Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on floating http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic floating Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Drifting gently down the stream Fri, 06 May 2005 23:03:54 +0100 This evening I did something a bit out of the ordinary: I spent an hour in a <a href="http://www.londonfloatcentre.com/">floatation tank</a>. I'd heard about it in a documentary on Acetylcholine (from Brainwaves a series of documentaries on the chemicals which make our brains work) I listened to during the week and it turned out the <a href="http://www.londonfloatcentre.com/">centre</a> was right next to Clapham Common tube station. It seemed intriguing so I gave it a shot. The experience itself was interesting but, because I have so much tension stored up in my shoulders, not always comfortable. But there were moments that are, well, hard to describe. Weightless, alone in a complete void, completely peaceful. Quite a trip. And then, suddenly the music came up and it was time to get out. And that's when it really hit me, as I sat in the lounge and I felt like I was continuously falling into the chair. I felt light headed and peaceful and happy. Now, a couple of hours later, I feel better than I can remember, still a little giddy and smiling to myself. Apparently it gets better from here. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002551.html Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Sat, 07 May 2005 22:29:10 +0100 A quick "state of mind" update: That good feeling from <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/05/06.html#a1800">yesterday</a> has remained with me throughout today. I woke up this morning with my usual shoulder and back ache noticably reduced which was worth the price of admission by itself. I've felt very calm and relaxed. This in itself is a strange sensation for me where tightly wound is a more normal state of affairs. Maybe I should experiment every Friday. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002556.html Life is but a dream Fri, 13 May 2005 22:11:43 +0100 Damn. I've just realised that I've run out of rope for next weeks title. Oh well... Just back from my second floating session at the <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.londonfloatcentre.com/&e=7249">London Float Centre</a>. This was a completely different experience to the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/05/06.html#a1800">first float</a>. Last week I was nervous about doing something new and my body was so tense it was an effort to relax. This week I was more confident of what I was doing and my body is in much better shape (it has been ever since the last float). I slipped into the tank and was comfortable almost immediately. As the music died down I found I could put my arms over my head which is very comfortable (I couldn't do it last time) and lie back and I lost the sensation of my body being there except momentarily. I used a headrest this time which was good and bad, I'd use it again because the support for my neck was nice but next time a little less inflated. My mind has been racing all week and I guess it didn't really stop so much as slow down and learn to meander all over the place. It was nice, just drifting... Then. Bam! The music was there again. It was hard to believe an hour had passed. Unlike last time when I felt the time passing and was more or less ready to come out this time it seemed to pass in the blink of an eye and I was inclined, for a moment, to barricade myself in. Afterwards in the lounge over herbal tea I considered attention which is one of the topics I am studying for the exam on monday. Attention is all about how we handle the many stimuli rushing at us all the time. In the tank maybe 90% of those stimuli just aren't there. Without weight, without action, without stimuli - your brain is free. Now I'm back home and feeling very calm and relaxed. It's a very un-2-days-before-an-exam-like feeling and only time will tell if that's a good thing. For now though I am happy. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002603.html No stress yet Mon, 16 May 2005 12:11:27 +0100 Right, I'm off to do this exam. I'm still feeling calm and collected which still feels totally unnatural both for me, and for this situation. We'll see if I've managed to retain my cool come the end. One thing I would say is: If you are feeling a lot of stress in your life, I can recommend spending one hour in a floatation tank. I don't know how it works (yet!) but it seems to have some impact. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002612.html Floating resolve Fri, 20 May 2005 22:47:24 +0100 Did the 3rd <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/floating.xml">float</a> of my trial tonight. I spent an hour happily floating, drifting, dreaming, and am now deeply relaxed. So much so that I don't want to spend time in front the computer in case it jangles it out of me as computers are won't to do. I have also been thinking about my exam next Thursday on the Biological Basis of Behaviour. I'm finding it hard to study and I've concluded that the temptation to check email & news and the need to post are continuous distractions that I can well do without right now. So I've decided to take an electronic holiday. I'm shutting down for a week. It'll be another form of sensory deprivation. Sorry if I don't respond to your email, comments, and so forth. Catch you in a week. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002642.html Error #11 -- system overload Sun, 29 May 2005 12:48:57 +0100 Some things about last week that I very much enjoyed (not the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/05/20.html#a1847">exam</a>, although that went okay) were:<ul><li>not having to keep up with my mailing lists</li><li>not having to check, or reply to, email</li><li>not checking bloglines</li><li>not having to think about what to post</li></ul>For a few days I felt a pleasurable sense of disconnection. Now I am asking myself "Why?" My current line of thinking is that thought itself may be the problem. I am wondering if I have reached some kind of attentional boundary for concurrent, on-going, tasks. I have 3 major ones (as well as a raft of minor ones) which are:<ul><li>personal study projects around information management, topics, and sense making frameworks. These have lead me, in the previous 8 months, to learn Ruby, a bunch of new mathematics, AI algorithms, and so on</li><li>a growing role in my company requiring me to develop new knowledge and skills and to be better at communicating and persuading</li><li>a psychology course which is stretching me and leading me in many new directions</li></ul> Now I choose to take on all of these silver linings. All bring me pleasure and fulfillment of some kind. Yet, in the last few weeks, I have found myself at a point where my brain is giving me active resistance and making life difficult. Why? In cognitive psychology I learned about some models of attention which represent how the brain handles concurrent task processing. A central assumption of all the cognitive models is that useful resources are in limited supply. Common sense suggests this is a good assumption. Somewhat unsatisfyingly for my purposes though these models that I have studied deal only with simultaneous competition for resources, e.g. "How well can someone write from dictation while simultaneously reading a novel?" The answer is "surprisingly well" but it doesn't address background processing very directly. When I'm working on an identity fraud presentation I'm not directly trying to understand support vector machines or why humans don't reason with propositional logic. When I'm studying Baysian theory I'm not thinking about communicating technical proposals or how neurons communicate. Whilst learning Andersons ACT model of skill development I'm not thinking about data protection or clustering algorithms. And yet I feel that, somewhere in the background, I am doing all of these things. It seems to me that my mind is dealing, at some level, with more problems than the one which is my current focus of attention. For my purposes I require a model of attention that attempts to explain both focused attention and background attention. I have learned attentional models that describe the brain as having a kind of central executive function, a shared facility which plans tasks and shares available, modal, resources between them. Although it wasn't part of the syllabus for this semester some of my reading suggests that more current theories involve multiple executives. I think that background processing must also involve (to some degree) reasoning and access to memory. As an aside, I found it very unsatisfying in the cognitive psychology module I took that everything seemed disconnected. It wasn't until the very end, the last week before the exam really, that attention, memory, and reasoning all began to interweave for me. I think lesson #1 of a cognitive psychology course should eschew history (as much as I love William James) in favour of building the backbone which will support every other concept. So I'm looking for an attention & thinking model which handles not only focused attention but the way in which background tasks are processed. Is there anyone out there who is current in this field? Returning to my starting point I have recognized that I am facing some internal resistance, my stress levels have gradually risen, and I find it harder to concentrate. <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/floating.xml">Floating</a> has been a boon, it deals effectively with the stress, but it's a band-aid solution. In the three months I have off from my course I aim to manage my stress levels downwards and to try and come up with a better solution which allows me to continue my interests along more managable lines. I'm certainly open to suggestions. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002644.html