En-Trancing Exective Function -- An Addendum to Yesterday
I'm sorry, but I'm still on this telly, telly, everywhere tear. It's something that is pretty much turning into an obsession.
In case you missed it, yesterday, I moaned about a television in waiting rooms that I legally couldn't leave or turn away from either the sound or the image. I was spared the trauma by a helpful receptionist, but had I been forced to be there later in the day things could have gotten water-torture ugly.
Why this antipathy? I'm seeing more and more evidence that these ever-present flicker screens are causing perhaps grievous harm to our collective ability to think. I know, I know, I can't just open with such hyperbole without evidence. I'll try my best to provide some.
I (and others who commented on yesterday's entry) seem to suffer a common malady. The telly cannot not be watched. It draws our attention despite our efforts to resist its siren call. Why is that? Last year, kmo over at his C-Realm podcast interviewed Dennis R. Wier, author of The Way of Trance. I've been thinking about what Mr. Wier had to say ever since, and fitting his observations with other information over which I sometimes stumble. I spent some time transcribing kmo's interview (not the whole thing: right now, it is 6:10 pm and still over 100 humid degrees in the shade here), focusing on parts relevant to television. Let's first explore what he has to say about trance in general.
KMO: In fact, in one of the articles on your website, you say that you could say you were addicted to meditation. What would it mean to be addicted to meditation?
DW: That's when you prefer to meditate rather than do much of anything else. Actually, it was in the early years of my meditation experience that I felt that I was addicted. That was . . . the impetus for me to study meditation in depth and to perform various kinds of meditation experiments on myself so that I could find out exactly what was going on when I meditated and to explore some of the implications of the meditation, among which, of course, was to become addicted to meditation.
KMO: When one thinks of addiction, one thinks of eschewing things like friends and family to stay home and be alone and do the addictive behavior, or to only associate with other people who are addicts at that same sort of behavior. Was that true of your meditative practice?
DW: Quite so. Actually, . . . that's almost what we consider to be a yogi living in a cave avoiding other people and associating only with other yogis. I'm not suggesting that addiction is necessarily a bad thing. You could also say that addiction is kind of a characteristic of a very intense trance state. . . . I would guess one of my conclusions is that when you meditate for a very long period of time, you can become seemingly addicted, but actually it is characteristic of an intense trance.
(A disclaimer here. Mr. Wier speaks in the interview in a very conversational tone, switching topics mid-sentence, occasionally abandoning sentences, and inserting a lot of hems and hahs as he searches for the right words. I can't fault him for that. I'm guilty of the same verbal tics. However, this does explain the copious ellipses you'll find during the transcription. I've done my best to preserve the gist of his talk without copying all of his verbal meanderings verbatum.)
So: To Mr. Wier, what is trance? He describes it in great detail. As a synopsis, one repeats patterns -- executes "cognitive looping" -- until the brain goes into a "dissociative state." In this state, one becomes both an acting party and a witness to the action. I'll let him explain some of the more salient points:
One of the very important characteristics of this state is that the witness . . . the conscious one observing one's self meditating, this witness actually has some disabled cognitive functions. One . . . is short-term memory, and another one is critical judgment. There can be others as well. These disabled cognitive functions give the characteristic flavor, you might say, of a trance. But while we're in this so-called witness state, watching ourselves meditate . . . you become suggestable. There can be enhanced inner involvement, or visualizations, many many many other characteristics that we call "trance." There can also be a lessening of body awareness. These are all results of the so-called cognitive looping that has (created) the trance. If there is a loop, there are disabled cognitive functions. Likewise, if there are disabled cognitive functions, there is probably a loop, but sometimes it's very difficult to find out what this loop is. . . . (Emphasis mine.)
He notes elsewhere in the interview that one becomes better able to induce trance states as one practices and experiences them more and more. Keep that thought in mind as we pick up later in the action with a question from kmo:
KMO: While you talk about the disabling of cognitive functions, specifically the autonomy function, and you talk about it in positive terms in the context of learning something new, there are lots of people who have lots of money at their disposal who would like to teach us things that are not necessarily good for us. . . . They wish to instill beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, desires in us. . . . (It is) in their advantage to disable our cognitive functions and they are doing it at every opportunity, every time we turn on the television or, basically, walk out into any public space, there is somebody trying to put us into a trance. Talk a bit about the television and about other uses for trance for less than benign purposes.
DW: I call this "trance abuse." Basically, when there's any kind of repetitive thing going on, it will tend to disable your short-term memory and your critical judgment. When your critical judgment is disabled you become suggestible, uncritically so. So for example, when you're watching television, you're watching and watching and watching and pretty soon you go into a kind of a trance where information just kind of flows into you.
The way that television works to induce a trance oftentimes is by changing the imagery like maybe every second or so, or even less than a second. It's flash, flash, flash, flash. You can't really process all of the images, especially when these images are emotionally very strong or creating a fearful response. So what happens is that you begin to dissociate. . . . Your body becomes less sensitive. You become desensitized to all these emotions. And in doing so, it induces a trance. You become less critical. . . . Your critical judgment just basically goes to sleep. So you're just absorbing all of this stuff. (Again, emphasis mine.)
