CDS Journal

A friend of mine told me that after practicing the game of darts for long enough, he experienced a noticeable change… it got noticeably easier to play better. I’ve seen this phenomenon explained in an experiment someone did called the Backwards Bicycle where they demonstrated that after a certain amount of practice, the brain simply “adapts” to the activity being done and the experience from the point of view of the person doing it is that its like what I’ve heard described as “getting over the hump” of learning something… the point where lots of the processes involved in the activity become automatic and don’t require as much conscious intentional thought to execute… making the activity require significantly less effort than it did previously. While exploring this whole idea more, I found something interesting that refers to the " Reticular Activating System " (RAS), which is described as a human radar system, and that it is a key thing to understand when it comes to learni...

The "5 Monkey Experiment" is a very common story told as a way to try to understand human behavior... but it is usually presented as a way to say that humans are "flawed". If you do a Google search, you'll find many tellings of the story... here's one: LINK The story talks about understanding behavior by explaining how a group of monkeys behaves in an experiment... but there is one critical thing missing from it... the experiment does not account for the presence of the experimenter and the impact this has on the outcome. In the experiment, a group of monkeys is treated with some negative experience (ie. sprayed with cold water when they try to get some bananas). This negative experience is just accepted as the foundation of the experiment and there is no attempt to see THAT part of it as critical to the entire story. The monkeys behavior BEGINS with a negative experience... and their natural behavior is what simply passes it on efficiently. If the initial e...

This post contains notes about another post - CDS Journal: The Trap (2007) The Connection Between Conditional Love and the Cold War This documentary explains that during the cold war in the 1950’s, Friedrich Hayek maintained that societal altruism was destined to fail, and that unregulated individual self-interest was a better solution. The documentary explains how his idea began to prove true with scientific studies into the 1960’s and 1970's. In order to explain, the documentary spends time showing how things unfolded… which involves understanding what the concept of Game Theory is, how it came about, and how in the early 1960’s a psychiatrist named R.D. Laing used it to study private family life. Here is a rough transcript of the section of the documentary that talks specifically about the family study and the results. If you want to jump to the section of the video that these words are transcribed from, click HERE (Part 1, 24m 12s) : In institutions, Laing had noticed that ...

Romance is about Self-awareness I grabbed a netflix show on tap that felt potentially interesting and am in the middle of watching (Passengers [2008], ref 1). Right from the start it had a "Sixth Sense" feel to it... like the main character's unawareness of her own reality is the core story. I just interrupted watching at the halfway mark to start writing this and ended up looking at the critical review reference in the wikipedia article. It's not good... so it seems like it's not even considered a good use of the Sixth Sense plot device. The acting isn't that bad and it's a fairly polished production, so I'm not turned off from watching the rest. However, it is worth commenting on what I noticed so far... which is that the entire premise of romance feels like a dramatic metaphor of self-awareness (or lack of). All storytelling is about guiding a viewer through their own version of the story. A story like this one is about guiding a viewer through the ...

I listened to an interview with a musician who has made the choice to go alcohol-free. I think this is a story worth paying attention to because the musician has expressed the way that alcohol is used in their industry. They said that, unlike the general use of alcohol... as a way to relax AFTER something stressful (ie. after a hard day's work)... the music industry's use of it is to reduce anxiety BEFORE doing something. It is one of the few working environments where this is not only accepted, but commonplace and even necessary. What I got out of this story is the idea that things like alcohol do serve a purpose, at least temporarily. What I would have liked to hear from this interviewee is the details of how and why they came to not need this tool anymore, because within the same interview they said something contradictory. They began the story by saying that when they first became a musician, their anxiety was so high that it resulted in vomiting... and that when intr...

In my post " Where do I want to live? What do I want to do? ", I described having the experience of serving a purpose that I found meaningful and, for better or worse, how critical it is for me to need purpose to feel worthwhile. Today I'm looking at this from a different angle... though the lens of choice. I saw a bumper sticker on a vehicle today that said "Choose Happiness". I've seen this phrase before and I've generally dismissed it as new age rhetoric... but today it meant something different. Today it reminded me that the only way to be absolutely immune to the conditional nature of life's ups and downs is to have the ability to choose it... to choose immunity.  Life may suck at times... but I don't have to behave accordig to that reality. This is not the same thing as having a "positive attitude"... because my experience of that tactic is that it's most definitely a form of delusion achieved by ignoring reality a...

Narcissistic behaviour is a process of ultimately coming face to face with itself. Narcissism trusts no one... and therefore, ultimately, learns its lesson by focusing on the only thing it cares about... itself... and ends up unknowingly applying its own selfishness on itself and learning a lesson from that. The primary benefit of avoiding narcissistic behaviour demonstrated by others is your own sanity.  Being free from the effects of narcissism requires being able to identify it and not be affected by it.   When I witness someone complaining about another person's narcissistic behaviour, what I see is a person who is vulnerable to it.  Narcissism isn't about an individual... it's about the entire world that surrounds and follows that individual around... which is a world that doesn't change easily or quickly. Narcissism is a cultural cancer which, unlike physical cancer, is extremely contagious. Like all cancers, it is ruthless in its goal... to infect and elimin...