Beyond the Book #5 – Memorize a Data Sequence

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Mar 222011
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Memorize a Data Sequence.”

Introduction: meditating on memory

The exercise “Memorize a Data Sequence” is all about memory, but it’s not about memory in the ways that we usually think about it. Most popular discussion about memory focuses on the experience of common forgetfulness and on ways of staving off memory loss as we age. But the focus of this exercise is about something we don’t usually stop to think about: how our minds create discrete memories from the seamless flow of our experience.

Rather than suggesting ways to improve our memory, the exercise uses the present moment experience of memory (and its failures) as an object of meditation. What’s the point? Simple. As we observe the mechanisms of our own memory in action, we increase our capacity to reflect on the workings of our mind, which brings us the benefits of mindfulness meditation in whatever form we practice it (as summarized by Dan Siegel): we become less reactive to our inner experience; we enhance our ability to attend to sensations, thoughts and feelings, whether pleasant or unpleasant; we train ourselves to move through our lives with greater awareness and we foster a non-judgmental attitude toward our own experience.

But just because the exercise cheerfully ignores the practical functions of memory in real life, that doesn’t mean that I’m not just as distressed as any guy (especially any guy who recently turned fifty) about the declining state of my own memory. In fact, my struggles with memory in recent years have been greatly compounded by my struggles with Chronic Lyme Disease, which has neurological effects that fog my brain making it very hard to think fluidly and retrieve material from memory. (For instance, I just spent over a minute – I’m not kidding – trying to retrieve the word “retrieve.”) All of this often leaves me feeling rather like Dorrie, in Finding Nemo:

Pieces of Pi

Lyme Disease aside, though, declining memory and aging do of course go hand in hand. And for all the early Alzheimer’s jokes, for the most part it’s not pathological. It’s intriguing to me, though, how little my own distress about the state of my memory motivates me to do anything about it. If I were really motivated to improve my memory, I might spend more time doing exercises at the Memory Gym. Or I might take memory-enhancing vitamins and supplements.  I could practice the many commonly-suggested techniques for maintaining a healthy memory, such as these suggested by the Mayo Clinic. Or I might simply play endless games of the simple yet utterly maddening game N-back, which has been demonstrated to improve both memory and “fluid intelligence.”

Better yet, I might start applying some of the techniques Joshua Foer describes in his fascinating new book Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything, in which Foer describes how he, a person with a completely average memory, trained himself to memorize strings of random information so well that he wound up in the finals of the USA Memory Championships. As it turns out, the capacity to retain prodigious amounts of information doesn’t actually require special gifts. It’s simply a matter of discipline and persistence. (If you want the short version of his story, Foer also summarized some of the ideas ideas in the book in a New York Times Magazine piece titled Secrets of a Mind Gamer,)

When I wrote The Next Ten Minutes, I had no idea that there were competitions dedicated to the sorts of tasks I describe in this exercise – memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards, strings of random digits, etc. But I was fascinated by the Pi Day contest at my son’s school, in which students attempted to memorize as many digits of Pi as you can. (Want to get started? Here are the first million digits.)

I’d had some recent experience with similar tasks, most notably in my efforts over the past few years to teach myself Chinese. Learning any language requires a great deal of memorization, of course, especially when you’re trying to building vocabulary. But Chinese, with its ideographic written system (in which every word is expressed by different character) presents unique challenges to one’s memory. Especially for someone like me, because my visual memory is simply awful. I do reasonably well (although not great) memorizing words and grammatical structures aurally. But when I try to memorize Chinese characters, my brain simply flails. It’s extremely difficult to make the imagery before me attach itself to any sense of meaning. So I have the experience, over and over again, of watching my brain struggle as it tries to force itself to create a memory. It feels like a micro-version of the experience of the famous amnesia patient Clive Wearing:

Both the Pi contest and the task of trying to memorize Chinese characters capture my attention because of the way they combine something so seemingly pointless with something so deeply human. Our identities are shaped by our memories (more on that in a moment), but memory in and of itself is without any inherent meaning. Memory is simply a mechanical function through which the brain’s short-term processing encodes some portion of the information in our experience into long-term memory. The more detailed processes through which memory works, however fascinating, are beyond the scope of this post (and frankly they’re largely beyond my comprehension). But the underlying paradox bears repeating: the mechanical act of encoding memories is essentially without meaning; but it is only through that act that a sense of meaning in our lives can arise at all.

Meaninglessness

On one side of this equation lies the experience of meaninglessness. The fascinating thing about the digits of Pi, for instance, is that they are both absolutely fixed – determined – and deeply meaningless. The human brain is averse to meaningless, to such a degree that we will relentlessly impose a non-existent sense of meaning on things which are truly random. (For instance, check out for instance this short NPR story on the existence or non-existence of true randomness of  the iPod Shuffle.) In fact, creating something which human beings experience as truly random is really quite difficult. Monty Python was often pretty good at it. And Samuel Beckett may be the closest thing we have to a master at this art:

How much of what you hear in this text is actual meaning as generated by the artist, and how much of it is imposed by the need of our own minds to find this string of text meaningful? Although it’s probably an impossible line to draw, it’s fair to say that a large part of the “meaning” that we make from Beckett’s words comes from our own imposition of order upon them.

Meaning

While the neurological workings of memory are complex beyond my understanding, the subjective experience of memory is my stock in trade. As a psychotherapist, I often conceptualize my essential job as that of matching present emotional experience with memories from the past. A key question I am regularly asking my clients as they talk about something that’s distressing them, is whether they have any memories of feeling this way in the past.

There’s an assumption underlying that question: that our behavior in the present is shaped by our past experience. Or, more properly, by the memories that we have constructed about our past experience.

Because the other assumption in that question is that our memories are an accurate reconstruction of what happened to us in the past. But the hard truth about the subjective experience of memory is that it is extremely malleable. Memory defines us. And yet it is deliciously fallible. People don’t want to hear this – we don’t believe that the memories which define us may not be true….or may not be as true as we believe them to be.

But there’s no question that our memories are subject to distortion. In fact, studies have shown that it really is possible to manipulate memories into existence of things that never happened. But here’s the thing: just because your memories aren’t “true” doesn’t mean that they’re not true. While all of us (therapists not least of all) can get into trouble insisting on the literal truth of the content of a memory – that this person did that thing in precisely the way someone remembers it, a memory can be emotionally true whether or not its literal content is accurate. As a therapist, I find it to be very useful to broaden my definition of memory to allow for an emotional truth which transcends the literal specifics of any given memory.

I could say much more about this, but it’s beyond the scope of this post. I’ll end by recommending a little game that I sometimes play with my wife – you can do it with any with whom you’ve shared past experiences. Choose a memorable moment that you’ve been through together. Then, without talking about it, separately write down everything you can remember about the event. When you’re done, compare notes. You’ll almost certainly find that some things you remember almost exactly the same. And that your partner’s memories will trigger things that you had forgotten. But other things will be more blurry – did it happen that way or not? And, most fascinating of all, some things you will disagree about completely. It’s likely that you will isolate at least a few details which you simply cannot resolve. Both versions cannot be true. And yet each separate version is true to that person’s experience. Here’s the challenge: can you allow your memory to be both true and not true at the same time?