When one watches television, one can become uncritically suggestible to whatever flows through the screen into the eyes. And that's not the worst of it.
Over at RadioLab, one show dealt with how our critical/cognitive faculties develop, called by neuro-developmental specialists executive function. These executive functions prove enormously important when trying to pay attention to one's immediate surroundings, shut out distraction and follow instructions. In one experiment first conducted (IIRC) in 1945, children were instructed to stand before an examiner and stand quietly. Children under five had little chance of remaining quiet longer than 30 seconds, if at all. Children between five and seven could stand up to five minutes on average, and children over seven (again, IIRC) could pretty much sustain their attention indefinitely.
The same experiment was conducted at least 50 years later. Nowadays, the children between five and seven years have trouble lasting even 30 seconds, and even teens have difficulty going longer than a few minutes. (Once it cools off a bit, I promise I'll dig out the exact episode and revise the numbers to fit the related experiment.) For some reason, children today have dramatically lowered executive function, or at least evidence of retarded executive function development.
No one knows exactly why this is, but my money is on at least partly on the Boob Tube. All of those trances before the electronic babysitter might be taking its toll.
I'll take one parting shot at at least some of the political aspects this retarded or stunted executive functionality might be having on our populace. In an earlier entry, I shared the work of Bob Altermeyer, a researcher with a quite well-researched and developed theory of what makes certain people politically conservative. It turns out (as I note later in that entry) that conservatives also have a more limited reserve of energy when it comes to exercising executive function. To repeat the quote from the article I used as a source:
The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort -- you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function -- a talent we all rely on throughout the day -- draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. (I emphasized yet again.)
Regarding that emboldened section, think of the kids simply standing still and quiet for as long as they could. Kids were better at it 50 years ago than they are today. Today's kids have less ability to focus, less of a reserve of focus-ability. This ability to sustain focus also determines the level of nuance anyone can absorb about any given topic before one defaults to a more binary good-verses-evil judgment.
So the more these people watch Faux News . . . engaging in a television-induced trance state . . . uncritically absorbing the content . . . softening the memory of how they might have gotten the content in their heads (remember that short-term memory loss in the trance state!) . . . they continue with tee vee trancing . . . to weaken their executive function . . . that helps them critically evaluate information . . . information which confuses them . . . and drives them to seek a comfortable trance state . . . so they watch more Faux News. . . .
And the wheel of samsara spins. Thanks a lot, Rupert.
And to think people now pipe Faux and other manipulative corporate flashings into burrito joints.
In case you missed it, yesterday, I moaned about a television in waiting rooms that I legally couldn't leave or turn away from either the sound or the image. I was spared the trauma by a helpful receptionist, but had I been forced to be there later in the day things could have gotten water-torture ugly.
Why this antipathy? I'm seeing more and more evidence that these ever-present flicker screens are causing perhaps grievous harm to our collective ability to think. I know, I know, I can't just open with such hyperbole without evidence. I'll try my best to provide some.
I (and others who commented on yesterday's entry) seem to suffer a common malady. The telly cannot not be watched. It draws our attention despite our efforts to resist its siren call. Why is that? Last year, kmo over at his C-Realm podcast interviewed Dennis R. Wier, author of The Way of Trance. I've been thinking about what Mr. Wier had to say ever since, and fitting his observations with other information over which I sometimes stumble. I spent some time transcribing kmo's interview (not the whole thing: right now, it is 6:10 pm and still over 100 humid degrees in the shade here), focusing on parts relevant to television. Let's first explore what he has to say about trance in general.
KMO: In fact, in one of the articles on your website, you say that you could say you were addicted to meditation. What would it mean to be addicted to meditation?
DW: That's when you prefer to meditate rather than do much of anything else. Actually, it was in the early years of my meditation experience that I felt that I was addicted. That was . . . the impetus for me to study meditation in depth and to perform various kinds of meditation experiments on myself so that I could find out exactly what was going on when I meditated and to explore some of the implications of the meditation, among which, of course, was to become addicted to meditation.
KMO: When one thinks of addiction, one thinks of eschewing things like friends and family to stay home and be alone and do the addictive behavior, or to only associate with other people who are addicts at that same sort of behavior. Was that true of your meditative practice?
DW: Quite so. Actually, . . . that's almost what we consider to be a yogi living in a cave avoiding other people and associating only with other yogis. I'm not suggesting that addiction is necessarily a bad thing. You could also say that addiction is kind of a characteristic of a very intense trance state. . . . I would guess one of my conclusions is that when you meditate for a very long period of time, you can become seemingly addicted, but actually it is characteristic of an intense trance.
(A disclaimer here. Mr. Wier speaks in the interview in a very conversational tone, switching topics mid-sentence, occasionally abandoning sentences, and inserting a lot of hems and hahs as he searches for the right words. I can't fault him for that. I'm guilty of the same verbal tics. However, this does explain the copious ellipses you'll find during the transcription. I've done my best to preserve the gist of his talk without copying all of his verbal meanderings verbatum.)
