Thoughts on The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson, Rosch)

I just finished reading The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. I honestly wasn't following the logic of the book for most of the time I was reading it. I didn't really understand how they were connecting Buddhism to cognitive science. I liked their review of enactive cognition. But while I was reading the last ten pages on the treadmill this morning, the train of thought it led me to was worth the whole book.  

I had a really busy day, so I didn't get to reflect about it too much - I'm trying to piece it together now as I write this. Varela et al. were challenging the dogma that we exist as economic machines, programmed to maximize reward and avoid costs. But they make an interesting point: we all (sometimes) do benevolent things and feel good about it, and not in a "selfish" way. Our phenomenological experience of being a good person means that we don't experience life as the economic machine - and this is important for understanding behavior! The whole book was kind of arguing how phenomenology/experience can't be ignored forever in the quest to understand the mind. Also, Varela et al. point out that via the theory of enactive cognition, all existence exists in relation to what exists around it. In other words, everything we love exists because something besides ourselves exists. Even when caught in the passionate pursuit of wealth and power, these things are only valuable in the sense that other organisms are there to witness our increased evolutionary fitness for acquiring these goods. Nothing is in isolation. 

So we have two main points that I feel like were really meaningful:

1) We (sometimes) experience selflessness, compassion, benevolence, and non-possessive love for others. 

2) Even the most debased pleasures occur in-the-world, embodied and enacted in the environment (which includes other living beings).

Something about contemplating these two points made me feel an intense, tear-producing surge of compassion, and I felt as if I was awakening to some deep realization about the true inter-connectedness of the universe and all living creatures. It was very awesome. I haven't felt like that in a long time. The book was definitely worth the read even if just for putting me on that train of thought. Yet it's late in the day now, so I have to admit I'm struggling to piece together just what it was about the book that hit me so profoundly. 

There is a lot more to contemplate regarding this connection between Buddhism and cognitive science, or even Buddhism/Eastern spirituality with philosophy of science in general. I will update here with any new thoughts later in the year perhaps. (Also, yes I am still doing No-AI November and I actually would love to not ever go back to AI, but that will be another upcoming post). 

No-AI November

 Last week, I presented this paper on cognitive offloading in children. The discussion moved to AI, and how it might be different from other ways our species has offloaded until recently. Prior to AI, the dominant form of offloading is writing. We manipulate and structure the environment in many ways to aid cognition, but when we think of "offloading" information, most of us think of how we write things down to remember later. A bit worse is looking things up on Google, say to cheat for a test. But, perhaps fundamentally different from these, is how we use AI to problem solve.

I'm always using ChatGPT to check my scripts. I do a ton of data cleaning and things like parsing eyetracking data, which (for me) can get really confusing. I don't think I would have made as much progress in my PhD so far without the advent of AI to speed up the process of debugging code or helping me turn psuedocode into a usable chunk. 

But I think this is actually bad in the long run. I've been playing with the idea in my head of doing no-AI November, and I think I will commit to it. Today I had to do a lot of scripting in R, and I tested out not using ChatGPT for anything. Yes it did take me 5x as long to make a new plot that I have never made before, and a miser would think that is proof of how useful and necessary AI is in today's world to maintain productivity in the face of speedy competition (whom is also undoubtedly using AI) but! That was also 5x more thinking. And 5x more time spent working on a problem. That means, every time you use ChatGPT - even for something miniscule, like plotting something or writing a simple 10-line for-loop - you are dividing your thinking time by at least half. That has got to be bad for those of us in the business of building knowledge and learning skills.

So here goes no-AI November! 

Attentional refreshing as "meditation"

I am here, once again, talking about a new form of "meditation" I have been doing the past month. Eventually I will land on one that sticks. Also, this method is probably not meditation at all. Lewandowsky and Oberauer talk in this article about attentional "refreshing" as a more effective method for maintaining information in memory than rehearsal.  

Most of us have been told that the best way to memorize information (over short or long periods) is to mentally or verbally rehearse it. I also believed this until reading the linked article. Yet something called attentional "refreshing" might lead to better recall. In the article, Lewandowsky and Oberauer target the "decay" theory of memory failures (I will not go into the decay-vs.-interference debate here, but personally I do lean towards interference theory) by demonstrating how rehearsal, which should eliminate any memory loss due to decay-over-time, works no better than simply directing one's attention to the content in memory. 

