Examine ideas before consumption

I consider myself fairly smart and I tend to spend a lot of my day thinking but I find it really hard to come up with a topic to write about. There are a couple of blogs I read and they present thoughts and ideas on a almost daily basis. At first I was really impressed with an output like this but the more time I spent reading these blogs the more I realized that the ideas they present are mostly half baked platitudes stitched together from something the author has read on another blog. Telling people that the way to find the purpose in their life is to think about what they are good at or what they get complimented for and pursue that (or just to follow their passion) sounds good and might lead to a short rush for the reader but it is not a real help. It is not even a real or personal thought. It is just something the author has picked up on a self-help blog and rephrased into 5 or 7 bullet points. Or, even worse, it is something the author has just thought of when he sat down to write his daily blog entry.

I can only guess how high the pressure must be to put out a new idea (on the same topic) every day if you write a blog like this. It probably gives these people a real high to write something, have a couple of hundred people read it and be thanked for “helping so much” by people they’ve never met. But, preaching empty shells of thoughts (like “you should follow your own way”) to people who feel lost and alone just to feel superior is plain wrong.

Things written on blogs (and even lots of things written in books) are not truths just because they are written down. In my opinion most stuff written on blogs has just been written to fill empty space and to get the rush of telling someone what to do. I don’t want to imply that all authors are evil but I want to imply that all authors have a motive for writing. And these motives are almost never to help people they’ve never met. Consequently, most of the advice on the internet is not a tailored solution for the reader but just a weak interpretation of something another person (just like the reader) has read somewhere or thought of while sitting on the toilet. There might be a valid idea at the core of it but it should be thoroughly examined before consumption.

Seeds of change

Changing something is hard but sustaining the change is even harder. Whether it is something small like keeping my desk clean or something big like being less afraid of failing does not matter. If done right changing something you do not like can be done quiet easily. I started small by cleaning up a part of my desk and by caring less about winning during a card game with friends. With these little steps I was able to change the things I did not like about me and it wasn’t so hard after all.

But .. after two weeks I found myself back at square one without ever doing something wrong or even realizing when I fell back into my old habits. This is something that happens quiet easily. A bad habit is still a habit and without control the brain falls back in its default mode executing known habits instead of the new and improved habits that you would like to foster. In order to introduce a new habit you have to overcome the old one and you should be fully aware that the old habit is there for a reason. You might think that you should go for a run every evening after work instead of relax in front of the TV with a beer but maybe your mind really needs this relaxation time to keep sane. However, if you are sure you want to introduce a change in you behaviour there is a small trick I’ve learned to sustain a change in your life: The seed of change.

Do not try to change your whole behaviour at once and try to sustain that because it will just overwhelm and crush you. Instead, introduce one piece of change in the desired direction and pour your energy into sustaining that seed of change. If you take care of that seed for long enough it will grow and gradually influence other parts of your life. I started by cleaning up half my desk and making sure that this part of the desk remained tidy. I tidied it up every evening (which was pretty easy since it started tidy in the morning) and the interesting thing that happened was that after a couple of days the clutter started to disappear from the rest of my desk. This happened because when I cleaned up stuff from my “clean spot” in the evening I sometimes put things from other parts of the desk away as well (I didn’t force myself to do this it just occurred naturally because I was putting away a related item). I did (and still am) doing the same thing with my fear of loosing. I allow myself to be as afraid of loosing as I want to be except when playing games with friends. In such situations I consciously focus on enjoying the games and accepting to loose. I played chess with a friend last week and found a daring gambit which sacrificed a lot of material for a small chance of a really nice combination. At that point I was already winning and it took a real effort to play this funny line instead of going for the simple win. It turned out I was wrong and the gambit lost me the game but I am convinced it was the right thing to do because it was much more fun that way. By defending this seed of change ferociously against the onslaught of my competitive mind I allow it to grow and as it grows it slowly but steadily allows me to overcome my fear of loosing. And, at one point it will have grown into a habit that sustains itself.

Keeping this part tidy was pretty simple since it started ou

Free will

The EEG experiments done by Benjamin Libet were quiet thought provoking and led to some questions on how “free” our will really is. The basic idea of his experiments was to sit subjects in front of a rotating pointer and at a freely chosen point in time press a button. The subject was asked to remember which direction the pointer was pointing at the moment when they made their decision. He recorded the brain activity using an electroencephalogram (EEG). Using the EEG data Libet was able to predict when the subject would press the button several hundred milliseconds before they became aware of their own decision. The interesting implication of that is of course that the decision we are making are already made before we become consciously aware of them.

In a recent Review Paper in Nature Neuroscience “Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans” John D. Haynes replicated something similar using fMRI. He claims that he is able to predict a binary decision with 60% accuracy as much as 7 seconds before the participants become aware of it. Even though I believe Libet’s experiments, I really can not believe that this 60% is not an artifact. 7 seconds is just far too long and fMRI using the BOLD signal is a far too noisy measuring technique.

The question that remains is: Do we have a free will? In my opinion the answer is: The question is misleading. There are a lot of questions that could be meant by this question and most of them have simple yet contradicting answers when replied to the original question. If we knew everything about the physical world (even though such knowledge is physically impossible) we could predict the future. So from a global point of view we don’t have a free will. But, does this have any effect on how I make decisions, live my life or whether I am responsible for my actions? No, of course not. On a local scale (regarding humankind and me in particular) free will does of course exist. No one has ever read my thought and no one ever will. I am responsible for the decisions I make just like everyone else. As far as the universe is concerned I probably don’t have a soul but as far as I am concerned this does not matter. I am the me looking at the world through my eyes and thinking my thoughts and I can feel my soul even if it just a figment of it’s own imagination