Musical memories

There are many, many songs about memories, many of them completely awful. But I’m going to take the opportunity here (which I may never have again) to pair Philip Glass with Barbra Streisand. Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach is not explicitly about memory. But it from one of my favorite pieces of music and it contains a text which requires singers to memorize long sequence of random numbers, which makes it a perfect accompaniment for this exercise:

And I must balance the avant-garde minimalism of Philip Glass with a nod to one of my least favorite performers (and songs) of all times, which is, of course, explicitly about memory:

If you think I should have chosen something different, or you can think of a song which better embodies the spirit of the exercises, let me know in the comments.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

In addition, I want to provide a link to Joshua Foer’s book…

…and to Dan Siegel’s wonderful book, The Mindful Brain, which has inspired me in many ways and from which I drew the summary of the benefits of mindfulness listed earlier in this post:

And as always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

 

Beyond the Book 5# – Memorize a Data Sequence

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Memorize a Data Sequence.”

Introduction: meditating on memory

The exercise “Memorize a Data Sequence” is all about memory, but it’s not about memory in the ways that we usually think about it. Most popular discussion about memory focuses on the experience of common forgetfulness and on ways of staving off memory loss as we age. But the focus of this exercise is about something we don’t usually stop to think about: how our minds create discrete memories from the seamless flow of our experience.

Rather than suggesting ways to improve our memory, the exercise uses the present moment experience of memory (and its failures) as an object of meditation. What’s the point? Simple. As we observe the mechanisms of our own memory in action, we increase our capacity to reflect on the workings of our mind, which brings us the benefits of mindfulness meditation in whatever form we practice it (as summarized by Dan Siegel): we become less reactive to our inner experience; we enhance our ability to attend to sensations, thoughts and feelings, whether pleasant or unpleasant; we train ourselves to move through our lives with greater awareness and we foster a non-judgmental attitude toward our own experience.

But just because the exercise cheerfully ignores the practical functions of memory in real life, that doesn’t mean that I’m not just as distressed as any guy (especially any guy who recently turned fifty) about the declining state of my own memory. In fact, my struggles with memory in recent years have been greatly compounded by my struggles with Chronic Lyme Disease, which has neurological effects that fog my brain making it very hard to think fluidly and retrieve material from memory. (For instance, I just spent over a minute – I’m not kidding – trying to retrieve the word “retrieve.”) All of this often leaves me feeling rather like Dorrie, in Finding Nemo:

[finding nemo video]

Pieces of Pi

Lyme Disease aside, though, declining memory and aging do of course go hand in hand. And for all the early Alzheimer’s jokes, for the most part it’s not pathological. It’s intriguing to me, though, how little my own distress about the state of my memory motivates me to do anything about it. If I were really motivated to improve my memory, I might spend more time doing exercises at the Memory Gym. Or I might take memory-enhancing vitamins and supplements. I could practice the many commonly-suggested techniques for maintaining a healthy memory, such as these suggested by the Mayo Clinic. Or I might simply play endless games of the simple yet utterly maddening game N-back, which has been demonstrated to improve both memory and “fluid intelligence.”

Better yet, I might start applying some of the techniques Joshua Foer describes in his fascinating new book Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything, in which Foer describes how he, a person with a completely average memory, trained himself to memorize strings of random information so well that he wound up in the finals of the USA Memory Championships. As it turns out, the capacity to retain prodigious amounts of information doesn’t actually require special gifts. It’s simply a matter of discipline and persistence. (If you want the short version of his story, Foer also summarized some of the ideas ideas in the book in a New York Times Magazine piece titled Secrets of a Mind Gamer,)

When I wrote The Next Ten Minutes, I had no idea that there were competitions dedicated to the sorts of tasks I describe in this exercise – memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards, strings of random digits, etc. But I was fascinated by the Pi Day contest at my son’s school, in which students attempted to memorize as many digits of Pi as you can. (Want to get started? Here are the first million digits.)

Pi image

I’d had some recent experience with similar tasks, most notably in my efforts over the past few years to teach myself Chinese. Learning any language requires a great deal of memorization, of course, especially when you’re trying to building vocabulary. But Chinese, with its ideographic written system (in which every word is expressed by different character) presents unique challenges to one’s memory. Especially for someone like me, because my visual memory is simply awful. I do reasonably well (although not great) memorizing words and grammatical structures aurally. But when I try to memorize Chinese characters, my brain simply flails. It’s extremely difficult to make the imagery before me attach itself to any sense of meaning. So I have the experience, over and over again, of watching my brain struggle as it tries to force itself to create a memory. It feels like a micro-version of the experience of the famous amnesia patient Clive Wearing:

Clive Wearing video

Chinese image

Both the Pi contest and the task of trying to memorize Chinese characters capture my attention because of the way they combine something so seemingly pointless with something so deeply human. Our identities are shaped by our memories (more on that in a moment), but memory in and of itself is without any inherent meaning. Memory is simply a mechanical function through which the brain’s short-term processing encodes some portion of the information in our experience into long-term memory. The more detailed processes through which memory works, however fascinating, are beyond the scope of this post (and frankly they’re largely beyond my comprehension). But the underlying paradox bears repeating: the mechanical act of encoding memories is essentially without meaning; but it is only through that act that a sense of meaning in our lives can arise at all.

Meaninglessness

On one side of this equation lies the experience of meaninglessness. The fascinating thing about the digits of Pi, for instance, is that they are both absolutely fixed – determined – and deeply meaningless. The human brain is averse to meaningless, to such a degree that we will relentlessly impose a non-existent sense of meaning on things which are truly random. (For instance, check out for instance this short NPR story on the existence or non-existence of true randomness of the iPod Shuffle.) In fact, creating something which human beings experience as truly random is really quite difficult. Monty Python was often pretty good at it. And Samuel Beckett may be the closest thing we have to a master at this art:

Beckett video

How much of what you hear in this text is actual meaning as generated by the artist, and how much of it is imposed by the need of our own minds to find this string of text meaningful? Although it’s probably an impossible line to draw, it’s fair to say that a large part of the “meaning” that we make from Beckett’s words comes from our own imposition of order upon them.

Meaning

While the neurological workings of memory are complex beyond my understanding, the subjective experience of memory is my stock in trade. As a psychotherapist, I often conceptualize my essential job as that of matching present emotional experience with memories from the past. A key question I am regularly asking my clients as they talk about something that’s distressing them, is whether they have any memories of feeling this way in the past.

There’s an assumption underlying that question: that our behavior in the present is shaped by our past experience. Or, more properly, by the memories that we have constructed about our past experience.

