Week 6: Meditation, Skill Building and Parallel Processing

My junior year of college is when I started meditating. Growing up I was always someone who had way too much energy.I had trouble sitting still in class. In second grade my teacher would let me get up and walk around the classroom because it helped me stay focused. During the weekends my parents knew they had to take me outside and run me around if I was going to fall asleep at night.I was attracted to meditation as an opportunity to calm myself down a little bit. That tendency with my physical energy could also apply to my mental state and I would have trouble calming my mind down. Since starting meditation in 2017, it has helped me out a lot and I have received a bunch of benefits from it.

My practice has mostly been daily 10 - 20 minute sits, but recently Jenny and I decided to try a meditation retreat that involved some more intensive practice. On our three day retreat, which is still quite short by meditation retreat standards, I spent some time thinking about how the duration of a practice changes the experience. The retreat is a much longer period of time than my normal daily sits. Why are longer sits and a whole day of practice so different from my daily practice?

My experience was that the difference can not be explained simply by the fact that the retreat is longer and therefore I was sitting for more time. I felt that the first ten minutes of a 30 minute sit were different from the first 10 minutes of my ten minute sits. A 30 minute sit at the beginning of the retreat also felt quite different from a 30 minute sit in the middle of my work day. One 30 minute sessions seems to impact me differently than three ten minute practice. I started reflecting how each of these experiences might feel different because I am impacted by what happened before and what I am anticipating to come after the sit.

Thinking deeply about this time aspect of meditation made me realize how similar meditation can be to other tasks. It is harder to meditate for a longer period of time because I am doing a task that takes energy. Most tasks become harder the longer I am working on them. Meditation is no different. It is more difficult to sit for 30 minutes than for 10 because I am using up the energy that I have. Focusing my attention on my breath is a difficult task because it is so different than what I do normally. Meditating, similar to a lot of other tasks requires energy to be completed.

While I did not identify this model of energy usage with meditation, it is a model that is quite intuitive with other tasks. At the end of a day we need to rest because we have depleted our energy during the day. We cannot exert our bodies physically indefinitely. I can run for a certain amount of time but as I use up my energy it becomes harder and harder to keep running. My body needs to take a break to rest and recover. This model is more intuitive with physical exertion, but we also know it applies with mental tasks as well. The longer I am at work, the more drained I become.

For these tasks that require energy to be spent, we have learned that you can get better at them through practice. If I want to become a better runner I have to run regularly. Overtime as I run my body adapts to become better at running. I am able to both run for longer and at a quicker pace. Meditation actually also follows this trend. The more I meditate the easier it becomes to meditate. I am able to both meditate for longer and have higher quality meditations.

Meditation is a task similar too many others, that requires energy to be used and that we get better at the more that we practice. All of these other tasks though we think of as skills. Getting better at running is a skill. Playing an instrument is a skill. It is not immediately clear to me what the skill I am building is when I meditate. I meditate because of the benefits on the rest of my life. I am not meditating to get better at the act of meditation. One explanation could be that meditating is improving my ability to pay attention, but I find that meditation is about a lot more than just focus. There are meditations that are not about focus but instead are about showing gratitude or being loving. As I mentioned my prime motivation for meditating was not focus but finding a place of calm.

I believe part of the reason I have trouble viewing meditation as a skill I am building is because it impacts characteristics of my personality that I do not normally think of as skills. When I talk with other people about their ability to pay attention, they talk about it as a fixed thing. That some people have short attention spans and others have longer ones. Some other personality traits are thought of as even more fixed than attention. We speak as though it is fixed that some people are kind and others are less kind. But maybe just like getting better at running, or playing an instrument, being kind or paying attention is actually a skill that we can cultivate.

So this leave me wondering, why do we think of some qualities as fixed personality traits, but we recognize other as skills that need to be worked on?

Skill building, getting better at a specific task, is a discipline that has been studied in depth. There are many different skills whether it is playing a sport, playing an instrument, cooking or baking, where a lot of resources have been developed about how to grow. From my own experience, the following model is helpful when I am thinking about how to build a skill.

• When I am first starting out, I am attempting to do something novel. This task is not something I have done before and it is quite difficult. I might not even be successful in accomplishing the task.
• As I do the task more and more, it becomes easier. Soon my body just starts doing the right thing without devoting as much conscious energy to it. My attention or cognitive load can be focused on something else because my body just does the task instinctively.
• Eventually this task becomes something I can do without even thinking about it. The completion of the task has been completely moved to my subconscious. No part of my cognitive energy is spent on accomplishing the task.

As we gain mastery over a skill it changes from something we spend a lot of cognitive energy on to something that happens almost completely in the subconscious. We know this to be the case with some of our most basic functions. We do not remember it, but at first walking and talking took a lot of cognitive energy. Eventually they moved to the subconscious. An example of something we might remember more clearly is learning to type. At first it took a lot of energy and focus. Now my hands just press the correct keys without thinking about it at all.

