Talking to Yourself: Thinking Tool or Speaking Practice? (Part I)

I've been wondering about what happens when we talk to ourselves. Lots of people do it. Not in the crazy person who makes you walk the other side of the street sense, but as daily "thinking." The difference between this and "having an idea" is that the "conversation" is clearly language. That is, the internal conversation uses actual words and sentences. The topic could be what to have for dinner, what you'll say next time someone at work shows up without their action items completed, whether the garage needs painting, etc. The conversation can take time: 10 seconds, a minute, maybe even 15 minutes during a commute. Listen to yourself when you're pondering something. You might be one who never has a language-based internal conversation. But I doubt it. So I wondered about the impact...or maybe I should say the purpose...of this subvocalizing. Is it really an "objective" conversation between multiple internal views in order to reach a decision? Or, do you (whatever "you" is in this sense) know in advance where the conversation will end? So I tried an experiment. Results in the next post.

Words vs. Music...Short step vs. Long leap

I made a naked claim in the last post that if you see casual audio as any sort of contribution to long-term intellectual development and practical ideas, you need a mix of words and music. The claim was that "words are the seed and music is the soil." Hey, this is a blog, so I can claim whatever I want, but DoxSpot is supposed to be at least a little rigorous in such things, if only so you can tell me what I'm all screwed up. So I tried to dissect the results of my own experimentation. Everyone that cares about such things assumes a link between words (NPR podcasts, non-fiction audiobooks, classic speeches, etc.) to intellectual growth. And most assume some practical value for your daily decisions. What a shock. Listen to 30 minutes on Katrina and learn about levies (or corruption or poverty or political ambivalence or whatever). Listen to 60 minutes on Einstein and gain a conversational knowledge of relativity. But does music play a role? Does the content--and more importantly, your ability to use the content--grow differently depending on how it is subsequently marinated? In my "experiments" it did. The difference was the size of the steps (or leaps). When all audio is "content," the steps are small. Learn about Katrina and then make decisions about donations, home flood control, a trip to New Orleans. Learn about relativity and then make decisions to, well, learn more about relativity (or not). In short, all thinking was a simple regurgitation of the actual content--a glorified book report. But learn (sufficiently) about Katrina and switch to music and then the thinking evolves to changing planning processes related to various disasters, finding ideas to respond to a headline-driven society incapable of maintaining the 3-5 year attention span to really fix the New Orleans ills with new ways to mobilize interested subsegments. Or learn (again, sufficiently) about relativity and build a mental model for exactly why time slows down so you can explain it to a 12 year old.

If you are a parent or other person-of-influence for a young person, this isn't navel gazing. It's completely practical. What do you model? What do you encourage? What do you buy? And for any given person and any given topic, what is the optimal mix? 90:10? 50:50? Where exactly on this mythical scale is hip-hop? (My personal view is that's it's on both ends.)

Try this sometime on yourself. You may be surprised by your results. And let me know.

Words versus Music: Content Needs Room to Grow

I've been wondering about the effects of listening to music vs. words in audio. From commuting to workouts, I listen to tons of audio. Based on music sales and theft, I'm guessing you do too. The question is: is the audio pure distraction or does it play some role in your long-term personal mental development? And if the latter, what should be on your iPod? This matters whether the "personal development" is your own or that of your children. (Warning: this overall topic may be a recurring theme in DoxSpot.) Too keep things clear--at least to start--we'll talk about a stark contrast of pure content (words) vs. pure melody (music without understandable words), even with the understanding that lots (most?) falls in the middle. I've done some experimentation. My question was simple: Are intellectual results of a workout greater listening to substantive content (e.g. non-fiction audiobooks, talk radio, etc.) or to my moderately varied musical playlist? And the answer is simple: the former is content and the latter is concept development. Words are the seed. Music is the soil. Without content, your musings and music-marinated daydreams have the value of a 24-hour Charmin toilet paper commercial marathon. But without development, your NPR-enriched thinking is a glorified junior high book report. More to come on this....

Dalai Lama, Part II: Rigor in Meditation?

