Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Book
of
Rest
The odd psychology of
doing
nothing
A. J. Marr
2
Preface 6
Introduction 8
Appendix 61
References 95
3
https://www.scribd.com/doc/284056765/The-Book-of-Rest-The-Odd-
Psychology-of-Doing-Nothing
https://www.scribd.com/document/495438436/A-Mouse-s-Tale-a-practical-
explanation-and-handbook-of-motivation-from-the-perspective-of-a-humble-
creature
Galileo’s Lament, and The Collapse of the Social Sciences (NEW!) A critique of
the Social Sciences from the deconstructing rules of science, and from the
informing perspective of the neurobiology of motivation and its implications for
the prospect of individual humans and humanity itself.
https://www.scribd.com/document/659384787/Galileo-s-Lament-and-the-
Collapse-of-the-Social-Sciences
One Track Minds: The Psychology of the Internet The psychology of the
internet, and its effects on people, society, and what it holds for our future.
https://www.scribd.com/document/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-
Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet
4
B2: The Old Art and New Science of the Business Network Social and business
networks explained from the perspective of classical and behavioral economics,
and how to design and use them for personal and societal betterment.
https://www.scribd.com/document/119487008/B2-The-Old-Art-and-New-
Science-of-the-Business-Network
https://www.scribd.com/document/389107357/IT-bytes-Giving-IT-the-
Disrespect-it-Deserves?secret_password=lE0jFD0CqXtH3owoVyIv
Psychological Acts Essays on the psychology of the stranger places in the lives
of people throughout history living on a solitary blue marble in space
https://www.scribd.com/document/579781102/Psychological-Acts
Satires
Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology Bad psychology dictionary for a
muddled and often dumb science with definitions for all the psychology terms
you've known and not loved.
https://www.scribd.com/document/389679836/Dr-Mezmer-s-Dictionary-of-
Bad-Psychology
https://www.scribd.com/doc/16345689/Dr-Mezmer-s-Psychopedia-of-Bad-
Psychology
Platonia Star Trek meets Gulliver’s Travels, along with parallel universes,
alcoholic AI, evil Russians, galactic empires, death stars, shoe mobiles, lusty
Amazon space babes, virtual realities, planet hopping, space cadets in mini-
skirts, Florida State spaceships, Wal Mart shoppers, God, and everyone dies at
the end.
https://www.scribd.com/document/246124307/P-L-A-T-O-N-I-A
5
Mechanica Bollix and Lucilius are brilliant engineers who just happen to be
robots. Called "mech-anics" (because they can construct practically anything at
will), they are motivated to be prophets and to turn a profit, and are capable of
almost God-like exploits. They bound about the cosmos meeting challenges,
solving problems, and being by turns robotic hero-sages and all-round
nuisances and fools. These are their dumb adventures.
https://www.scribd.com/document/318278089/Mechanica-Fables-for-the-
Information-Age
Who Dat? An unlikely super-hero from Chalmatia, the land that time forgot,
and on purpose. Follow Who Dat as he saves his beloved Saynts from sudden
death, confronts the Dark Lord Nutria and the Mudball of Doom, MS Skynet and
the Microbesoft Nuclear Cloud, the dreaded Chi-Borgs, the all powerful middle
aged suburban housewives, and Coach Sayban and the five super bowl rings of
power, and all before lunch!
https://www.scribd.com/document/396600499/Who-Dat-Chronicles-of-a-
Clueless-Super-Hero-from-the-land-of-Chalmatia
And!!
Preface
How to Rest Deeply, Or, why you don’t need to read this
book
Think of your meaningful tasks at hand (i.e., events that have branching
virtual positive outcomes), choose any meaningful task and alternate its
performance with thinking non-judgmentally or ‘in the moment’, or
being mindful. Because you do not have to make continuous judgments
between rational (meaningful) and affective choices which are derived
from the present (distraction), past (regret), or future (worry) your
muscles will soon be at an inactive or resting state, and their prolonged
inactivity will result in the release of opioids or ‘endorphins’ in the brain
that will give you a feeling of pleasure. In addition, the anticipation or
awareness of subsequent meaningful choices during mindfulness
sessions and the performance of those choices afterwards increases
attentive arousal (due to the activity of midbrain dopamine systems that
cause arousal but not pleasure) that accentuates the feeling of pleasure
in relaxation (or dopamine-opioid interactions), resulting in an enhanced
positive emotional state during and after mindfulness sessions, or a
sustained feeling of ‘bliss’. You will note that you will feel totally relaxed
and have greater self-control and an accompanying sense of positive
arousal, pleasure, and alertness, thus representing good feelings and
much higher productive capacities that will extend into your otherwise
stress filled day. And the good thing is that you will be fully rested and
alert and experience a natural ‘high’ and will not have to take a course
on mindfulness, or meditation, or even for that matter read the book that
follows! It’s that simple.
Introduction
Relax!
Chapter 1
A Get Rest Quick Plan
Here is the fool proof method to being relaxed, staying relaxed,
anywhere and anytime. No seven-day seminar, doctor’s appointment,
or heavy lifting is required, and you can even skip the rest of this book.
It consists of three words. Read it slow so that it can sink in. The
explanation that follows is easy too, and it is hoped, self-evident.
11
That’s it. Sounds great, and it seems simple too. Let’s get started, you
say. One thing though.
What the heck is cognitive perseveration?
Cognitive perseveration is what you tend to not do when you are
walking on the beach, are at home sitting on an easy chair looking at your
garden, or are otherwise unbothered by the worries, cares, and
distractions of the world. In these occasions, relaxation is the order of the
day. That’s because cognitive perseveration is the worries, cares and
distractions of the world, and that’s what’s causing you to be tense or
‘stressed’. Cognitive perseveration is consciously (e.g. worry,
rumination) or non-consciously (e.g. apprehension, distraction) dwelling
on decisions, problems, or dilemmas that have no positive resolution. To
avoid these cognitive events, the common solution is to physically
remove ourselves to a secluded spot, but is this necessary? After all,
perseverative thoughts are merely cognitive behavior, and you can
pretty much avoid them at will, or can you?
You can, if you have the proper justification, born of explanation. But
first, let’s define what we mean by worry, care, and distraction. It all has
to do with indecision, dealing with dilemmas, or more specifically, our
inability to make a decision in foresight or hindsight when we know we
must. Can’t figure out God’s opinion of you or comprehend your income
taxes? Relax, you can just postpone it for another time. However, if you
are near death or tax time, death and taxes take a whole new meaning,
and you need to make some good decisions now.
Cognitive dilemmas that reflect continuously considering past, present,
and future events are respectively called rumination, distraction, and
worry. These dilemmas have no satisfactory issue, and likely never will,
but we keep at them until we are tense and miserable. To illustrate, let
us conduct a simple mind experiment, which is way of translating the
hypothetical into the obvious.
On your way to work, you accidentally back over your cat, and he is on
his way now to the animal hospital to recuperate. Naturally, you are
upset about this and are somewhat tense too as your mind is set off in
13
different ways, none of them good. So, you ruminate or mull over the
decisions you could have made to avoid the accident, worry about your
wife’s reaction and how you will respond, and are distracted enough to
call the hospital every few minutes to check on the health of your beloved
tabby. These represent cognitive dilemmas that leave you no recourse.
In this case, thinking about what decisions you could have made, will
make, or will make now are fruitless, with taking any fork in the road
leaving you as miserable as before.
The solution is simple, merely avoid or otherwise eliminate these
perseverative thoughts completely and consistently, and you will be calm
and relaxed.1 However, it is a common aspect of our thought that despite
knowing better, we often feel we have no choice but to continue to worry,
fret, and be distracted, if not constantly then often enough to disturb the
inner calm which is the default state of being alive. In other words, the
decision to continue to ruminate, worry, and be distracted is often
signaled by the energizing, arousing, or ‘affective’ feelings that
accompany the uncertain positive implications of perseverative
thought.2
1And very likely you will be happy too, since persistent relaxation (a relaxed
state for a half hour or more) is an affective state because it increases the level
of endogenous opioids centered in the midbrain, which are the cause of all
our pleasures, and mitigates the palatability or reward value of other
behaviors (food, alcohol) that increase opioid release. In this way, it inhibits
otherwise harmful cravings. Perseverative cognition may also be the result
of ‘mind wandering’, or spontaneous, undirected, or discursive thinking,
which has as of recent been strongly correlated with a state of unhappiness.
