Thoughts on Training My Brain
Posted by they4kman on Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 2:33 p.m. (3 weeks, 2 days ago)
I think I've trained my mind to feel content and satisfied when things make sense to me. I think things make "sense" to me when I feel I can explain them to others. I think I judge others' understanding of my explanations based on how happy and content they look.
I summarize this process to others by saying "I seek contentedness with the truth." I'm not a huge fan of using "the truth", because if others don't agree with me on something, me saying "the truth" seems pretentious.
I began learning about neurotransmitters a few weeks ago. I want to discuss how I think serotonin works. Roughly, I think it supplies a feeling of contentedness. I want to learn more about GABA soon, because I've read it's the most widely used inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it tells neurons not to fire. I think this could be very useful in training the brain not to feel good about a mistake. I would define mistake as something which isn't useful, something which was unintentional in hindsight.
Long ago, I'd learned about neural networks, and tried to fit my understanding of them to the brain. I tried to figure out how a neural network could produce what we feel as consciousness. The process I used was to pick out certain distinct behaviours of my mind and attempt explaining them. I think I matched up many ways the mind feels to how a neural network could facilitate them. Thus, I believe the brain is a neural network, and I can treat it as such.
My limited understanding of serotonin leads me to think it's what gives a sense of calm contentedness. Not so much a sense of bright happiness, but a sense that everything is going alright. I like this feeling. To train my brain, I think I essentially try to feel calm while being the person I want to be.
To accomplish this, I think I first built an important tool in my brain. I spent time discovering thoughts I have which bring about this sense of calm. I think I was physically locating the parts of my brain which released serotonin. I repeated this process, finding different routes to the sense of calm, until I could do it on command, in many different environments.
Once I had this serotonin-releasing tool in place, I came up with behaviours I wanted to reinforce in myself. I would then do those behaviours and use my tool to release serotonin, feeling that sense of calm. I believe this takes the parts of the brain responsible for carrying out the behaviour and the serotonin-releasing parts, and connects the two, so in the future, carrying out the behaviour will release serotonin.
I did a lot of discovery when I was younger, trying lots of things and watching other people. I picked out the things I liked, and used this process of training to become them.