Because the other assumption in that question is that our memories are an accurate reconstruction of what happened to us in the past. But the hard truth about the subjective experience of memory is that it is extremely malleable. Memory defines us. And yet it is deliciously fallible. People don’t want to hear this – we don’t believe that the memories which define us may not be true….or may not be as true as we believe them to be.

But there’s no question that our memories are subject to distortion. In fact, studies have shown that it really is possible to manipulate memories into existence of things that never happened. But here’s the thing: just because your memories aren’t “true” doesn’t mean that they’re not true. While all of us (therapists not least of all) can get into trouble insisting on the literal truth of the content of a memory – that this person did that thing in precisely the way someone remembers it, a memory can be emotionally true whether or not its literal content is accurate. As a therapist, I find it to be very useful to broaden my definition of memory to allow for an emotional truth which transcends the literal specifics of any given memory.

I could say much more about this, but it’s beyond the scope of this post. I’ll end by recommending a little game that I sometimes play with my wife – you can do it with any with whom you’ve shared past experiences. Choose a memorable moment that you’ve been through together. Then, without talking about it, separately write down everything you can remember about the event. When you’re done, compare notes. You’ll almost certainly find that some things you remember almost exactly the same. And that your partner’s memories will trigger things that you had forgotten. But other things will be more blurry – did it happen that way or not? And, most fascinating of all, some things you will disagree about completely. It’s likely that you will isolate at least a few details which you simply cannot resolve. Both versions cannot be true. And yet each separate version is true to that person’s experience. Here’s the challenge: can you allow your memory to be both true and not true at the same time?

Musical memories

There are many, many songs about memories, many of them completely awful. But I’m going to take the opportunity here (which I may never have again) to pair Philip Glass with Barbra Streisand. Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach is not explicitly about memory. But it from one of my favorite pieces of music and it contains a text which requires singers to memorize long sequence of random numbers, which makes it a perfect accompaniment for this exercise:

Video: Einstein on the Beach: numbers

And I must balance the avant-garde minimalism of Philip Glass with a nod to one of my least favorite performers (and songs) of all times, which is, of course, explicitly about memory:

Barbra Streisand: Memories

If you think I should have chosen something different, or you can think of a song which better embodies the spirit of the exercises, let me know in the comments.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

In addition, I want to provide a link to Joshua Foer’s book:

And Dan Siegel’s wonderful book, The Mindful Brain, which has inspired me in many ways and from which I drew the summary of the benefits of mindfulness listed earlier in this post:

Beyond the Book 5#  – Memorize a Data Sequence

 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Memorize a Data Sequence.”

 

Introduction: meditating on memory

 

The exercise “Memorize a Data Sequence” is all about memory, but it’s not about memory in the ways that we usually think about it. Most popular discussion about memory focuses on the experience of common forgetfulness and on ways of staving off memory loss as we age. But the focus of this exercise is about something we don’t usually stop to think about: how our minds create discrete memories from the seamless flow of our experience.

 

Rather than suggesting ways to improve our memory, the exercise uses the present moment experience of memory (and its failures) as an object of meditation. What’s the point? Simple. As we observe the mechanisms of our own memory in action, we increase our capacity to reflect on the workings of our mind, which brings us the benefits of mindfulness meditation in whatever form we practice it (as summarized by Dan Siegel): we become less reactive to our inner experience; we enhance our ability to attend to sensations, thoughts and feelings, whether pleasant or unpleasant; we train ourselves to move through our lives with greater awareness and we foster a non-judgmental attitude toward our own experience.

 

But just because the exercise cheerfully ignores the practical functions of memory in real life, that doesn’t mean that I’m not just as distressed as any guy (especially any guy who recently turned fifty) about the declining state of my own memory. In fact, my struggles with memory in recent years have been greatly compounded by my struggles with Chronic Lyme Disease, which has neurological effects that fog my brain making it very hard to think fluidly and retrieve material from memory. (For instance, I just spent over a minute – I’m not kidding – trying to retrieve the word “retrieve.”) All of this often leaves me feeling rather like Dorrie, in Finding Nemo:

 

[finding nemo video]

 

Pieces of Pi

 

Lyme Disease aside, though, declining memory and aging do of course go hand in hand. And for all the early Alzheimer’s jokes, for the most part it’s not pathological. It’s intriguing to me, though, how little my own distress about the state of my memory motivates me to do anything about it. If I were really motivated to improve my memory, I might spend more time doing exercises at the Memory Gym. Or I might take memory-enhancing vitamins and supplements.  I could practice the many commonly-suggested techniques for maintaining a healthy memory, such as these suggested by the Mayo Clinic. Or I might simply play endless games of the simple yet utterly maddening game N-back, which has been demonstrated to improve both memory and “fluid intelligence.”

 

Better yet, I might start applying some of the techniques Joshua Foer describes in his fascinating new book Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything, in which Foer describes how he, a person with a completely average memory, trained himself to memorize strings of random information so well that he wound up in the finals of the USA Memory Championships. As it turns out, the capacity to retain prodigious amounts of information doesn’t actually require special gifts. It’s simply a matter of discipline and persistence. (If you want the short version of his story, Foer also summarized some of the ideas ideas in the book in a New York Times Magazine piece titled Secrets of a Mind Gamer,)

 

When I wrote The Next Ten Minutes, I had no idea that there were competitions dedicated to the sorts of tasks I describe in this exercise – memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards, strings of random digits, etc. But I was fascinated by the Pi Day contest at my son’s school, in which students attempted to memorize as many digits of Pi as you can. (Want to get started? Here are the first million digits.)

 

Pi image

 

I’d had some recent experience with similar tasks, most notably in my efforts over the past few years to teach myself Chinese. Learning any language requires a great deal of memorization, of course, especially when you’re trying to building vocabulary. But Chinese, with its ideographic written system (in which every word is expressed by different character) presents unique challenges to one’s memory. Especially for someone like me, because my visual memory is simply awful. I do reasonably well (although not great) memorizing words and grammatical structures aurally. But when I try to memorize Chinese characters, my brain simply flails. It’s extremely difficult to make the imagery before me attach itself to any sense of meaning. So I have the experience, over and over again, of watching my brain struggle as it tries to force itself to create a memory. It feels like a micro-version of the experience of the famous amnesia patient Clive Wearing:

 

Clive Wearing video

 

Chinese image

 

Both the Pi contest and the task of trying to memorize Chinese characters capture my attention because of the way they combine something so seemingly pointless with something so deeply human. Our identities are shaped by our memories (more on that in a moment), but memory in and of itself is without any inherent meaning. Memory is simply a mechanical function through which the brain’s short-term processing encodes some portion of the information in our experience into long-term memory. The more detailed processes through which memory works, however fascinating, are beyond the scope of this post (and frankly they’re largely beyond my comprehension). But the underlying paradox bears repeating: the mechanical act of encoding memories is essentially without meaning; but it is only through that act that a sense of meaning in our lives can arise at all.