For more on this, look at the TED video by the psychologist Matt
Killingsworth.
2 The prospect of uncertain and positive outcomes is often intrinsic to
Passive Perseveration
When we think of cognitive perseveration, we think of the worries and
concerns that are the emotional signposts that signal branches in our
personal passages of life that are difficult if not impossible to logically
decide between. But on the way to any fork in the road we are beset by
countless other decisions which represent the smaller dilemmas of
plodding forwards or taking a moment to smell the flowers. The former
choices representing major decisions we often dread, but the latter are
trivial, and are something not to avoid, and certainly not dread. And it
is here that we are wrong.
But what are the actual entailments of perseveration? Active perseveration
comprises the intermittent worries, difficult decisions, and regrets that
consist of our conscious perception of our world, whereas passive
perseveration represents the nonconscious minor distractions and
concerns, generally slight but consistent, that populates our days. When
we actively perseverate, our thoughts and decisions are focused on the
dilemmas, from past, present, to future, that decide our fates, whereas
passive perseveration are the scarcely considered minor choices we
make between minor or trivial affective and rational choices that cannot
15
meaningful tasks, then we can more easily resist positively affective yet
meaningless tasks for meaningful alternatives that easy to sort out and
rarely conflict. It is that solution that we will propose in Chapter 7.
Ultimately, our behavior is a result of justification, derived from affective
and effective rationales, of emotion and reason. As we shall see, faulty
justifications come from faulty explanations. Fix the explanation and the
motivation to change becomes real because we now know how our
stresses work. Knowing yourself is the essence of philosophy, and to be
able to rest, we must be philosophers as well.3
3
Our explanation of perseverative cognition generally conforms with the
‘perseverative cognition hypothesis’, that holds that cognitive perseveration
is the main constituent of stress. However, this hypothesis does not provide
an explanation of how cognitive perseveration signals tension and stress, nor
does it describe the neurological correlates of neuromuscular tension and its
opposite of rest. Because it is bereft of explanation, it cannot be used to
explain corollary states of rest, meditation, peak experiences, and the like
which we derive directly from the explanatory models to follow in this book.
Per Wikipedia, the 'perseverative cognition hypothesis' holds that stressful
events cannot affect people's health, unless they think repetitively or
continuously (that is, 'perseverate cognitively') about these stressful events.
Stressful events themselves are often too short, as are the physiological
responses to them. Therefore, the physiological responses during these
stressors are unlikely to cause bodily harm. More importantly, many
stressful events are merely worried about, or feared in the future, while they
often do not happen or do not have the feared consequences. Nevertheless,
the body reacts with prolonged physiological responses to continuous
thoughts (perseverative cognition) about these stressors. Therefore, it is the
perseverative cognition, and not the stressors that can eventually lead to
disease. In scientific terms, it is said that perseverative cognition is
a mediator of the detrimental effects of stress on one's health. Since its
publication scientific evidence for this hypothesis has been accumulating.
17
Chapter 2
Rest Explained
4 And if you concur with the Epicurean belief that a state of happiness is
equivalent to a state of continuous pleasure, then the continuous opioid
release in relaxation is just your ticket. Opioids are the source of all of our
pleasures, from eating a ham sandwich and smelling a rose to having sex, but
whereas our common pleasures end with satiety, the opioid induced
pleasures of relaxation can continue without end as long as we stay relaxed.
Although opioid inducing drugs are addictive, it must be noted that the
positive affective states associated with other psycho-active substances or
behaviors, whether it be for addictive drugs (heroin, cocaine) or video games
or the ‘pleasures’ of esteem, power, of affiliation activate not opioid but
dopamine systems in the brain that instigate action, not sustain repose. This
state of ‘wanting’, although positive, is not pleasure, any more than an itch
that demands to be scratched. Sounds confusing? It needn’t be, and for more
information that can sort this all out for you, I refer you to this article by the
neuropsychologist Kent Berridge, whose work firmly established that our
pleasures, or what we like and want, are not quite what we think they are.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2756052/
18
that increase opioid levels (food and alcohol), and makes your brain
work better. Opioid release in relaxation or ‘somatic rest’ as well as for
all of our pleasures is also labile, and can increase or decrease due to its
cognitive context, the neuropsychology of which we will explain in
greater detail later in this book.
Good stuff indeed. So why don’t we feel rested all the time? The short
answer is because we can’t make up our mind, and our musculature is
called upon to help us do so, but in a quite unexpected way. The cost is
the loss of all the benefits of relaxation, for the prospective gains that as
will be demonstrated, are often utter mirages.
So, that brings us to explaining the converse of relaxation, or muscular
tension. Our muscles move when we walk and talk and grasp things,
and they also tense and are primed to move when we are about to engage
in a strenuous activity, from running a marathon to running away from
a predator. For these voluntary muscles, they continue being activated
when they tire, and when they start to hurt we stop. Whether running,
talking, grasping, or lifting, we have a conscious control over these aptly
named ‘voluntary’ muscles, and cease their activity before we approach
total exhaustion. However, there is another class of muscles which hold
us up. These muscles are moving all the time, and often for reasons so
slight that they are barely if at all perceived. These are our postural
muscles. When they activate we scarcely perceive it, and only when they
remain activated do we remark upon it, as they leave us literally
exhausted and in pain. These are our ‘involuntary’ muscles that act
reflexively and non-consciously, for the most part that is, and how and
why they work is the pivotal concern of this book.
To illustrate, take a relaxing drive to the beach, say the destination is a
three-hour drive away. You walk on the beach, you swim, and when you
come back you are exhausted. So why are you so tired? That’s because
your postural muscles are continually activated, adjusting your torso to
every twist and turn, bump and dip in the road. All that muscular
adjustment is pretty darn tiring, and your relaxing trip ends up anything
but.
19
But there are also non-physical or ‘mental’ reasons that lead to the
sustained activation of these muscles. These reasons are generally non-
conscious in nature yet cannot be easily explained or ‘verbalized’. Now,
acting non-consciously is no mystery to us, as we can always explain it
in retrospect. Drive your car to work in the morning, and your conscious
attention can be directed to the radio, a phone call, or day dreaming, and
yet non-consciously you are making continuous and rational decisions
to speed up, slow down, make turns, and keep on course to your
destination. Your muscles move to steer the car because of rational
opportunities that are taken moment by moment to get you places in the
safest and quickest way, and you can easily rationalize or understand
them after the fact.
But what happens if opportunities conflict, with no satisfactory recourse
of choosing one over the other, and much to lose if one route is chosen
over the other? Dallying over such dilemmas is not a productive thing,
and to force you to make your decision quickly or else retreat from the
dilemma altogether, your body sends you another non-conscious
message. Namely, your postural muscles contract, soon tire, and the
resulting discomfort forces you to attend to the problem and make a
decision, or else escape the situation. This brings us to the pivotal concept
of this book that is at the core of our procedures and explanation.