A possible explanation for why our bodies function in this way, moving tasks from the conscious load to the sub conscious load, is that our conscious load is fixed. We have a fixed amount of conscious attention. If I am spending my conscious energy on making my fingers press the correct keys, then I cannot focus on what I am trying to write. A helpful metaphor could be to think of our conscious energy a single linear process. Our sub conscious energy though can parallel process. While our conscious energy can only be devoted to one thing at a time, our bodies can do many things at the same time by utilizing our sub conscious. We actually do know that our bodies are doing many things all at the same time. We can hear things, feel things and be thinking all at the same time. Being able to move tasks out of our conscious energy and into the subconscious actually might be necessary for us to do a lot of the complex tasks that we do on a day to day basis. If we had to devote conscious energy to everything we do, it would be impossible for us to function.

Our experience is so dominated by what is happening in our conscious attention that it dominates our perception of self. In my experience, I am rarely consciously choosing feelings. Instead an event happens causing some feelings to appear in my conscious attention. Those feelings appear as some fixed part of me, not something that is malleable. But it is also possible that reacting to an event is a skill that has been moved to my subconscious. It would be quite energy intensive to be consciously deciding how I feel every single movement. The aspects of our selves that we think of as traits are the same as other skills, they just are mostly in our subconscious already.

If what we think of as traits are actually internalized skills, how we think about identity can actually be changed. We do not have these fixed aspects of our identity. There are aspects of our identity that have been internalized deeply into our subconscious. Changing them can be difficult because they are entrenched in the ways we process the world. In order to change them the trait or skill has to be brought out of the sub conscious and into the conscious. Once it is in the conscious then it can be worked with and adapted.

The focus of many meditations is to do exactly this, bring things that are normally in our subconscious into the conscious awareness. The most classic example of this is focusing on your breathing. Normally breathing is something that is not a part of our cognitive energy, but meditation asks us to put it there. There are other meditations that focus on hearing or touch sensations which are also often in the subconscious. Practicing with the breath can make it possible to do the same with feelings and thoughts. When a feeling or thought pops out of the subconscious into the conscious we learn that we do not need to become attached to it.

As I mentioned earlier, this act of moving things from the conscious to the subconscious is really important. It is what allows us to do many complex tasks and to build skills. But this also can have negative impacts. It means we can develop patterns or habits that we are not even aware of. If these habits are harmful then it can be really hard to change them and we might view them as fixed aspects of who we are.

The ideas in the section above are merely a theory based on my experiences with meditation and building skills. Our conscious experience is a linear processor and it only has a certain amount of capacity. To allow that capacity to be spent on solving novel problems in new situations, we move a lot of processing into the sub conscious. Moving tasks into the subconscious is what gives us the ability to do multiple things simultaneously or complex tasks.

Our most basic functions have been moved to the subconscious. The ability to breath, walk, talk and even think are all happening below our perception. They are so fundamental that it is helpful that we do not devote conscious energy to them.

This insight about movement between the conscious and the subconscious might be able to help me answer some of my questions related to meditation and time. What happens before a moment in time and what I anticipate to happen in the future impacts my experience of present moment. In reality, I can only focus on my breath for one moment. If I can only be present for a moment, what happened before that moment or what might happen after should not impact my ability be present. But processing every single moment in its entirety would be overwhelming for my single conscious processor. That means our experience of the present moment has to be simplified. Two brief theories for how we simplify our experience:

• One way to simplify the amount of processing we have to do is through time smoothing. We process things that are nearby in time in similar ways. We are generally not going to be happy immediately after being sad. It takes time for the way we are processing actions to change. This is why what we anticipate to happen impacts our experience of the present moment and what just happened impacts our experience.
• Another way we make it easier to process the present moment is by pattern matching it to other similar moments. We compare this moment to a history of moments. Our feelings are then determined based on the outcomes of previous moments that were similar. This is why our history can impact the way we respond in a lot of very strong ways.

It is really important that a lot of the processing our body does happens outside the realm of our conscious awareness. This allows our conscious awareness, our most valuable resource, to be used in the highest leverage way. Without this, it could be really difficult for us to handle novel situations or do complex tasks. But, the fact that so much of our processing happens at a level we are not aware of can also be detrimental. It means we use heuristics that are not always true. I find it really helpful to recognize that my subconscious processing is not a fixed trait of who I am, but rather something that can change. I have found meditation to be a really helpful tool for making me aware of my subconscious processing.

I recently finished reading the book Other Minds. The ideas in here are not directly taken from it, but it would be silly not to recognize that the content of the book has influenced these thoughts. I highly recommend it!

These thoughts are also inspired by conversations with Jenny about cognitive burden.