 

 

Meaninglessness

 

On one side of this equation lies the experience of meaninglessness. The fascinating thing about the digits of Pi, for instance, is that they are both absolutely fixed – determined – and deeply meaningless. The human brain is averse to meaningless, to such a degree that we will relentlessly impose a non-existent sense of meaning on things which are truly random. (For instance, check out for instance this short NPR story on the existence or non-existence of true randomness of  the iPod Shuffle.) In fact, creating something which human beings experience as truly random is really quite difficult. Monty Python was often pretty good at it. And Samuel Beckett may be the closest thing we have to a master at this art:

 

Beckett video

 

How much of what you hear in this text is actual meaning as generated by the artist, and how much of it is imposed by the need of our own minds to find this string of text meaningful? Although it’s probably an impossible line to draw, it’s fair to say that a large part of the “meaning” that we make from Beckett’s words comes from our own imposition of order upon them.

 

Meaning

 

While the neurological workings of memory are complex beyond my understanding, the subjective experience of memory is my stock in trade. As a psychotherapist, I often conceptualize my essential job as that of matching present emotional experience with memories from the past. A key question I am regularly asking my clients as they talk about something that’s distressing them, is whether they have any memories of feeling this way in the past.

 

There’s an assumption underlying that question: that our behavior in the present is shaped by our past experience. Or, more properly, by the memories that we have constructed about our past experience.

 

Because the other assumption in that question is that our memories are an accurate reconstruction of what happened to us in the past. But the hard truth about the subjective experience of memory is that it is extremely malleable. Memory defines us. And yet it is deliciously fallible. People don’t want to hear this – we don’t believe that the memories which define us may not be true….or may not be as true as we believe them to be.

 

But there’s no question that our memories are subject to distortion. In fact, studies have shown that it really is possible to manipulate memories into existence of things that never happened. But here’s the thing: just because your memories aren’t “true” doesn’t mean that they’re not true. While all of us (therapists not least of all) can get into trouble insisting on the literal truth of the content of a memory – that this person did that thing in precisely the way someone remembers it, a memory can be emotionally true whether or not its literal content is accurate. As a therapist, I find it to be very useful to broaden my definition of memory to allow for an emotional truth which transcends the literal specifics of any given memory.

 

I could say much more about this, but it’s beyond the scope of this post. I’ll end by recommending a little game that I sometimes play with my wife – you can do it with any with whom you’ve shared past experiences. Choose a memorable moment that you’ve been through together. Then, without talking about it, separately write down everything you can remember about the event. When you’re done, compare notes. You’ll almost certainly find that some things you remember almost exactly the same. And that your partner’s memories will trigger things that you had forgotten. But other things will be more blurry – did it happen that way or not? And, most fascinating of all, some things you will disagree about completely. It’s likely that you will isolate at least a few details which you simply cannot resolve. Both versions cannot be true. And yet each separate version is true to that person’s experience. Here’s the challenge: can you allow your memory to be both true and not true at the same time?

 

Musical memories

 

There are many, many songs about memories, many of them completely awful. But I’m going to take the opportunity here (which I may never have again) to pair Philip Glass with Barbra Streisand. Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach is not explicitly about memory. But it from one of my favorite pieces of music and it contains a text which requires singers to memorize long sequence of random numbers, which makes it a perfect accompaniment for this exercise:

 

Video: Einstein on the Beach: numbers

 

And I must balance the avant-garde minimalism of Philip Glass with a nod to one of my least favorite performers (and songs) of all times, which is, of course, explicitly about memory:

 

Barbra Streisand: Memories

 

If you think I should have chosen something different, or you can think of a song which better embodies the spirit of the exercises, let me know in the comments.

 

 

Further reading

 

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

 

 

 

 

In addition, I want to provide a link to Joshua Foer’s book:

 

And Dan Siegel’s wonderful book, The Mindful Brain, which has inspired me in many ways and from which I drew the summary of the benefits of mindfulness listed earlier in this post:

 

 

And as always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

And as always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

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Beyond the Book #4 – Move As If You Were Underwater

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Dec 312010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Move As If You Were Underwater.”

Introduction: slow feels good

Readers of The Next Ten Minutes will be aware that while I am a great advocate for mindfulness meditation, I often struggle to maintain a consistent meditation practice myself. One of the things that I find most difficult about getting myself to meditate regularly is that meditation requires me to slow down from my usual pace. Like most people, I tend to associate motion with productivity. When I’m busy doing things, especially if I’m busily doing several things at once, I feel, well…important.  Moving slowly works against the way we’ve been conditioned to behave. Which is precisely why it’s such a valuable practice. The exercise Move As If You Were Underwater is designed to provide you with a way to experiment with life in the slow lane. Because once you surrender to it, slow feels good. Slow allows you to move through your life with the fluidity and grace of a Tai Chi master.


Life under water

Similarly to the way that the exercise Go Into Another Room sensitized you to the pressure of air against your body, this exercise asks you to imagine the feel of water pressing against your skin. That pressure forces you to move more slowly than you feel you should be able to. You can probably remember the experience of being a child in a swimming pool and trying to reproduce the activity of running underwater, how the pressure of the water transformed that  familiar movement and made you acutely aware of the mechanics of an activity you ordinarily did without thinking about it.


Like most of the exercises in the book, this one aims to reawaken your awareness of automatic behaviors by forcing yourself into an observational mode as you examine the mechanics of your behavior. Or, as Dan Siegel calls it, YODA:  “You Observe and Decouple Automaticity.” “Automaticity” is a way to describe our capacity to behave without conscious awareness of our behaviors. Automaticity is obviously very valuable in many ways. Evolutionarily, the development of the sort of procedural memory that allows us to act without thinking was essential for survival. Because it’s obviously not adaptive to be thinking about the mechanics of running while you’re in the act of trying to out-run a sabre-toothed tiger.

But there is an invisible loss that happens when we transform a learned activity into an automatic behavior. What we lose is the present moment…our mindful awareness of what is actually happening, inside our mind and body and also in the world around us.

In my experience, regaining access to the present moment often requires us to play some sort of cognitive trick on ourselves. Because our minds are extremely well-adapted to do what they do, we have to find ways to bypass that automaticity. Forcing yourself to slow down is one such trick.

Ommmmmmmmm….

Using a mantras can be an important technique in the service of slowing yourself down. Mantras have long served this purpose in many spiritual traditions. And in my view anything can be a mantra so long as it’s used to draw our focus intentional toward a single conscious object. The focus of the mantra doesn’t have to be spiritual (although the outcome of using it may well turn out to be).


In the exercise I encourage you to repeat a simple word or phrase as a way to continually re-direct your attention back to your slow-motion activity. So, if you’re peeling potatoes in slow motion you might simply repeat to yourself: peeling, peeling, peeling. Inevitably your mind will wander. When you notice it has wandered all you need to do is to gently draw your attention back to that mantra, the same way you would bring your focus back to your breath in mindfulness meditation.

Slow food, slow driving

Next time you sit down to dinner with family or friends, take a moment to listen to the sounds emanating from the table. Does it sound something like this?