In the tale of Buridan’s Ass, an ass is faced with the dilemma of being
equidistant from a bale of hay and a bucket of water. Not being able to
decide whether to eat or quench its thirst, the ass simply starved to death
as it pondered the unresolvable. As humans who daily encounter far
more dilemmas than an ass could possibly perceive, it is equally
understandable that we would hesitate, and in the aggregate, lose our
days rather than lose our lives. Of course, we would not starve ourselves
to death for any one choice, but add up all those micro-costs for those
20
5
As with nearly all theories that are purportedly worth their salt, our theory
is not original, but was conceived by the psychologists Neal Miller and John
Dollard in the 1950’s. Their Dollard-Miller theory of anxiety hypothesized
that tension and anxiety (or fear, which they broadly defined as a pain
reaction to conditioned stimuli) were secondary or learnable ‘drives’ that
occurred whenever one was faced with ‘choice-choice’ conflicts, and to
escape these continuous or perseverative conflicts, anxiety impelled faster
avoidance behavior, and was reinforced. For example, avoidance-avoidance
conflicts would represent a conflict between two choices we would rather
avoid, such as visiting the dentist or living with an aching tooth. Approach-
approach conflicts represent conflicts between two desirable options, such as
21
So, for example, on April 1 we think about our taxes, feel tense when we
see no good alternative to paying up, and because of the pain postpone
our day of reckoning until April 14, when we have no other choice. In
this case, tension is rewarded or ‘reinforced’ because it leads to a
favorable outcome, namely escaping from a no-win scenario. However,
many dilemmas are continuous with either option too important to
ignore or avoid, and we possess faint hope of their resolution. That is
often enough for us to dwell on such matters, even though the odds are
long if not impossible. Sometimes these dilemmas represent future
intractable issues, such as whether when traveling on vacation you
worry, and are tense as you decide whether to turn back to see if you left
the water on, and other times they represent a train of distractions from
the internet to phone calls that provide moment to moment alternatives
to doing one’s work. And so we feel tense, and this pain or ‘anxiety’
forces our hand to make one decision or other, or else to simply escape
the situation.
Muscles work to speed decision making, and that’s often a good thing,
lest we forget the lesson of Buridan’s mule, who was indeed a real stupid
ass. The question you may pose however is what makes you the author
so sure? Simple, if perseveration on cognitive dilemmas is the cause of
tension, and apart from fear, is the only cause of tension, then all the
remedies for tension or stress must overtly or covertly rely on the remedy
we propose. In the next chapter, we will demonstrate just that.
Chapter 3
Rest Unexplained
know that we can treat ear infections with antibiotics, pain relievers, bed
rest, heat packs, or ear drops. All treat the symptoms, but only one
remedy treats the cause. Because ear infections can be explained due to
bacterial causes, we know therefore that antibiotics, or the body’s natural
immune response are the only cures. Thus, to cure an ear infection you
take antibiotics, or you rest in bed or simply wait, and allow your own
immune system to fend it off. However, you will still of course likely
address the symptoms, and eardrops, warm compresses, and pain
relievers will help.
But let us consider a time when we did not have an explanation for ear
infection. That’s easy to do if we back up our analysis two hundred years
are so. If you lived in 1815, and if you were forearmed with a correct
explanation of infection, you would know that bed rest and the passage
of time would be the only cure, awaiting our body’s natural defenses to
cure us. You would know that warm compresses and holding the head
up to drain the middle ear would be effective therapies not to cure but
to mitigate infection. Because you have an adequate explanation of
infection, you can reject other remedies of the time that by want of mere
correlation with a good result, or confounded with faulty explanations,
were given credence they did not deserve. That means that prayers,
exorcisms, and quack tonics are ruled out, and if you have some chicken
soup, you would know its limitations.
Because you have a good explanation of what infections are and what
they do, you can treat with and avoid infections, and know the difference
between what treats the symptoms, what treats the cause, and what
merely treats someone else’s wallet. Your knowledge won’t stop
infections of course, but your ability to confront infection won’t be
stopped by bogus procedures that are informed only by tradition, old
wives’ tales, or dime store cures.
Above all, this little book attempts to provide a valid explanation of
tension or stress. So how do we demonstrate this? A good explanation of
course, but what does that mean? To have a good explanation, four
criteria are necessary, simplicity, generality, testability, and justifiability.
24
where the theory predicts a result that doesn’t hold true, then the theory
must be changed or even abandoned.
Well-Tempered Procedures
Focal Meditation
Focal meditation is the sine qua non of procedures that induce relaxation,
which means that it is the premier procedure to calm one’s body and
one’s soul. Nonetheless, it remains a procedure without explanation,
which of course has not stopped the growth in its popularity and the
ever-growing expansiveness of its claims, from consciousness raising to
increasing human virtue.
Focal meditation simply involves sharply reducing all undirected and
spontaneous what-if or discursive thinking as well as non-discursive
purposeful or meaningful thinking in an undistracted environment
while attending to a simple physical stimulus or cognitive precept. You
are pretty much staring ahead and thinking of nothing while restricting
or focusing attention to some real or virtual stimulus, thus narrowing
perceptions as well as eliminating decision making. As essentially
‘thought less’ awareness, meditation is the best and most proven way to
relax. In meditation, all spontaneous or discursive judgement or mind
wandering is avoided, so there is no opportunity for it to transition into
worry, rumination, or distraction, with the deactivation of the covert
musculature or relaxation as the result. While meditating, you are not
thinking about your troubles, but in reducing non-discursive thinking
you aren’t thinking about what to have for breakfast or the nature of the
universe either. Thus, you become relaxed but are pretty useless to
27
yourself and the world for the time being. As a method to achieve
relaxation, meditation is thus effective, but not practical, since it is only
performed in restrictive distraction free environments.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness may be described as ‘choice less’ or moment to moment
awareness. It is a state of active, open attention on the present, but
without the requirement to narrowing one’s perceptual field or focal
attention. Mindfulness is like focal meditation because it also entails the
avoidance of discursive thought or mind wandering, but without
inhibiting awareness and basic interaction with one’s perceptual field
(walking, talking, driving, etc.), or rudimentary non-discursive thought.
The result again is a pleasurable relaxed state, as the avoidance of mind
wandering prevents thoughts from segueing into cognitive
perseveration.6 It is to be noted that our definition differs from other
just being in the moment, adding in superfluous procedural layers like deep
breathing, intonations to be loving and kind, psychotherapeutic jargon, and
four-day training seminars full of new age cant is easy to do for what
amounts to a simple psychological hat trick.
7 It must be noted that although many studies that justify meditation duly
contrast meditators with subjects who have undergone relaxation training,
comparing control group subjects who use different relaxation induction
procedures (e.g., eyes closed rest, progressive relaxation) with groups of
meditators who become similarly relaxed imputes that the relaxed states
across both groups are the same because those techniques are equally
efficacious in producing rest, an assumption which is empirically
unfounded, since rest is not a single state, but occurs in degrees. For example,
progressive relaxation entails learning how to relax major muscle groups,
whereas deep rest entails relaxing all striatal muscular groups. Indeed, if
meditation produces benefits above and beyond that of relaxation, rather
than offering merely a better way to relax more completely, the degree of
neuro-muscular inactivity or rest (as measured by SCR-skin conductance
response or GSR-galvanic skin response to record electrodermal activity)
must be held equivalent for both experimental and control groups, a criterion
29
that has not been met by any studies that compare relaxed states in
meditators and non-meditators.
Secondly, the neurological correlates of relaxation that render affect also are
ignored in the meditation literature. Meditation is primarily justified for its
affective (a feeling of pleasure and avoidance of pain, or tension) rather than
behavioral (more effective cognition, changes in brain morphology) results,
yet it is an established fact that resting or relaxed states activate opioid
systems in the brain and attendant feelings of pleasure, with no evidence to
suggest other causal mechanisms in meditation for reported pleasure.
Indeed, the empiric literature in neuropsychology on meditation does not
account for the affective nature of meditation, and focuses instead on the
activity of cortical structures. This neglect calls into serious question the
explanatory power of current neuro-psychological studies of meditation,
which do not address and thus cannot justify rest and meditation as different
affective states that have dissimilar causes.
Finally, there is the issue of the imperfect semantics or independent
measures of meditative protocols, or what meditation procedure in fact
entails. In other words, how a meditation protocol is defined does not
necessarily reflect the cognitive operations that are characteristic of the
protocols that invariably entail rest. For example, meditation may be defined
as attentive focusing on a simple precept or word, however attentive focusing
in meditation also entails the consistent avoidance of perseverative thought
for a significant interval of time, which is clearly a resting protocol. It may be
argued that embedded in all meditative procedures are resting protocols that
by ignorance or design are ignored or discounted through the sole attribution
of the effects of meditation to obscure attentive or other cognitive causes.
30
remedies, and from a simple perusal of the stress relief literature, indeed
they are. Stress tips are ubiquitous, and without them all the magazines
on the checkout line of your local supermarket would be a lot thinner.