I promised more on the Dalai Lama's view of rigor in meditation. This blew me away. And if you missed the last post, we're still talking about the views the DL expresses in his "The Universe in a Single Atom" (audio or print). The second half of the book digs more into what Buddhism is about rather than just contrasting it with western science. In doing so, the DL sets up a case for combining Buddhist meditation with scientific analysis of thinking and brain physiology in a rigorous way to figure out thinking and happiness and what not. It’s a very good case. The most fascinating thing is the contrast with what we (or at least I) have been introduced to as Buddhist mediation. As noted earlier, I’ve had friends that approached Buddhism from the Western side (that is, as a personal exploration. Not from their parents.). Among them, one of my closest childhood friends lived at Muktananda’s ashram in LA where I’d visit him and maybe join a meditation session or two. What DL makes clear is that all (virtually all?) of the stuff we learn about meditation in the West…and it seemed virtually all that my friend saw as his ultimate goal…is essentially the calisthenics that 8 year old monks learn. The meditation built on “clear the mind, focus on a point, keep your mind quiet, etc. etc.” isn't some state a stone's throw from enlightenmend. Nah, it's just the basic skills, the scales, the stretching that one needs to master in order to do serious meditation. And what is that? It is active, results-oriented, rigorous, analytical, replicable, extensible to others, and investigative...about whatever topic one is analyzing. If you already know that, fine, click away. But if that isn't obvious, think about it a moment. We're talking about mature, skilled monks analyzing their own reactions, thinking, fundamental mental processes in a way that lets them guide others to replicate and test their findings in their own meditative analysis. This isn't just a little different from the typical Western view--it is almost the opposite. And yes, it is, in virtually every important sense, scientific. Once you picture this, can you possibly disagree that it might be valuable to combine this analytical, internal rigor (what the DL calls an "internal technology") with modern thinking about brain physiology and the science of the mind? I can't.

[Full disclosure: I am NOT getting kickbacks from Audible, Amazon, or any other vendors when I provide a link to something I mention. However, this may change in the future.]

The Dalai Lama on Meditation versus Science

I recently completed "The Universe in a Single Atom" (audio or print) by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama compares and contrasts the scientific tradition with the Buddhist tradition. Obviously, the DL has some unique views on this. I should mention I "read" this book via an audiobook (from Audible). The reader is Richard Gere. My view is that probably sold a lot more copies, but wasn't a good thing for the listener. You have to imagine Richard Gere whispering in your ear in his more urgent and earnest tones about something the wants you to realize he cares about deeply and that he obviously considers a great work. For me...just a distraction. Anyway, I finally got past that and it was well worth it.

Let's start with the basics: If you're going to learn about Buddhism, you might as well learn about it from the Dali Lama. Buddhism is far more investigative than I’d realized. Much is through contemplation rather than what Westerners think of as experimentation, of course, but exceedingly rigorous. (More on this in a future post.) It’s also non-theistic. I grew up with friends who lived in Ashrams, so I’d heard murmurs of Buddhism's different view of God relative to other religions, but it's more intense than I realized. I suppose deep down, I filtered these rumors through the view that being theistic in some fairly fundamental sense is pretty much the definition of a religion. It's not. The DL also expressed a massively different view of Karma than usually discussed in the West. In the West, Karma is usually described as a sort of metaphysical justice. The DL has clearly heard this in the way we Westerners talk about Karma, so he spends a bit of time on how it’s off-base. Short story: It's more a propensity for action (that leads to predictable results) than some sort of metaphysical justice. And you know what? That view ties much more directly to evolution, nature, nurture, and science.

Let's go further on the relationship to evolution. The DL isn’t too keen on the whole “random variations lead to evolution” argument. He finds the “random” part to be, hmm, I think he says “unsatisfying.” He's certainly not an intelligent design advocate, but something more than survival of the fittest. He actually takes a very effective swipe at the way Darwin/evolution explain altruism. He’s knows that evoluation-minded people (and psychological hedonists in general) reinterpret apparent altruism as a just another flavor of survival or self-interest. No surprise. But then he makes a humble but biting comment about how his “understanding of science is that it attempts to build theories from data rather than adjusting the data to fit the theory.” Ouch. He also finds Darwin circular because evolution defines those species which survive as, therefore, the species best able to compete. And therefore those best able to compete are the ones that survive. He’s got a theory that something like compassion might actually be an additional driver for evolution, but doesn’t flush it out much. The key is that this attempt to embrace compassion is not some soft, squishy, nice-nice religious leader saying "can't we all just get along." No, it's a real criticism of current thinking based on attacking the core of the scientific method. Worth getting his view.

[Full disclosure: I am NOT getting kickbacks from Audible, Amazon, or any other vendors when I provide a link to something I mention. However, this may change in the future.]