Slurping and chewing noises are a sure indicator that food is being consumed fast and unconsciously. If, like me, you find yourself distressed at the ways in which we have collectively lost touch with the experience of eating, the slow food movement is the antidote. More than just advocating that we slow down and appreciate our food, slow food proponents advocate that we become more deeply conscious of where our food is coming from and how it is created. In other words, slow is more than just an absence of speed, it’s a way of thinking – deeply and expansively.


You might also try a technique which I learned from cookbook author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who writes in The Chinese Kitchen about how her father told her “that we must eat our food first with our eyes, then with our minds, then with our noses, and finally with our mouths.” When I notice myself eating too quickly (as I am prone to do), I try to bring myself back to this simple ritual. Before I take a bite I force myself to slow down and experience the food visually. Then I contemplate the food with my mind: what are the many pathways by which it found its way to my plate? Next I draw my attention to my sense of smell, letting myself “taste” the food with my nose. Finally, slowly, I take a bite. And, having gone through these preliminary steps, the experience of eating is transformed.

Another way to transform our everyday experience into slow-motion is through the technique of “hyper-miling.” This practice – driving in a slow and excruciatingly deliberate manner in order to maximize your car’s gas mileage – was born out of a response to high gas prices. But I think of it less as a money-saving technique than as a form of meditation.


In my personal experiments with hyper-miling, I’ve found that one of the most difficult aspects of the practice are the expectations of others. If you’re going to intentionally drive slowly, you have to directly face the irritation of others on the road. How you hold this awareness can vary. You can cloak yourself in righteous indignation; you can be apologetic.; you can try to block out awareness of everyone else. But no matter what you do, you’re still going to be getting in other people’s way. It’s a bit like sitting down to meditate in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Which forces you to contemplate the interesting but uncomfortable idea that an act of meditation to be obnoxious can also be a public nuisance.

Underwater music

Tempted though I am to use the SpongeBob song as a theme song for the exercise, in the end I have to go with “Son of a Mermaid.” Not because I’m a great fan of the song itself, but because the guy actually performs it underwater.


As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Memorize a Data Sequence – here.

 

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Light a Candle: a solstice exercise

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Dec 222010
 

Note: I wrote this new exercise especially for the solstice.  It was first posted on the Beyond Words Trend Watch blog, which you can find here.

The universal element in all our winter holidays is the absence of natural light. On a very primitive level, we’re all a little bit afraid of the dark and that’s why, as the days become shorter and shorter, we string lights around our homes and light candles. We’re holding off against the growing darkness, both symbolically and literally. But in addition to danger, darkness holds a deep and beautiful creative energy. In this exercise (which should be done after sunset or before sunrise), I invite you to immerse yourself in both the lush beauty of darkness and the fragile miracle of light.

What You’ll Need

  • A room
  • A candle
  • Matches

How to Do It

1. See the light. Start by choosing a room in which you feel safe, one in which you have control over the light switches. Now, before you do anything else, simply sit quietly in the room and observe the light that’s already there. Notice the lights themselves – are they overhead or lamps, fluorescent or standard bulbs? Notice everything you can about each source of light. What color is it? Is it constant or does it fluctuate in intensity? Try to identify every other source of light in the room, even those that are masked by brighter lights. Check the electronic devices – they’re always good for some luminescence. How about the windows? Are street lights or passing cars inserting light into the room?

2. Go over to the dark side. In preparation for this step, make sure you know where your candle and matches are. Identify a safe place where you can light the candle once it’s dark. Then, one by one, eliminate as many sources of light as you can. Sometimes this will simply mean flipping a switch. Other times it will mean turning off or even unplugging appliances. Sometimes it will require you to block out lights that you can’t turn off, by covering them up or pulling the curtains or shades. Note: you’re allowed to back-track a little as you perform this step, turning a lamp back on in order to locate the cord for the appliance that’s still lit up.

3. Curse the darkness. Why? Because it’s fun! Also, because it will help connect viscerally to your primal fear of the dark. Imagine the darkness as an evil force that is trying to swallow you up. Imagine it’s sheltering dragons and other malicious beasts. Once you’ve summoned up as much fear as you can, start cursing the darkness. Think of your voice as a source of light that can penetrate the darkness as you call it the worse names that you can think of.

4. See in the dark. That last step didn’t really work, did it? No matter how much you rage against the dying of the light, the darkness holds steady. So try a different approach. Take a few minutes to simply observe yourself as you sit in the darkness. Observe your thoughts, emotions and perceptions as you sit without trying to fight the darkness at all. What do you notice your mind doing? Is it active or calm, fearful or confident? Then see if you can stop attributing any intention to the darkness and simply notice it. Look into it. Stare into it. Try to see the darkness itself, as if it were a palpable substance. Does your experience of darkness change as you do this? Do you notice your eyes starting to adjust, to be able to make out more detail in the room? Is it possible to notice that change as it happens?

5. Light a candle. Because, as they say, it’s better than cursing the darkness. Locate your candle and matches. Even if your eyes have adjusted so that you can make these objects out, try to do it without looking, as if you were in perfect darkness. Magnify your sense of touch as you push the match against the strike pad, creating the friction that creates the flame. Look at the lit match for a moment before you light the candle. Notice how staring into it actually magnifies the darkness around it. Finally, light the candle. Set it in front of you. For a moment don’t focus on the quality of the light itself. Just take a few deep breaths and notice the way your body feels. What has changed? Then, with soft eyes, let yourself see the light. Notice what your mind wants to do. Does it like to stare straight into the light? Or does it want to use the emanation of the light to look around the room? Do you feel the impulse to jump up and turn more lights back on? Or possibly to blow out the candle and return to darkness? Take a few moments just to notice these impulse and then, when you’re ready, act on whichever one is the most appealing.

Inner darkness

There’s good reason that we’re hard-wired to be anxious about darkness. Darkness steals away our ability to identify danger before it reaches us. In darkness, we have an inherent disadvantage against all those nocturnal creatures whose vision has adapted to the night (and also against humans who are wearing night-vision goggles). Darkness is associated with almost every negative human quality – aggression, ignorance, perversity, etc. To Sigmund Freud, darkness was associated the primal urges that lurked in the unconscious. To Carl Jung, darkness meant the “shadow,” that part of ourselves that we rejected and split off from awareness. Freud was the first to articulate the ways in which we develop defenses against the awareness of this darkness within us. To both Jung and Freud, mental health required some degree of re-integration of these “dark” urges into our conscious minds by acknowledging rather than denying our aggressive impulses. In Jung’s view, owning your shadow is an essential part of becoming a more evolved human being. For Freud, the most profound creativity arose out of the sublimation of primitive, “dark” energy into higher order actions. The issue is not that our inner darkness is a positive thing. It’s that we all inevitably have a dark side, and when we deny it we’re telling ourselves several unsustainable lies. The first is that we are without aggression and hostility. The second is that we are not strong enough to experience dark feelings without acting them out. The irony is that those who most deny the reality of their inner darkness are precisely those who are most likely to act out on those urges. (Which is why variations on the story of the preacher who gets caught with his pants down are so very common.) The truth is that our darkest impulses are bound up with our most vital energy. And allowing ourselves to experience that darkness in a mature way can free up that energy for our use and give us access to our richest creativity.