Like diet and dating advice, stress remedies rarely differentiate between
symptom and cure, and may only partially address the problem. Because
stress tips don’t derive from explanations, but mere experience, they
cannot be judged against the metric of explanation. To relax means that
you must consistently avoid all forms of perseverative thought from
worry to distraction, not just treat the neuro-muscular symptoms of that
thought. Comprehensiveness is key, you must touch all the bases, not a
few. Besides lacking a good explanation, prevalent stress tips lack
consistency. Thus, you can still suffer distractions or worry while
walking on the beach or rocking on a chair, and to reduce the symptoms
with a hot bath or massage does not eliminate the cause.
Despite the imputed generality of eliminating perseverative thought to
achieve relaxation, the generality of our hypothesis must also apply to
those situations that cause muscular tension, or stress. It is to that issue
that we will now turn.8
8
A Note on Resting States, Resting Brains, and Meditative States
A resting state, or ‘somatic rest’, would seem to correspond with a brain at
rest or ‘neurologic’ rest, but by definition, somatic and neurologic rest are
entirely different things. A resting ‘state’ or somatic rest represents the
inactivity of the covert striatal musculature due to the application of resting
protocols (continual avoidance of perseverative thought represented by
rumination, worry, and distraction). Resting states also are affective states,
as they elicit opioid activity in the brain. Resting states in turn may occur in
tandem with all levels of non-perseverative thought that are passive or active,
from just passively ‘being in the moment’ or being mindful, to actively
engaging in complex and meaningful cognitive behavior. The latter cognitive
behavior is also additionally affective in nature due to its elicitation of
dopaminergic activity, and resulting opioid-dopamine interaction results in
a perceived state of ‘bliss’ or ‘flow’. On the other hand, a resting ‘brain’,
neurologic rest, or the so-called ‘default mode network’ is a specific type of
33
Chapter 4
A Matter of Stress
neural processing that occurs when the mind is in a ‘passive’ state, or in other
words, is presented with no or very limited cognitive demands. This results
in ‘mind wandering’ that can segue into non-perseverative (creative thought)
or perseverative thought (rumination, worry). A resting brain is due to a level
of demand, not a kind of demand, as in somatic rest, and the latter may
encompass different levels of demand or cognitive states with the same
affective outcomes. In other words, affect is not dependent upon neurologic
resting states, or the default mode network, as the affective outcomes of
meditation are commonly replicated in cognitively active behaviors that are
concomitant with somatic rest.
It is remarkable that in the literature of meditation, the neurophysiology of
rest is not defined, with a similar neglect to how neuro-muscular activity is
actively shaped by experience or learning, and how it in turn modulates
affect. The importance of meditation is very real, and the meditative
community is understandably averse to equating it with rest since it makes
meditation less ‘special’ or less marketable. But that is my argument
nonetheless, which in the end provides a better advocacy of meditation by
denying that meditation elicits a unique physiological process or state, which
like the concept of ‘phlogiston’, or the imaginary element that enabled fire,
impedes rather than furthers scientific inquiry.
34
Stress is a problem when the demands on your time and energy go on all day,
day after day, without letup- ‘Stress for Good’ Book
The technical definition of stress is the amount of energy you need to adjust to
the internal external demands of your life in a given amount of time. Stress is
the balance between what you have to do and the resources you have to do it
with.- Frederic Luskin1
Stress is the non-specific response of the body to any demand made upon it. -
Hans Selye3
Stress happens when we feel that we can't cope with pressure and this pressure
comes in many shapes and forms, and triggers physiological responses. These
changes are best described as the fight or flight response, a hard-wired reaction
to perceived threats to our survival. –Stress Management Society.
35
....there is no definition of stress that everyone agrees on, what is stressful for
one person may be pleasurable or have little effect on others and we all react to
stress differently. Stress is not a useful term for scientists because it is such a
highly subjective phenomenon that it defies definition. -American Institute of
Stress
First, the skeletal muscles contract and the hypothalamus, a small neural
center in the brain, reacts. The hypothalamus, among other organs, influences
the autonomic nervous system, which involves involuntarily activities of bodily
organs. It also mediates activity in the pituitary gland, which releases hormones
into the bloodstream. Under stress, as the muscles tense, breathing becomes
faster and deeper. The heartbeat quickens. Some blood vessels constrict, raising
the blood pressure and almost closing the vessels right under the skin. The throat
muscles and those in the nostril force these passages wide open. The stomach and
intestines temporarily halt digestion. Perspiration increases, and secretion of
mucous and saliva decreases. The pupils of the eye dilate involuntarily. At the
36
same time the adrenal glands release two hormones, epinephrine and
norepinephrine, which effect circulation, elevating heartbeat and blood pressure.
These hormones signal the spleen to release more red blood corpuscles. They
enable the blood to clot more quickly, and encourage the bone marrow to produce
more white corpuscles. They also increase the amount of fat and sugar in the
blood. While these events are occurring, the pituitary gland secretes two more
hormones, abbreviated TSH and ACTH, TSH and ACTH increase the rate at
which the body produces energy and which reinforce the signals sent to the
adrenal glands through the autonomic nervous system. ACTH also causes the
adrenals to release about 30 other stress related hormones43. -Source:
International Stress Management Association (www.isma-usa.org)
conflict and the latter does not. So, does demand cause tension? Of
course, but it is not what we are thinking about but how we are thinking
about it that is the root cause of tension. So, then you may ask, if conflict
free ‘demand’ does not cause stress, then what of the ‘flight or fight’
response that is so commonly attributed to stressful events?
It is a fact that our voluntarily and involuntary muscles are driven by our
emotions, particularly when we are afraid or fearful. This ‘flight or fight’
response, or as it is known today as ‘flight fight freezing system’, or FFFS
makes your heart race, your internal organs shut down, and primes your
muscles to act to defend yourself, or else run for the hills. On the other
hand, the simple tensions that occur when we find it hard to make up
our minds activate the postural musculature alone, a simple response
that shares little in common with the complex neurological and muscular
reactions which comprise fear. In other words, see a spider far away and
our postural muscles will move because we think, but see a spider on
your nose, and all your muscles and a whole lot more will move because
we fear. Do these separate instances correspond to the same neurological
causes? Of course not. In both cases, you are avoiding the spider, and yet
in each case your physiological responses are distinctively different not
only in degree but also in kind.
Moreover, in the former case your behavior is driven because you think,
and in the latter, it is because you are in fear. The former is due to cortical
processes, and the latter is due to more primitive neural processes,
centered in the midbrain, that govern the emotion of fear. This is a very
simple distinction, verified conceptually as well as empirically (see
appendix for academic sources), but it has not been explained well or has
even been entertained in the copious academic and popular estimate of
stress. So, our daily stresses and anxieties are distinctive from our fears.
They are indeed separate emotions.
It is a remarkable fact that we’ve got stress figured out all wrong. Our
hard-wired fear responses are responses to threat, not choice, and are
governed by different neurological processes from those cortically based
processes that underscore anxiety or tension. Secondly, neuromuscular
38
Chapter 5
Affective Decisions
We begin our day, and likely all our days, unconcerned that a meteor
will fall on our heads or that we will drop dead for any number of causes.
It’s simply a matter of just being there, since birth, with neither of these
events happening to us, so far.
Now let us say that the grand prize in the Powerball lottery is now up to
$500,000,000. Since the government has not enrolled us in the social perk
of a mandatory daily enrollment in the lottery, we have never gained the
experience of not winning. So, it is particularly novel that we now have
the opportunity of winning a prize that has no more likelihood of coming
our way than a meteor landing on our head. And so we buy Powerball
tickets, and in spite of our knowledge of the impossible odds, keep our
eyes and our pocketbooks open to new and unexpected possibilities that
give new meaning to the phrase that our eyes are bigger than our
stomachs.
The new un-likelihoods outshine the old un-likelihoods because that is
how our brains proverbially shine, or should I say activate. For the
purchaser of Powerball tickets, you can say he is literally of two minds
regarding his choice. He knows that his odds are long and that the long
term predicted value or ‘utility’ of buying a lottery ticket is next to nil.
