clearly both secondary and subservient to the lesson content. Going to a structured cell biology lab, you don’t think “I’m gonna investigate cellular biology”; you think “today’s lesson is a lab instead of a lecture.”
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The inverted framing of the meditation lessons ("I'm going to meditate and incidentally hear some instruction" instead of "I'm going to listen to a lesson and incidentally meditate") is powerful because it turns the lessons into *actually doing the thing*.
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Team sports and things like Peloton have a similar vibe: the mental model is "I'm gonna go play soccer," but the coach does may actually have a lesson in mind.
More:
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Great point here. I agree—I think the answer is no. One potential reason: notes.andymatuschak.org/zScaFc6MhijMiE
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But, to use your language, do these apps / activities push people beyond plateaus in the same way deliberate practice does (as you discuss in your notes)? My sense is no.
Of course, I suspect this is a design challenge not a fundamental limitation :).
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So true! It also engenders us to create a habit in a way that making the ‘learning’ primary never will, right? Few people are going to say “I’ll listen to a ten minute lecture before bed every night” but that’s what they’re doing when they habitally turn on the Daily Calm.
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Within the Wires tells a story in the form of meditation tapes. At least, for the first season.
nightvalepresents.com/withinthewires/
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I can think of electronics and signal processing classes that can do it in terms of lessons structured around projects. But currently they are not done that way.
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