Variations:

Close your eyes. It’s a funny thing about closing our eyes…there’s so much light happening on the backs of our eyelids. I have no idea what neurological or anatomical features give rise to this internal light show, but whatever the reason it gives us an opportunity to do this a variation on exercise no matter where we are. When you first close your eyes, the experience seems to be one of darkness. But as you settle in you can become aware of the host of visual sensations which arise within your own mind and body. Try using these sensations of light and color as an object of meditation. Take ten minutes or so to focus on the light that you are seeing. Notice everything you can about it. Then (and this is the best part), open your eyes and see if you can catch the imprint of those sensations on the world you see before you.

Just sit in the dark. Surely you know the old joke: How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Never mind, I’ll just sit in the dark. We’ve all got an inner martyr. Bring yours into the open by doing this exercise while enacting the spirit of this joke. Give yourself access to a candle, but don’t light it. Fail to light it resentfully. Magnify your feelings of powerlessness and suffering. Imagine what life looks like to those who those who not only don’t acknowledge their own inner darkness, but also refuse to give themselves access to their inner light. When you start to feel your suffering at its most intense, try to shift your perspective so that you are observing rather the martyr rather than in habiting him or her. What would it take to hold this suffering person with compassion?

Further listening: three great songs about darkness and light

Absolutely the best song ever written about a nightlight


Spiritual darkness, spiritual light

 

Melting into the dark

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Beyond the Book #3 – Go Into Another Room

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Dec 012010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Go Into Another Room.”


Introduction: acoustics and mindfulness

The exercise Go Into Another Room combines mindfulness practice with a simple psychotherapeutic technique with the goal of bringing us into a present moment awareness of the space we are currently inhabiting.

The mindfulness aspect of the exercise involves focusing our awareness on the spatial and acoustic aspects of the physical rooms we inhabit. The therapeutic technique involves mindfully making a very small change in our behavior and using the experience of change as leverage for a larger shift in our state of mind. I talk about the therapeutic technique in several different parts of the book, so in this post I’ll be exploring our experience of acoustic space and the ways in which acoustic awareness can be a vehicle for greater mindfulness. Because I believe that sound is a particularly effective vehicle with which to access mindfulness.  Like the breath, it’s always there. Even in the quietest room there is sound. Even in the absence of external noise, our own bodies create sound. And focusing our attention on the qualities of the sounds around us brings us into a fuller awareness of the present moment.

Acoustic literacy

I am nothing of an acoustician. I don’t begin to be able to comprehend the mathematics and physics that regulate the way sound behaves in different physical spaces. Nonetheless, hearing is by far my dominant sense and as a result I find that I have an intense intuitive awareness of the acoustic properties of physical spaces.

It’s not an intentional awareness and often it’s not even conscious. I find that it’s a difficult experience to put into words. Part of what makes it difficult is that I’m talking not about the experience of sound itself, but rather about an awareness of the behavior of sound within a given space. The sound of a hand clap in an empty room, to give a simple example, is very different than a hand clap in a fully furnished room. The sound of a footstep is different in a bathroom and in a gymnasium. Even if the original source of the sound is identical, the behavior of that sound in different rooms transforms our experience of it.

The reason for this is reverberation. When sound waves move out from their source, they eventually make contact with the surfaces around them. When they bounce off of those surfaces we hear, in addition to the initial sound, its reflection.

Different surfaces behave differently when sounds hit them. Some tend to absorb sound, some reflect them back. Surfaces at different distances reflect the sound at different time intervals. Different materials absorb or reflect particular frequencies of sound. As I say, the mathematical formulas describing the acoustic behavior of different spaces is extremely complex and beyond my understanding. But those who do understand it have created software which can model many different spaces, as in the examples below, which I created by taking a single sound source then running it through different settings on the reverb plug-in on my computer.

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In this example I’ve taken a simple drum beat and repeated it eight times. The difference should be fairly clear even on the worst speakers. The first version is “dry” – no additional reverb has been applied. In the second reverb is applied to create the effect of hearing the sound from a great distance. The third replicates the acoustics of a kitchen. The fourth is a large room. The fifth is a tunnel, the sixth a cathedral, the seventh and exhibition hall and the eighth mimics a martial arts stadium. (For those who are interested, I did this using two of the reverb plug-ins that come with Cubase 5 – Reverence and RoomWorks. I didn’t do anything fancy with the settings, just used the presets that come with these programs.)

Echoic, Anechoic

As I say, my understanding of what’s happening here is primarily intuitive. My ears pick up on these differences and I respond to them. We all perform some version of this extraordinarily complex process. Sort of like bats using echolocation, our minds are constantly making subtle assessments of the relationship between the sources of sounds and the reflections those sounds are creating.

As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in the introduction to their wonderful book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, the ability to sense spatial attributes is not unique to bats and dolphins. It’s hard-wired into our brains. “For example,” they write, “when blindfolded, nearly all of us can approach a wall without touching it just by attending to the way the wall changes the frequency balance of the background noise.” We’re not ordinarily conscious of doing this. But if I blindfolded you and teleported you to the inside of a cathedral, you’d know instantly what sort of space you were in. And if I then teleported you into a bathroom, you’d automatically feel the difference.

Personally, I find that I’m very sensitive to these differences. There are rooms that I can barely stand to be in because of their acoustic properties. And there are other spaces that I completely love. One of the rooms I like the most acoustically

is the music studio that I have created in the basement of my house. It’s a narrow room and before I began using it for music it was acoustically unpleasant…boomy and tight. I treated the walls with a great deal of acoustical foam, which absorbs much of the sound in the room before it reverberates off of the walls (particularly lower, bass frequencies). The effect is a room that, when you walk into it, feels soft and hushed, gently contained. The acoustical treatment has shaped the behavior of sound within the room in a way that makes it much more pleasant. At least to me.

This can be taken to extremes. Blesser and Salter describe the effects of “anechoic chambers,” rooms which have been specially designed so that all surfaces absorb rather than reflect sound waves. “From an aural perspective,” they write, “an ideal anechoic chamber is completely silent and entirely ‘spaceless.’” They describe the sensations of pressure, discomfort, disorientation, even nausea that are created by the absence of sonic reverberation. “The combination of sound isolation and absorption reduces background sound to a level that no longer masks the sound of a listener’s breathing heart or flowing blood.”  Indeed, when John Cage entered the Harvard anechoic chamber in 1948 he reported that rather than hearing silence he heard two distinct sounds which he was told were the sounds of his nervous system and his circulatory system. There is no such thing, he concluded, as perfect silence.