However, because the idea of winning the grand prize is unexpectedly
novel or new, the immediate or ‘decision’ utility of buying the ticket is
driven by a simple positive emotion, or positive affect. In other words,
in the present moment a lottery ticket has value, but in the longer term it
has none. For another example, consider a normal day at work. From
moment to moment we can go about our necessary business, or take a
moment to check our email, our social media page, chat with a coworker,
40
or make an idle phone call. These behaviors have a predicted utility that
diminishes to near zero the more often we do them within a space of
time, but the momentary or ‘decision’ utility stays high because these
behaviors are novel events with positive outcomes.
These examples demonstrate how the introduction of affect multiplies
the dilemma of deciding between a bird in the hand and two in the bush
to endless numbers of birds in endless numbers of bushes as far as the
eye can see. The great majority of these choices have no future utility or
value to us, yet we are torn between them nonetheless because one
choice is affective and one choice is effective, choices that are hard if not
impossible to reconcile.
So, what is the source of this positive affect? It is a brain chemical called
dopamine, which is more formally regarded as a ‘neuromodulator’
which activates groups of brain cells to center attention and facilitate
thinking, and is subjectively felt as a sense of energy, elation, or
activation, but not ironically, pleasure. Dopamine is released upon the
anticipation or experience of positive novel or discrepant events wherein
moment to moment outcomes differ from what is expected. To be alert
and aroused is a perquisite for living, and the feeling of boredom that
occurs even when one is engaging in pleasurable activity (eating an ice
cream cone, resting) reflects the actual pain that is present when
dopamine levels are lowered due to a lack of novel or ‘meaningful’
activity. Dopamine activity is further depressed with the perception of
events that have negative meaning, such as the imminent prospect of
death and taxes, and the resulting and painful state of depression results
in a loss of ability to focus attention and to think clearly. A primary role
for dopamine is to change the importance or salience of moment-to-
moment behavior. This momentary salience may or may not conform to
the overall importance of an extended behavior sequence, but it does not
and cannot predict the long-term importance of that sequence. For
example, intermittent small wins on a slot machine increase the salience
or moment to moment importance of each pull of the lever, and the
decision utility of the moment may or may not conform to a winning
41
9 And it may be argued, dopamine may be behind not just our distractions,
but also our worries. For example, we may logically regard as extremely
unlikely the likelihood that we have left our house unlocked as we embark
on a trip, yet like the Powerball example, the affective value of that
likelihood may skew our thinking, and have us running back to check on our
house in what in foresight and hindsight is clearly an irrational behavior.
10 (And here is a more formal explanation of how affective choice relates to
Chapter 6
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things
which are beyond the power of our will.” – Epictetus (ca. 115AD)
Times were tough all over. Thousands of illegal aliens were crossing the
border, the economy was in decline, people spent their days in mindless
and generally violent entertainment, the Middle East was in chaos, the
environment was degraded and the prophets all agreed, the end of world
was near. Our civilization will follow that of the Roman Empire, unless
you are of course living during the Roman Empire, and then you’ve
really got troubles!
So, let’s go back two thousand years to the year 115. The Roman Empire
was at its height, government was bureaucratic yet just, bread and
circuses were free, and naturally, folks were miserable. It was the time of
the Pax Romana, or Roman peace, but that didn’t stop people, then as
now, from complaining about the macro and micro aggressions that
made miserable their days.
With a nascent Christianity and other oriental religions, the consolation
of theology was that evil will get its due, that the meek will inherit the
earth, there was a heavenly reward for putting up with all your suffering,
and it pays to be loving and kind, even if you get shafted in the end.
So, what was the competing consolation of philosophy at the time? Enter
the philosophy of Stoicism. The Stoics were pragmatic philosophers who
looked to real world results. Their ‘consolation’ was no promise of
heaven or divine intervention, but rather a philosophical whack on the
head. Things may be hopeless, but that does not mean you should be
44
hapless, and it was haplessness that was the true cause of our misery.
Their primary advice was simple, stop worrying and fretting about
things you have no control over! In other words, it is sheer delusion to
consider worry and rumination as coping strategies because they will
not get you any closer to resolving your problems. Cognitive
perseveration is a waste of time and energy, and you should focus the
things that you have control over, namely your own character, integrity,
and personal virtue. Only then can you be truly happy, and happiness is
a personal choice derived from reason, not a gift from the gods.
The Stoic ideal was frankly Greek rather than Christian in nature, but
they were no slouches in ethics. Indeed, to them it was all that cognitive
perseveration on hopeless choices and causes that make people into
unhappy crude and brutish sorts. Eliminate the consternation between
decisions you have no control over, and you will end up being the
reasonable and relaxed sort that is after all your true nature anyways,
and your personal character and confidence will gain from it to boot.
What the Stoics didn’t have of course was an explanation as to why clear
thinking was the one true road to emotional health and happiness.
Because they couldn’t explain their philosophy, they could not justify it,
and Stoic teachings became relegated mainly to Bartlett’s familiar
quotations. But with explanation, the Stoic ideal becomes not just
practical, but wholly justified, and it is to our not so original procedure
that in full circle we return.
45
Chapter 7
Parsing Happiness
“Finally, all might agree that happiness springs not from any single component
but from the interplay of higher pleasures, positive appraisals of life meaning,
and social connectedness, all combined and merged by an interaction between
the brain’s networks of pleasure and meaningfulness. Achieving the right
hedonic balance in such ways may be crucial to keep one not just free of
distress— but even to achieve a degree of bliss.”- Kent Berridge11
11
Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach, Building a Neuroscience of pleasure
and wellbeing, Psychology of Well Being: Theory, Research, and
Practice 2011, 1:3 : http://www.psywb.com/content/1/1/3, 2011.
46
down with the importance of real and virtual outcomes gained or lost.
We will define ‘positive meaning’ as the branching positive implications
of behavior as perceived virtually. For example, recreating the super bowl
on a video console has little meaning, but watching the real super bowl
does, and doing a good deed, earning a degree, or completing a work of
art bestows a sense or ‘feeling’ of honor, pride, or achievement that
represent ever refreshing positive meaning. Contrariwise, behavior that
is positively affective in the moment (overeating, watching TV in lieu of
chores) may have branching negative implications that are also virtually
perceived. This ‘negative meaning’ suppresses dopaminergic activity
and is felt as the emotion of regret or depression, and the same reduction
in dopamine also suppresses opioid activity, resulting in a reduced
ability to experience pleasure, or ‘anhedonia’.16 We want to consider past
and present behavior and the emblems of that behavior (trophies,
rewards) to have positive and meaningful cognitive import that branch
into endless positive and affective implications, that will in other words
‘echo into eternity’.13 When combined with the pleasurable affective
state of rest, a maximal state of pleasure and alert arousal will be
achieved and will scale with the importance or salience of moment-to-
moment goals and their virtual implications. These facts lead us to
redefine rest as representing not a static but a dynamic affective state, as
the opioid systems activated in rest are always positively or negatively
modulated by dynamic or phasic changes in dopamine systems that are
Wither Meditation
The blessing and curse of intelligent life is that we are always trying to
make some sense out of it. We don’t wait for things to happen, and
instead are quick to model myriad as-if or transitive events. It is a sign of
intelligence, creativity, and a source of our happiness as well as our
woes. As a prerequisite for rest, the avoidance of cognitive perseveration
(i.e. persistent worry, rumination, distraction) means that perseverative
thoughts are not experienced at all, and to achieve this it logically follows
that the as-if cognitive operations that may segue into perseveration
must be reduced or inhibited. This is the rationale for thinking in the
present tense, or ‘in the moment’, which is the core definition of
mindfulness. Mindfulness avoids perseverative thought by radically
reducing the idle strands of predictive thought or undirected, ‘mind
wandering’, or discursive thinking that can lead to cognitive
perseveration and its manifestations of worry, distraction, and regret.