So: To Mr. Wier, what is trance? He describes it in great detail. As a synopsis, one repeats patterns -- executes "cognitive looping" -- until the brain goes into a "dissociative state." In this state, one becomes both an acting party and a witness to the action. I'll let him explain some of the more salient points:
One of the very important characteristics of this state is that the witness . . . the conscious one observing one's self meditating, this witness actually has some disabled cognitive functions. One . . . is short-term memory, and another one is critical judgment. There can be others as well. These disabled cognitive functions give the characteristic flavor, you might say, of a trance. But while we're in this so-called witness state, watching ourselves meditate . . . you become suggestable. There can be enhanced inner involvement, or visualizations, many many many other characteristics that we call "trance." There can also be a lessening of body awareness. These are all results of the so-called cognitive looping that has (created) the trance. If there is a loop, there are disabled cognitive functions. Likewise, if there are disabled cognitive functions, there is probably a loop, but sometimes it's very difficult to find out what this loop is. . . . (Emphasis mine.)
He notes elsewhere in the interview that one becomes better able to induce trance states as one practices and experiences them more and more. Keep that thought in mind as we pick up later in the action with a question from kmo:
KMO: While you talk about the disabling of cognitive functions, specifically the autonomy function, and you talk about it in positive terms in the context of learning something new, there are lots of people who have lots of money at their disposal who would like to teach us things that are not necessarily good for us. . . . They wish to instill beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, desires in us. . . . (It is) in their advantage to disable our cognitive functions and they are doing it at every opportunity, every time we turn on the television or, basically, walk out into any public space, there is somebody trying to put us into a trance. Talk a bit about the television and about other uses for trance for less than benign purposes.
DW: I call this "trance abuse." Basically, when there's any kind of repetitive thing going on, it will tend to disable your short-term memory and your critical judgment. When your critical judgment is disabled you become suggestible, uncritically so. So for example, when you're watching television, you're watching and watching and watching and pretty soon you go into a kind of a trance where information just kind of flows into you.
The way that television works to induce a trance oftentimes is by changing the imagery like maybe every second or so, or even less than a second. It's flash, flash, flash, flash. You can't really process all of the images, especially when these images are emotionally very strong or creating a fearful response. So what happens is that you begin to dissociate. . . . Your body becomes less sensitive. You become desensitized to all these emotions. And in doing so, it induces a trance. You become less critical. . . . Your critical judgment just basically goes to sleep. So you're just absorbing all of this stuff. (Again, emphasis mine.)
When one watches television, one can become uncritically suggestible to whatever flows through the screen into the eyes. And that's not the worst of it.
Over at RadioLab, one show dealt with how our critical/cognitive faculties develop, called by neuro-developmental specialists executive function. These executive functions prove enormously important when trying to pay attention to one's immediate surroundings, shut out distraction and follow instructions. In one experiment first conducted (IIRC) in 1945, children were instructed to stand before an examiner and stand quietly. Children under five had little chance of remaining quiet longer than 30 seconds, if at all. Children between five and seven could stand up to five minutes on average, and children over seven (again, IIRC) could pretty much sustain their attention indefinitely.
The same experiment was conducted at least 50 years later. Nowadays, the children between five and seven years have trouble lasting even 30 seconds, and even teens have difficulty going longer than a few minutes. (Once it cools off a bit, I promise I'll dig out the exact episode and revise the numbers to fit the related experiment.) For some reason, children today have dramatically lowered executive function, or at least evidence of retarded executive function development.
No one knows exactly why this is, but my money is on at least partly on the Boob Tube. All of those trances before the electronic babysitter might be taking its toll.
I'll take one parting shot at at least some of the political aspects this retarded or stunted executive functionality might be having on our populace. In an earlier entry, I shared the work of Bob Altermeyer, a researcher with a quite well-researched and developed theory of what makes certain people politically conservative. It turns out (as I note later in that entry) that conservatives also have a more limited reserve of energy when it comes to exercising executive function. To repeat the quote from the article I used as a source:
The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort -- you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function -- a talent we all rely on throughout the day -- draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. (I emphasized yet again.)
Regarding that emboldened section, think of the kids simply standing still and quiet for as long as they could. Kids were better at it 50 years ago than they are today. Today's kids have less ability to focus, less of a reserve of focus-ability. This ability to sustain focus also determines the level of nuance anyone can absorb about any given topic before one defaults to a more binary good-verses-evil judgment.
So the more these people watch Faux News . . . engaging in a television-induced trance state . . . uncritically absorbing the content . . . softening the memory of how they might have gotten the content in their heads (remember that short-term memory loss in the trance state!) . . . they continue with tee vee trancing . . . to weaken their executive function . . . that helps them critically evaluate information . . . information which confuses them . . . and drives them to seek a comfortable trance state . . . so they watch more Faux News. . . .
And the wheel of samsara spins. Thanks a lot, Rupert.
And to think people now pipe Faux and other manipulative corporate flashings into burrito joints.