 

I am Standing in a Room

The theme song for this exercise is not a song at all. It is a classic piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier called I am Standing in a Room. (It’s a piece which I’ve listed, along with other minimalist classics, in the “further listening” at the end of the exercise Repeat Yourself.) In this piece, Lucier takes a simple piece of audio (a spoken paragraph) and plays it in a room then re-records the sound as it sounds in the room. He repeats this process over and over until the original sound is transformed by the reverberant properties of the room itself. It’s an extraordinary exploration of the sonic and acoustic principles I’ve been discussing in this post.  An illustration of the technique can be found in the video below. If you’d like to get the entire mesmerizing and surprisingly poignant 45 minute piece, you can find it here.


 

As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

Further, further reading

More detailed reading on spatial acoustics, borrowed from Blesser and Salter’s website:

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Move As If You Were Underwater – here.

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Here’s your chance to win a signed copy of The Next Ten Minutes

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Nov 152010
 

I’m honored to be the featured artist in the Lymenaide Holiday Bazaar. Please consider supporting those with Lyme by visiting the Bazaar. And while you’re there, enter for a chance to win a signed copy of The Next Ten Minutes. The details are below.

Featured Artist

Monday, November 15th
Featured Artist: Andrew Peterson



Lymenaide is proud to introduce this season’s first Holiday Bazaar Featured Artist: Andrew Peterson.
Andrew is a relatively newly diagnosed Lyme patient, but is not stranger to physical pain and hardship. He suffered for two years, saw numerous doctors, and even acquired a tentative diagnosis of ALS before he was diagnosed with late stage Lyme disease.
“I was diagnosed with Lyme in July of this year, after spending two years going from doctor to doctor in search of a diagnosis for all my crazy symptoms. I even wound up at the Mayo Clinic because for awhile it seemed very possible that I had ALS. The specialists all kept telling me that there was nothing wrong with me, even as my symptoms worsened. Like so many other people, I came out negative on the ELISA test and this, in conjunction with the fact that I live in Montana (where Lyme supposedly doesn’t exist) kept any of my doctors from worrying about Lyme. I finally got the Lyme diagnosis when I insisted on getting a Western Blot, which came back positive for borellia. (I’ve written extensively about the search for a diagnosis on my blog, in a series called “Being Undiagnosable.” It’s an experience I know that many Lymies will relate to.) So as best I can figure, I’ve had Lyme for almost two and a half years.”
Yet even through the hardship and debilitation that Andrew has faced, he has remained incredibly positive and admirably motivated. Instead of letting the disease destroy everything that he is and was, he used it as fuel to continue on with his passion and shape who he is today.
“As so many people who face my life with Lyme come to realize, it’s a disease which robs you of the ability to work as hard or as well as you used to be able. I came to an important realization during the course of the past few years, which was that while I may not be able to get as much work done as I used to, I can still move my life forward. I can get a little bit done every day, and that will add up. Looking back on it, I can’t believe that I was able to write and publish a book during this difficult time. But the way I did it was by staying focused on what it was possible for me to do at any given moment. By resting when I needed to rest and working when I was able. The book itself has become a symbol to me that even though Lyme has dramatically altered my life, it does not have complete control.

The other thing that has been very exciting to me is that the realization, as The Next Ten Minutes neared its publication date, that I had the opportunity not just to promote my book, but to use that promotion to advocate for greater Lyme awareness. In interviews and discussions about the book, I have the chance to talk about my experience with Lyme and put a human face to the disease.”

“The Next Ten Minutes” Book Giveaway


What better way to kick off Lymenaide’s series of Holiday Bazaar Featured Artist Giveaways than with such an inspiring book, by an incredible author and fellow lyme survivor.

“The Next Ten Minutes contains a set of simple yet powerful exercises which will transform your state of mind by directing your full awareness to the habits and routines of your everyday life. The seeds of change are embedded within the most ordinary routines of daily life. These exercises will help you see how, when you bring your full attention to these routines, daily life can become an act of meditation.”



To enter to win a signed copy of “The Next Ten Minutes”, please do the following:


1. Comment on “The Next Ten Minutes” bazaar booth, which can be found here. In your comment, please either write an encouraging, motivating, or inspiring message to late stage Lyme battlers, or state how you’ve used a talent or passion of your own to cope with your illness like Andrew Peterson has.

2. Either share the link to this featured artist write-up on your blog, twitter account or facebook page, or make a purchase from one of the booths at the bazaar. In your comment on “The Next Ten Minutes” bazaar booth, please either include the link to where you’ve shared, or a link to the booth that you have purchased from.

3. Include your email address at the end of your comment, so we can contact you if you so happen to win.

Your comment will enter you in a drawing that will take place this Friday, November 20th. The winner will be announced on Lymenaide’s facebook page and will receive an email notification. Andrew Peterson will personally mail the winner a signed copy of his book.

“I believe deeply that this disease does not have to stop us in our tracks. Each of the booths in the Lymenaide holiday bazaar represents a triumph over Lyme. Sometimes it seems like we’re only capable of taking the tiniest steps forward…but that is still progress. We can all find ways to move forward with hope and compassion, for ourselves and for everyone else who suffers from Lyme.” – Andrew Peterson



Enter on Andrew’s booth- http://bit.ly/9i2DSR
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Beyond the Book #1 – Procrastinate

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Nov 032010
 

Introduction

This is the inaugural post in a new series, in which I will explore the ideas behind each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. The concept for this series arose as I was writing the book. With each exercise, I found that I there were materials that I really wished I could have incorporated into the book. But most of these materials existed on-line. And to my mind there’s just no good way to incorporate on-line materials into a physical book. So, rather than sprinkle the pages of the book with a bunch of web addresses, I decided to supplement the book with a series of blog posts in which I can link directly to on-line material. These posts will undoubtedly vary in their narrative coherence. Some will be short essays. Some will take the form of a list. All will include links to the additional reading (or listening) references which appear at the end of each exercise.

If you haven’t yet read the book, you won’t have all of the information you need to place the material in these posts in context. Even so, you should find some interesting and entertaining things here. My hope is that you’ll find the information in these posts both fun and helpful as supplements to the book. I would like for this to be a dynamic project and a conversation, so I’m also hoping that readers will suggest additional on-line materials and will provide links in the comments section. My plan is to post an entry about a new exercise about once a week.

The roots of this exercise and the concepts behind it

Procrastinate was the very first exercise I wrote for the book, and it is one of the exercises which is most directly drawn from traditional psychotherapeutic techniques. It is an example of “prescribing the symptom” (a concept which I discuss elsewhere in the book), a technique which is meant to put the patient into a therapeutic double bind. The beauty of a well-executed double-bind is that it creates a situation in which every outcome is positive. When you are instructed to perform a “negative” behavior such as procrastination, you have two choices: you can follow the instruction or you can disobey. If you disobey you win, because you have overcome your procrastination. If you follow the instructions you also win, because you have transformed the act of procrastination into a conscious choice, thus demonstrating the power that you have over your own behavior.