During mindfulness sessions, by consistently focusing on the moment,
or being mindful, as-if cognitions are inhibited, perseveration is avoided,
and relaxation is achieved. Mindfulness is the habit of continually thinking
in the present tense. As a means of mental hygiene, mindfulness implies
that the default mode of a happy life is a still life, a timeless life. But
therein lies the rub. As we have noted, humans are imbued by evolution
with an instinctive ‘seeking’ response that leads us to seek novel
outcomes, and optimally, to seek a cascade of virtual future positive and
novel events or ‘meaning’. Thus, to be mindful is not enough, as being
mindful alone ultimately invites boredom. Thus mindfulness is a
practice that can only be intermittently applied before one surrenders
again to the siren’s call of distraction, and begins the Sisyphean process
of a relaxed high followed by a stressful low. But to make meditation
sustainable and increase its affective ‘tone’, a type of judgment must be
introduced to follow it, and by doing so increase our ability to better
manage our behavior, or self-control.
50
Self-Control
The concept of self-control denotes the rational consideration and
discovery of the expected consequences of pursuing a course of action,
or its expected utility. Thus our behavior can be shaped by our own
volition as rational actors. These consequences, when considered in real
time as inspiration or ‘meaning’, have affective value and reinforce
moment to moment approach behavior. However, ‘decision utility’, or
the value in the moment of a course of action, is also affective, and can
be in line or at odds with the long-term goals or expected utility of a
course of action. Thus one can pursue the long-term goal of productive
work and still be diverted or distracted by stimuli (social media,
rumination and worry, web surfing, small talk at work, etc.) that have
little or no long-term value or meaning. This often causes tension and
stress as one has to continually choose between choices of
incommensurate value, or in other words, between distraction and
productive work.
The logical answer to this problem is to increase the decision or moment
to moment utility of behavior that is coherent with the expected or future
utility of performance by increasing the former’s affective value. In other
words, by making productive work artificially more enticing in the
moment, it is easier to crowd out distraction and focus on important
tasks. We often non-consciously do this by waiting until the last second
to accomplish a task, where moment to moment success is touch and go
and elicits attentive arousal or excitement. In other words, we
procrastinate. From heroically defusing the bomb in time to merely
catching the bus on time, from our entertainments to our most banal day
to day behavior, through the timing of our behavior we calibrate affect
to induce the responses we logically need. A preferable approach to self-
motivation or self-control without putting our behavior on the razor’s
edge of procrastination is not just making moment to moment
productive behavior more arousing, but also more pleasurable. To do that,
we must first get relaxed, and that is where mindfulness comes in.
51
This notion is in fact not new but finds its origins in the philosopher
Aristotle’s concept of eudaemonia, which adduces arousal and pleasure
to a life lived according to reason. From his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle
argued that eudaimonia, or living well, consists in activities exercising the
rational part of the psyche in accordance with the virtues or excellency of reason
Which is to say, to be fully engaged in the intellectually stimulating and
fulfilling work at which one achieves well-earned success.17 The metaphorical
concepts of ‘stimulating’ and ‘fulfilling’ can be mapped to arousal and
pleasure centers in the brain that are activated not by some inner virtue
or capacity, but through outside incentives as arranged by an individual
and the primary (family, friends) and societal institutions that he selects
or which select him.
To love and do productive work was Freud’s maxim for happiness, our
similar notion is rather to relax while doing productive work. Both are
intoxicating, but the latter requires an easier route for the pleasures
which animate our life. Ultimately, self-control is not the secret to
16
Another way of expressing this is as ‘acceptance’ and commitment, wherein
one is aware of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but accepts them
as facts without proceeding to contest, reinterpret, or remediate them
through rumination, worry, or regret. In other words, acceptance inhibits
discursive or ‘what if’ thoughts or ‘mind wandering’, and implicitly entails rest
through its avoidance of cognitive perseveration.
.
53
A Postscript to a Preamble17
Resting: from Process to Procedure, in a nutshell
Process: Rest or relaxation (or its physiological representation as the
generalized inactivity of the covert musculature) is a primary entailment
of meditation or mindfulness practice as well as a common feature of our
daily lives, but the interaction of resting states with affective processes
in the brain is generally discounted or ignored within the literature of
meditation and behavioral and affective neuroscience. But what is the
neurophysiology of rest, and how may it relate to the efficacy of
meditation or self-help and psychotherapeutic procedure, and in the
large the modulation of affective states?
Being in the moment entails the active inhibition of mind wandering that
is a precursor to perseverative cognition (worry, distraction, regret)
through meditation, or its passive inhibition, as in thinking of nothing
while walking on the beach give the covert musculature the time to
completely relax, and this state of persistent or profound relaxation
elicits a state of pleasure or mild euphoria due to the concomitant and
sustained elicitation of endogenous opioids (or endorphins) in the brain.
In contrast, muscular tension inhibits or suppresses endorphin activity.
Relaxation also mitigates our sensitivity to pain and inhibits tension. In
18
Any subjective observation that includes affect must be objectively
measurable by tools that can observe the neuro-physiological correlates of
affective states. In the case of rest as an affective state and its embodiment
by neuromuscular and mid-brain activity, this is of critical importance. This is
not possible with the standard tools used to measure brain activity of
meditation as a resting protocol, such as the fmri, which measures blood flow
markers in cortical areas of the brain, and does not delineate brain processes
and their interaction with inputs from the peripheral nervous system. These
processes are characterized by opioid and dopaminergic systems that are
studied instead by ‘in vivo’ or direct manipulation and observation, usually in
animal subjects. Because of this primary reliance on one measuring tool in
meditation research, cortical activity alone has by default become the main
dependent variable that responds to mindfulness protocols, and this
experience is associated in turn with inferred cognitive processes such as
meta-cognition, decentering, attention, transcendence, etc. that are
‘disembodied’ and have no correspondence to the neuro-muscular processes
governing affect that are core to meditative experience. Thus mindfulness
research is encumbered by the limitations of the procedures it uses, which
limits in turn the questions it can answer, paramount of which is the nature
of resting or ‘meditative’ states.
56
So, to summarize:
1) The suppression of mind wandering through mindfulness protocols
correlates with the decreased activity of the covert musculature or
relaxation.
2) Relaxation elicits endogenous opioid release or is pleasurable.
3) The continuous experience with or expectation of imminent positive
and novel moment to moment behavior and its positive implications (or
meaningful behavior) during relaxation increases dopaminergic activity
which stimulates increased ongoing opioid release, and opioid release
will increase or ‘scale’ with the degree of dopamine release that scales in
turn with the increased salience of reward.
4) This can be observed in natural environments and manipulated in self-
control procedure, as outlined below.
And a side note: And what does Tom Cruise have to do with
it? A cinematic example. Lawful observations have generality, or
what serves the goose serves the gander, and in the physical and
biological sciences the same laws can respectively pertain to orbiting
moons and falling apples, or common colds and uncommon plagues. So
for the unscientific wary who wish to test my hypothesis and still have a
good time, you can serve up a serving of popcorn. So how do you make
popcorn taste better at the movies? If it’s a Tom Cruise movie, then
anticipating and watching it will make popcorn taste better, increase
your attention to the movie, and raise your motivation to keep
attending.25 If it is ‘Schindler’s List’, then you may lose your taste for
20
And mindfulness can occur without the need of a formally applied
mindfulness procedure and may be achieved unknowingly, as is the case in
the many occasions from a day at the beach to settling back from a hard day
at the office when we are ‘in the moment’ and are non-judgmentally aware,
and are hardly inclined to judge ourselves in other than a simple relaxed
state. The fact that nearly all states of relaxation are induced by the absence
of mind wandering, or to the point, being non-judgmental in the moment,
means that mindful and relaxed states are operationally the same, as they
are dependent upon the same cognitive processes, regardless of whether
they are deliberately or adventitiously imposed.
