Introspection on Meditation and My Mind: Anime, Creativity, ADHD and Measuring Intelligence
It has been more than 4 months since my first stream of consciousness post which I titled A Gateway to my mind: 3 hours of me trying to convey the stuff going in my mind to the world. While i was simultaneously making 2 articles, I thought I'd do another one of those freewrite/stream of consciousness posts as I was having way too many things to talk about. In fact that is the reason i was making 2 posts at the same time and that was merely what I got into typing. I get several ideas/topics to post about every single day without even trying. Only few of them ends up being posts. the rest gets buried in my head.
Meditation - Me - ADHD
I can vouch for the accuracy of most of the things presented in the above video. For an example I can give you a very simple experiment about pain I discovered while in middle school. Pinch your arm or other body part. Make it painful. You can do this yourself or ask someone else to do it for you. Then start concentrating on your pain. There are no real techniques or training. Just put your complete focus on the pain. There will be an immediate reduction of pain. Your simple understanding of the pain just made the whole thing less painful.
I can hear the voice in my head......
reading this sentence.
Personally I don't have much of a voice in my head. I tend to think too much about certain things (nature of the universe etc.) and too little about other things (90% of the stuff normal people think about). So I'rarely in a constant state of distraction. In most days I don't even use my mobile for 5 minutes. But I'm not in a constant state of flow or zen either. There are many times I get into a state of flow and I've noticed that I get into that state faster and more frequently as I've been meditating since I was a little kid. Instead I have this sense of utter boredom or sense of not caring which is much close to what many of the overpowered fictional characters exhibit. In my ΛLDNOΛH.ZERO review I mentioned how much I loved and admired its main character who can be introduced with the following original meme of mine:
I'm no mecha pilot but that way of life in many ways represents mine. Another two of my characters are Shunsui Kyōraku and Kisuke Urahara from Bleach. Both of them are extremely lazy and keeps their cool in all situation to the point of absurdity (which isn't that uncommon in anime). Most people consider One Punch Man to be a comedy/ parody but I beg to differ. I consider one Punch Man to be a very serious and deeply philosophical exercise.
The older I get more and more emotions are lost from me. Most superficial things ends up having zero effect on me. Fame, status, power, authority are things that I actively have to force myself to think about. Some time ago i was asked: "I miss your personal examples of where exactly you decided for what you call freedom, liberty, and peace." and my instant reply was the following:
This is the single most bizarre sentence in your reply. It's like asking when did I decide to live or when did I decided to have good Hygiene or have a good sleep every night. When I'm on steemit or some other community I come across so may people who somehow decided/discovered these values. Even a great deal of people I respect somehow figured out or discovered these values. I didn't. They are just natural and non-negotiable for me. Life doesn't make sense without them.
The incident reminded me of an old quote I've seen which may or may not be a real incident:
So where is the ADHD part?
Many consider ADHD to be a negative thing. But I consider it to be a useful tool during times of learning and exploration. But it's a matter of being master or being the slave. Before The Chernobyl incident, the mankind was the master of this powerful energy. But when they lost their grip, it brought forward a massive tragedy. There is (relatively) very little wasteful thinking i my life. instead I'm busy with way too many topics and I randomly pick topics and study for 8-9 hours a day on average. That's how I stumble upon so many things to write about leading to a point where I don't end up writing a bloody thing because it all too convoluted, hard to describe or just "not good enough" by my own standards.
So I haven't achieved a state of total equanimity or enlightenment. But since middle school, I've realized that the less you care, the more you can do. It all developed out of my own laziness and obsession for efficiency unlike most people who discovered these things through "other" means.
Quoting Ramin Shokrizade
Recently I had some discussions with my girlfriend about the question “How many geniuses are there on Earth?”. I just threw out that the top 1% of the top 1% of intelligence might make a good easy measure (the most intelligent one person out of every 10,000). Of course this begs the question “how do you measure intelligence?” It is one thing to attempt to assign an IQ or EQ to an individual with standardized tests. If you could do so with perfect accuracy and precision, then you could say “These are the 700,000 geniuses on Earth (1% of 1% of 7B).”
Even if you count all of the artistic, philosophical and humanistic geniuses in the world, common sense indicates that only a small portion of these individuals are actually shaping our future. Some are too young or too old, some may be experiencing social or financial hardships that prevent them from participating, and some may have just “checked out” due to feeling out of place or even shunned in society.
This paper was prompted by an insight I had last night, which was New Years Eve (the last day in 2011). I became intoxicated, a very rare (less than once a year) event for me, and I spent some time observing how my brain responded. Normally when I think of an idea, object, or concept, I get a flood of connections to things that might be related. Imagine if someone asked “What comes to mind when I say the word ‘Fire truck’?” Many things may come to mind. Google seems to work the same way. When I type ‘fire truck’ into Google I get 28,600,000 connections. I assume the number of connections I get, if I could count them, would be a much smaller number.
I would propose that the number of connections I get to any particular idea is based on the totality of my personal experience, weighted to those areas I have more interest in. This may be related in some ways to Raymond Cattell’s concept of crystallized intelligence. The advantage I have over Google when I do a search of my (smaller) database is that I can include the relevance of various things to each other in ways that Google cannot. The latest generation of humanity has unprecedented access to information, but if they do a search for something, and the most relevant thing they are seeking ends up on the 3000th page of a Google search, this just prevents them from finding it.
Last night I had this experience of my “relevant objects/concepts” map breaking down. Before I fell asleep I had gotten to the point where it was very difficult to focus on anything more than one object/concept, and that one thing lacked relevance. The more related ideas I have to something, the more ways I can think of using something. This is critical in problem solving. When relevance drops to zero, I noticed that I lost all will to take action. I lost my volition. When a person is presented with some data, if they don’t see how it is relevant, it seems unimportant and no action is taken on it.
What if, beyond IQ and EQ, it took a concept of relevance for a genius to take action and use their abilities to innovate? What if this sense of volition was tied to the perception of relevance, and relevance was linked to that person’s totality of experience or crystallized intelligence? What if you used volition as a third measure of intelligence? This would result in a construct where the combination of IQ, EQ, and Volition resulted in a measure of a person’s propensity to make and apply cognitive leaps?
Source
This is why I mentioned that ADHD is a tool to be mastered. The psychological term ADHD is an interpretation of a certain kind of mental/brain function. If we can understand the mechanics that leads to these conditions like ADHD, schizophrenia etc. we can turn those things into connecting dots to create new things, highly detailed visual thinking etc.
I had so many stuff to talk about and although I understand that long posts would earn me more respect, most people are more receptive towards somewhat short articles. Even without the videos this post is a 9+ min read according to Busy.org
So I think I'll make another post to follow up although I'm not sure how much I'd be able to cover in the next post or whether I'd even end up writing a part two. For the time being upvote, resteem, follow and give these things some real thought and try some meditation :-)
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