How is "refreshing" any different from rehearsal? They are defining "rehearsal" as "rote articulatory rehearsal", whereas refreshing is "briefly directing attention to a concept or memory, bringing it into conscious awareness" - the key difference (as I understand it) is that refreshing does not require verbalization. 

Getting to my point, I've been practicing 20 minutes of attentional refreshing every day, usually in the afternoon or evening when I've finished all of my daily reading. I just try to recall and attend to the memories I have of anything I've learned, graphs I've looked at, meetings I've been in. Anecdotally (this entire blog is an anecdote!) I am actually remembering content from what I read! Gone are the days of reading endlessly only to forget it all after a few hours... Everybody should be doing this, and I can't believe I just now figured out this learning "hack"!

"Lantern" meditation

The past week I've been trying a new meditation technique that is unlike any others I've played around with. I was inspired by a recent conversation with my CDS mentor, Alison Gopnik (the Cognitive Development Society's mentorship program is great for students, check it out if you haven't). She describes children's attention to be more like a "lantern" than like a "flashlight" - unfocused, but broad. Kids and babies notice things about the world that us adults take for granted. Mindfulness meditation can bring us back to the moment, but it often involves focusing on a mantra or focusing on the breath or focusing on focusing - when maybe we should stop trying to focus on anything in the first place.

Alison described her meditation practice to be like a "lantern" meditation. I didn't get many details about her specific technique, but it inspired me to test out my own interpretation of it.

For 20 minutes a day (sometimes broken up into two 10-minute sessions) I sat outside and let my attention be captured by anything and everything. Birds singing, bugs crawling, the wind, weird cracks in the pavement, dogs running up for a scratch. I didn't fight distractions, and I also didn't focus on anything. No mantra, no specific breathing, no "trying not to think". I think by being passive about the state of my mind, I was able to reach a meditative state faster than usual.

I'm going to stick with this technique for a bit, and I'll update the blog later on if I notice any additional benefits. Thank-you to Alison, if you somehow haven't heard of her, you should check her out (countless talks on Youtube and epic podcast appearances). 

Debrief: short-term meditation training results

 To recap, this is what I did: 

• Pre-test: N-back until failure (did not make it past 3-back)
• 20 minutes of mindfulness-meditation-inspired meditation for 4 days
• (Always between 1 and 4pm, set a timer for 20 minutes, sat outside, focused and redirected mindfulness on the breath)
• Post-test: N-back until failure (made it through 3-back, failed 4-back miserably)

Inspired by the short-term meditation training in Zeidan et al., 2010 where they recorded improvement in N-back after 4 days of 20-minute mindfulness meditation sessions. 

I also (somewhat) kept track of how often I mind-wandered during my daily reading, but I didn't see noticeable improvement there. (~5-8 mind-wanders per hour of reading). 

I would be surprised if getting a bit better at the N-back (making it through the 3-back in the post-test) was actually due to the meditation. I will be more convinced after I try some more meditation training routines and continue to see positive results. 

Overall, I actually hated the mindfulness meditation method of just focusing on the breath in silence. I found it excruciatingly boring and honestly was checking the timer a couple times in the last two sessions. I'm excited to try the next one though, and if it's another meditation one, hopefully I will have more patience for it!

 First post!

Brief intro: in this blog, I will document pseudo “experiments” I will run on myself to test methods of personal improvement that I find interesting. As a PhD student in cognitive psychology, I will mostly be testing out methods of cognitive enhancement, but maybe I will try some physical or mood/emotion ones as well.

For my first “N of 1” experiment, I will be doing a self-replicable version of the mindfulness meditation training in Zeidan et al., 2010. 

In their study, they had meditation-naive (but meditation-interested) subjects do four days of mindfulness meditation for 20 minutes, each session. They had some cognitive and mood-related pre and post-tests - check out the paper for the deets. Their training resulted in some small improvements in the streak-correct in the N-back and a few other statistically significant (but small effect) results. 

I’m mostly interested in whether meditation can improve sustained attention at tasks that require working memory. So, I will just use the N-back as my formal measure, and as an informal measure I will be tallying the instances I am distracted or mind-wandering during reading. I read one academic paper a day, so with this simple 4-day training, I would be surprised and skeptical to see too much improvement, but this is my first self-experiment so I wanted to start small. 

What I will do:

• Pre-test: N-back, # of mind-wanders during that day’s reading

• 20 minutes of mindfulness-meditation-inspired meditation for 4 days

• Post-test: N-back, # of mind-wanders during that day’s reading

• Summary of # of mind-wanders from previous four days

In my next post, I will report the results!