60
popcorn entire, and although not bored, are certainly not in a pleasurable
state. And if you are Tom Cruise, literally hanging by your fingernails off
a cliff, you are relaxed and confident, but the moment to moment
resolving danger makes sure that your attentive arousal is guaranteed,
and the natural ‘flow’ or peak experience that comes with it. The point is
that our pleasures and attentive arousal are synergistic, and looking
forward to as well as experiencing novel and good things will always
accentuate ongoing pleasure and increase arousal, regardless of its
source, whether that anticipation is (unbeknownst to you) unreliable (as
in a placebo effect), or reliable, as in an actual precursor of good things
to come. This is why all of our pleasures, from relaxation to food to sex
are so labile, and can increase due to the reliable or unreliable
anticipation of and true experience of good things, whether those events
be meaningful behavior, or even, just another Tom Cruise movie.
61
Appendix
Now it’s time for a more complex explanation. You know the sort, full of
new words, inscrutable argument, and a list of referential sources whose
validity you must take on the author’s word but whose simple
implications should be subject to challenge and refutation. In this section
I will wade into the fine print of a higher order explanation for muscular
tension and relaxation. For those wanting to delve into the finer print of
my analysis I refer you to a journal article by this author that has long
since disappeared into the Sargasso Sea of academic literature. This
article was published in 2006 in the ‘International Journal of Stress
Management’. A second article worthy of note is David Holmes’ critical
survey of the meditation literature, which concludes that meditative
states are merely resting states.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/121345732/Relaxation-and-Muscular-
Tension-A-bio-behavioristic-explanation
https://www.scribd.com/document/291558160/Holmes-Meditation-and-
Rest-The-American-Psychologist
For a more comprehensive overview of learning theory, and how ‘affect’
is essential for motivation and ‘happiness’, as well as the major practical
implications of ‘affective neuroscience’, my little book linked below on
motivation will hopefully entertain and educate.
https://www.scribd.com/document/495438436/A-Mouse-s-Tale-a-
practical-explanation-and-handbook-of-motivation-from-the-
perspective-of-a-humble-creature
Finally, in the pages to follow I restate more formally my position and
discuss the larger implications of an explanation of muscular relaxation
and tension in the context of popular theories and schematics of emotion,
which include the Yerkes-Dodson law, ‘Circumplex’ theories of emotion,
and the concept of ‘flow’.
On the other hand, here is proof positive that this author is quite daft:
https://www.scribd.com/document/389679836/Dr-Mezmer-s-
Dictionary-of-Bad-Psychology
62
Muscle Bound
response (SCR) and electromyography (EMG), but rarely if ever has this
behavior been hypothesized to respond to non-consciously perceived
outcomes. Rather, muscular tension has generally been construed to be
an artifact of autonomic arousal that is elicited due to psycho-social
‘demand’. This interpretation regards muscular tension as controlled by
different motivational principles from those that underscore voluntary
or operant behavior, such as the reflexive or stimulus-response reactions
entailed by a fight or flight response, stress reaction, etc.26 In this case,
inferred instinctive processes take the place of observed cause and effect
relationships between behavior and outcomes.
However, this conclusion may remain uncontested not because the
relationship between tension and a change in overt behavior is
disproven, or because the relevant data are unobtainable, but because of
a common misinterpretation of the meaning of ‘demand’. But before we
delve into semantics of how we understand motivation, we must first
understand how striatal muscles work.
events that are not reconcilable logically since the former represents an
effective or instrumental event and the latter an emotional or affective
one. But what is the purpose of concurrent muscular activation? The
sustained activation of type 1 fibers as elicited by the perception of
equivalent alternative choices serves no direct functional purpose, but it
may serve an indirect one. Ssustained tension is painful, and as a rule
pain imposes a new action priority to escape pain and to avoid future
pain.58 That is, pain serves to initiate avoidance behavior. In other words,
pain is something you wish to escape. Thus, the pain of tension may
serve to motivate an individual to escape from ‘no win’ situations when
confronted with choices that entail significant gains but also significant
loss, and tension is thus indirectly reinforced by the avoidance of the
situation. (3) But if tension is due to information about the consequences
of behavior, namely the avoidance of the painful results of tension, how
can this be demonstrated?
Resting Procedures
The argument for the operant nature of type 1 muscular activity is that if
tension only occurs when decisions result in moment to moment or
imminent feasible or avoidable (i.e., opportunity) losses due to near
equivalent choices, then tension will not occur if there is no possibility of
avoidance of future events, or no opportunity loss. That is, the loss
71
remains, but the opportunity to avoid it does not. Thus, if tension occurs
because it signals behavior that leads to the subsequent avoidance of the
events that elicit tension, then it logically follows that tension is therefore
‘reinforced’ by prospective avoidance, and is an operant behavior.
A well-known procedure used to eliminate the ability to avoid loss while
responding under multiple alternative choices is called an exclusion time
out.63 Common in educational environments, an exclusion time out
describes a period when an individual is restrained from performing all
actions which are otherwise rewarding to extinguish targeted behavior
(e.g. temper tantrums). Thus, a child under time out must sit and not
participate with classmates, engage in learning tasks, read a book, etc.
Although the child incurs and is aware of loss, the difference is that this
loss is unavoidable or non-feasible. A time out is also a resting
procedure. To rest is to take a time out from the choices or demands of a
working day to achieve a state of relaxation. However, it does not
implicate to what degree choices are reduced, mainly that they are. Thus,
although resting may figuratively represent an exclusion time out, it
does not literally match the definition. To do that requires a radical
reduction of choices that entail imminent (i.e., moment to moment) feasible or
opportunity loss, and this is implicitly or explicitly entailed in meditative
procedures that inhibit all ‘what-if’ or discursive thinking or ‘mind
wandering’ that can segue into cognitive perseveration. The research
consensus is that meditative procedures and resting protocols correlate
with an attendant state of relaxation.64 65 For meditation and resting, an
individual may be aware of or is ‘mindful’ of irreconcilable choices due
to rumination, worry, or distraction, but through the inhibition of
discursive thought, tension is eliminated by the avoidance of choice.
However, although the result of relaxation is shared by meditative and
resting states, the inferred causes for these have been expanded beyond
the mere reduction of choice. Thus, for meditation, relaxation may not be
primarily attributed to the reduction of choice, but to the manipulation
of attention. This manipulation involves focusing attention on a stimulus
event (focal meditation, Benson’s ‘relaxation response’). But as with the
72
that activity. The remedy for this error entails ultimately a redefinition
of the very concept of stress itself.
The problem though is that the Yerkes-Dodson law71 has little if anything
to do with Yerkes or Dodson and may be rephrased to demonstrate
correlations for many different psychological states. As the psychologist
Karl Teigen put it: In its original form as published in 1908, the law was
intended to describe the relation between stimulus strength and habit-
formation for tasks varying in discrimination difficultness. But later
generations of investigations and textbook authors have rendered it variously as
the effects of punishment, reward, motivation, drive, arousal, anxiety, tension
or stress upon learning, performance, problem-solving, coping or memory; while
the task variable has been commonly referred to as difficulty, complexity or
novelty, when it is not omitted altogether. These changes are seldom explicitly
discussed and are often misattributed to Yerkes and Dodson themselves. The
various reformulations are seen as reflecting conceptual changes and current
developments in the areas of learning, motivation and emotion, and it is argued
that the plasticity of the law also reflects the vagueness of basic psychological
concepts in these areas.72
In other words, the Yerkes-Dodson law approaches meaninglessness
because it is merely a taxonomy for a lot of meanings that if patched
together can result in nice smooth bell curves. Nonetheless, relationships
77
or correlations between demand and arousal are useful, and are the stuff
of the daily heuristics or rules of thumb that we use to guide our lives.
However, correlations themselves may not suggest explanations, and
can indeed impede or obscure them. Many of the relationships we
perceive are obviously spurious because they have no conceivable
explanation, and even if ‘explained’ by inferred forces or processes,
repeat observations would dissuade us of their reliability. For example,
rising hemlines may correlate with rising stock prices for a period of
months, and may be explained by the conjecture that stock brokers are
emotionally perked up at the sight of a more revealing female dress, but
observations over the long-term view dispel them. On the other hand,
other relationships not only provide strong and consistent correlations,
but allow us to quickly determine explanations. For example, a day of
continuous rainfall correlates with flooding, but because we know the
simple metaphors of hydraulics, we can easily move from correlation to
explanation by understanding how collecting rain water causes floods.