This technique is most useful in situations where we feel powerless..or rather, where we aren’t acknowledging the power that we have. It works by giving us access to the part of ourselves that is making the choice to engage in the behavior. It’s a technique which, to the best of my knowledge, was developed by Milton Erickson, whom you can see at work in this video:


Erickson made use of small variations in habitual behaviors as leverage for larger change. In my exercise, the goal is slightly different. I want the reader to experience the “negative” behavior of procrastination as a conscious choice. The larger goal for me (as it is in all of the exercises in the book) is to enhance your “observing ego,” so that you have a greater ability to observe the workings of your own mind.

Another example of a therapeutic double bind

Recently a patient was describing to me how she frequently found herself doing things for other people that she really didn’t want to do. She was puzzled by why she kept doing this. I had her walk through one specific example of this behavior, in as much detail as she could. She described a recurring scenario in which her husband would ask her to do something that he was perfectly capable of doing for himself (“honey, would answer the phone, it might be my boss calling”). When this happened, she had a distinct emotional reaction: an initial flare of anger, followed quickly by an emotional damping down and a cognitive rationalization (“don’t make him get mad at me”). Then she proceeded to resentfully do what he asked.

I instructed her to keep doing exactly what she had been doing over the next week. But to observe herself as she engaged in that behavior. And each time she observed herself repeating this pattern, I told her to say to herself, calmly and without  judgment: “I am choosing to do something that I don’t want to do.”

When she came in for her next session, something had shifted. She didn’t feel helpless anymore in the face of her husband’s intimidating demands. In fact, she confessed, she’d disobeyed my instructions by starting to tell him to answer the phone for himself.

The technique worked because rather than trying to force her behavior to change it created a sort of cognitive dissonance in her own self-awareness. She was forced into a more mindful state about her own behavior. Being able to observe herself in this manner gave her the room to start making different decisions. By failing, she found success.

Etymology

The word “procrastinate” is rooted in the Latin verb that literally means in favor of (pro) tomorrow (cras). I find this interesting because, offhand, I can’t think of another English word that has the Latin root “cras” with this meaning. (If you know of one, please leave it in the comments.) There’s a nice explanation of the etymology at Word Power.

Procrastination: the traditional view

Here’s Ellen DeGeneres, with your basic stand-up comedy riff on procrastination:


Here’s an animated version of the same theme:


There are a few million variations on this theme. Procrastination is a universal experience, but the way we usually think about it isn’t particularly complex. The joke is simply that we humans keep hitting our head against the same wall, over and over again. We try to overcome our weakness, but after a few seconds we succumb.

Traditional techniques for fighting procrastination

Just as humor about procrastination tends to hit a single note over and over again, traditional advice for over-coming procrastination tends to try to stare down our resistance to getting things done by using strategies aimed at forcing our behavior to change, as evidenced in instructional videos like these:


And you’ll find similar advice on sites like these:

eHow

About.com

Mindtools.com

The idea, as I see it, is that you can change your behavior by forcing your behavior to change. But as those who have read The Next Ten Minutes will be aware, I’m not a big believer in this approach. I actually to think that trying to keep yourself from procrastinating is a fool’s errand. If you try to engage it in hand-to-hand combat, it’s not going to go well. In fact, you might actually wind up strengthening the very behavior you’re attempting to suppress.

Meditation on procrastination

That’s a lot of carping about the unhelpful ways that people try to help us with procrastination. But there are also some people out there who think about procrastination in really interesting ways. For instance, I rather like this approach to “structured” procrastination because it attempts to make use of the inevitability of procrastination rather than trying to defeat it outright:

Structured Procrastination

And this is a wonderful piece which looks at the psychological mechanisms underlying procrastination, leading us to think differently about how our minds are working when we’re in the process of procrastinating:

You are not so smart

Finally ,here’s another very good essay on the psychology of procrastination, which gets you thinking differently about the whole subject, and which might just inspire you to get some really important things done:

Paul Graham

Procrastination songs

In my fantasy about this series I have a theme song for each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. But I’m off to a bad start because I honestly cannot think of many hit songs about procrastination. Some people have suggested John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” but that’s not really about procrastination. It’s about detachment. The best procrastination songs I can find are home-made, like the one below. (If you can think of any good songs about procrastination, please list them in the comments.)


Half-assed procrastination

One more thought. In one of the variations on this exercise in the book I ask readers to do something that they’ve been putting off, but to do it without enthusiasm. I challenge readers to see if they can mindfully do a half-assed job on something. It’s a challenge because usually when we do a half-assed job on something it’s a sort of semi-conscious protest.

This variation relates to an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, one which informs the entire book. I believe that we often discount the value of positive behaviors which we perform poorly or inconsistently. I’ve thought about this a great deal in regards to my own meditation practice….or lack thereof. I know that I am an extremely inconsistent meditator. What I’ve found though, is that this awareness of how poorly I meditate tends to keep me from meditating at all. In writing The Next Ten Minutes I attempted to turn this idea on its head. Because I truly believe that even meditation practices that are done poorly and without much commitment are beneficial. And I believe that giving ourselves permission to practice meditation in a half-assed manner is a great way to build a micro-meditation practice into our daily lives. Rather than telling ourselves that we are failing because we can’t focus on our breath for more than a few seconds, why not build a practice whose goal is to make the most of those few seconds that you can meditate?

Toward that end, I created the League of Half-Assed Meditators, which now has its own page on Facebook. When I come across articles or research supporting the benefits of “micro-meditation,” I link to them there. If you too believe that taking a single, focused breath can make a positive difference in your day, then I encourage you to join the group.

Further reading

The individual reading references for this exercise are:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can find an Amazon list of references for this exercise here. The find a full set of lists for every exercise here. And if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, I’d love to hear them. Please leave them in a comment.

Open questions

Finally, a few question for discussion:

  • What is the most effective tool you’ve ever found to distract yourself from a task that you know you should be doing? Or, to give the question a more sinister twist: if you were a secret agent whose task was to keep your enemies from being able to concentrate on their work…what program or website would you sneak onto their computer to achieve your goal?
  • And what are your ideas for further variations on the basic procrastination exercise?

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Relax Your Face – here.

 



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The Next Ten Minutes…interview on Beyond 50 Radio

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Oct 272010
 

I was interviewed this morning On Beyond 50 Radio. You can listen to a recording of the broadcast here:


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The Next Ten Minutes…soundtrack

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Sep 302010
 


I’ve been hard at work lately on a short video trailer for The Next Ten Minutes. As a composer, one of the most important aspects of this has been creating the soundtrack for the video. I wanted to create a piece of music that worked harmoniously with the spoken word but which could also stand on its own as a sort of soundtrack to the book itself. So, while the evolution of this cyclic, meditative piece is driven by the rhythms of the text it accompanies, my hope is that it also has an internal coherence of its own.

And yes, I acknowledge the influence of Steve Reich.

The full video will be available nearer the publication date for the book (10/26).

 

To hear the music, use this player:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.


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