Correlations are still strong when you take a few steps back and enfold
a primary cause or causes into a more encompassing taxonomy or
classification that may at turns reflect meanings that are clear or obscure.
For example, you can say that bad weather causes flooding, but ‘bad
weather’ suggests the causes of flooding, namely excessive rainfall. In
this case, the explanation for bad weather is preserved. However, the
taxonomy of demand or for arousal does not suggest its components,
and in fact obscures them. That is, the independent measure of demand
and the dependent measure of arousal signify disparate processes (e.g.,
anxiety, interest, and challenge) that denote no clearly defined
constituent parts; hence the meaning or semantics of demand and
arousal are vague or obscure. Of course, it can be helpful to be vague. It’s
simple, gets attention, makes a model that has some face validity, and it
serves you well as a rule of thumb unless you want to make some specific
prediction. That’s when the model becomes inconsistent and fails, and it
becomes incumbent to define your terms.
_______________________________________________
78
frustrated while performing a task progressively loses his ability to perform well
as anxiety increases. Nonetheless, as demand increases and decreases, these two
very different types of arousal can occur simultaneously and produce a
performance curve very similar to the Yerkes-Dodson model.
As an aroused state, attentive alertness scales with the novelty or surprise of
moment-to-moment behavior. As a function of the release of the neurochemical
dopamine, touch and go events that entail continuous positive surprises (e.g.
rock climbing, gambling, creative behavior) positively correlate with aroused
alertness, which not only feels good but helps you think better. Thus, the bigger
the positive surprise, the more alert you become, and the better your performance
becomes. If, however, surprises start to trend from good to bad, alertness
decreases as we become progressively more depressed, but tension and associated
autonomic arousal (i.e. anxiety) increases. That is, as news moves from good to
bad, arousal doesn't increase, it just changes to an entirely new form! The
problem though is that positive surprises always come at the risk that things will
take a decided turn for the worse, as the rock climber get stuck in a snow storm
and the creative artist hits a writer’s block. Thus, the cost of higher good feelings
is the chance you take that a turn of fortune will turn those good feelings bad.
Generally, as demand increases risk increases, and at first we can handle it and
be pleasantly surprised by and are motivated by the continuous moment to
moment surprise of our success. But as demand ratchets up we are more likely
to experience failure, and another type of arousal, that of anxiety. Hence as
demand goes up, so do performance and arousal until performance reaches a
crest and arousal begins to change not in amplitude but begins changing in
kind. So, the Yerkes Dodson bell curve survives, it is rather the idea that arousal
does not change in kind across the level of performance that falls away.
80
The lesson we learn from all this is that the highest motivation or performance
stands at the cusp of failure, as we are rarely motivated by the sure and thus
boring thing. Unfortunately, what psychologists take from the Yerkes-Dodson
curve is the wrong lesson entirely, that arousal is a monolithic and indivisible
thing that does not categorically change as demand increases. In other words,
the lesson that no pain equals no gain is wrong. Rather, if you have pain you
will likely have no gain. For folks that are a bit wary of the school of hard knocks,
this is perhaps a lesson one can get a bit excited about.
_______________________________________________________________
To begin defining your terms, you must first define what you are
measuring, and we will start with the dependent measure of arousal. We
will notice first that there are multiple ways you can be aroused. Indeed,
the Yerkes-Dodson performance curve is dotted with emotional
transformations from boredom and interest to anxiety and bliss. These
demonstrate that for arousal, there are many distinctive emotional
correlates, and the problem seems complex and near intractable. After
81
all, our emotions are incredibly diverse, or least that is what the
innumerable metaphors for emotion would hold. Yet observation
provides a different perspective that our emotions are not as
idiosyncratic as they seem, and represent mainly the permutations of
simple and elementary processes. For the processes that underlie
arousal, namely the neurological and autonomic (i.e., neuro-muscular)
response to information, our argument so far has followed along these
lines. However, this position is not original, and was proposed more
than a hundred years ago.
processes that comprise emotions that we argue are based upon the
mundane events that comprise daily experience.
_______________________________________________________________
As defined:
response. Thus, tension will be less for low-utility choices than high. As
these contingencies diverge in value, we make rational decisions to
choose one of the alternatives and progressively less tension will occur.
Thus, the choice between two conflicting low value alternatives (e.g.
what dessert to order in a restaurant) will result in lower tension than a
choice between two conflicting high value alternatives (e.g. what
medical procedure to choose to treat a life-threatening condition). In
addition, less tension will occur when more information is available that
leads to one choice becoming more logically compelling.
The increase in dopaminergic activity due to moment-to-moment
discrepancy adds another variable that increases not only the incentive
salience of moment to moment responding, but also alertness (i.e.,
sensorimotor activation) and affective tone (i.e., a good or bad feeling).
Dopamine induced activation also scales monotonically with the
qualitative or informative aspects of discrepancy.77 For example, tasks
that entail moment to moment positive discrepancy (e.g. creative
behavior, sporting activities, surfing the web, etc.) under circumstances
wherein the incentive salience of alternative responses is relatively low
will correlate with feelings of alertness/activation or attentive arousal and
low or non-existent tension (or low degree of discomfort or a pleasant
feeling). Tasks that entail a moment-to-moment positive discrepancy
wherein the incentive salience of alternative responses is relatively high
will correlate with feelings of arousal and high and/or constant tension
(or high discomfort or pain). These feelings will also increase as the
utility of a response increases, or in other words, we become more alert
as the ’stakes’ increase, and less alert as they decrease. As the incentive
salience of alternative responses increases to match the increasing
salience of a primary response, the level of tension and corresponding
autonomic activation will increase as well and result in a state of anxiety.
Correspondingly, if the salience of a response increases as the salience of
an alternative response decreases, tension will fall and activation will
increase, resulting in a state of elation or ecstasy due to the combined
86
and may also become depressed when she recognizes that her lack of
activation forestalls her obtaining her long-term goals. Taking a time out
from her duties by sitting quietly and barring distractive thoughts will
result in relaxation (4). If she is completing a project to meet a deadline
“just in time‟, then she will feel pleasantly alert (5). If she falls behind her
task and/or is distracted by other pressing matters and thus perceives
alternative irreconcilable choices or dilemmas, she will feel anxious (6).
(6)
Anxiety elation
(5)
(2) (1)
(4)
boredom relaxation
(3)
What this means is that for any one-performance set, skill is not a
variable, but a constant. That is, one cannot adjust skill against demand
during performance because skill can only change negligibly during
performance, or in other words does not move. Thus, for performance
that requires any skill set, the only variable that can be manipulated is
demand.21 For moment-to-moment behavior the adjustable variable that
elicits flow is demand and demand alone. But that leaves us with
figuring out what demand exactly is.
A demand may be defined as simple response-outcome contingency.
Thus, if you do X, Y will occur or not occur. It is thus inferred that
demand entails a fully predictable means-end relationship or
expectancy. But the inference that the act-outcome expectancy is always
fully predictable is not true. Although a response-outcome is fully
predictable when skill overmatches demand, as demand rises to match
and surpass skill, uncertainty in the prediction of a performance outcome
also rises. At first, the uncertainty is positive, and reaches its highest level
when a skill matches the level of demand. This represents a ‘touch and
go’ experience wherein every move most likely will result in a positive
outcome in a calm or non-stressed state. It is here that many individuals
report euphoric flow like states. Passing that, the moment-to-moment
uncertainty of a bad outcome increases, along with a corresponding rise
in tension and anxiety.
Momentary positive uncertainty as a logical function of the moment-to-
moment variance occurring when demand matches skill does not
21
Although in general skill or ability remains constant within performances,
occasionally skill can be perceived to vary within a performance due to
physiological or cognitive variables that are independent of demand. This
does not change however the fact that one can only counter this by adjusting
demand, as skill or ability is NOT a property that can be manipulated in the
moment. For example, a rock climber may re-consider the level of her skill
because of her moment-to-moment physical health or reduced confidence in
her ability due to a near fall. In these occasions the climber would adjust
demand by taking more time before each move or moving to a less difficult
ledge.
93
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