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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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Your reply is not even anecdotal evidence. It only tells me that you find it fitting to give this particular advice.
Is your example with curing hallucinations supposed to impart the idea that getting hallucinations is OK, since they can be cured or worked around anyway? That's bullshit.
No, it was intended to impart the idea that the primary difference between imagination and hallucination is whether you can tell the difference between the two. NLP latched on to this distinction from Erickson's example, and have since noted that skill in a wide variety of achievements (music, baseball, golf, interior design) rely on various forms of visual or auditory hallucination, and that these hallucinations are behaviorarlly indistinguishable from the hallucinations of crazy people. (Same eye movements/focal changes, same breathing/posture/ shifts, etc.)
The only difference they've been able to find is that the crazy people don't know when they're hallucinating, but they can be taught to do so.
IOW, distinguishing imagination from reality appears to be a learned skill, just like learning to imagine things on purpose.
Yes, very yes! Talking to oneself is considered to be a sign of madness in folk psychology, but in actuality everyone talks to themselves constantly and merely represses the exterior component of this discussion to an incomplete degree. (The nerves of the larynx still react, making it theoretically possible to 'read someone's mind' by examining the electrical activity of the throat.)
People who hear voices aren't fundamentally different from normal people, except that they attribute their own internal thoughts to other entities instead of perceiving them to be self-generated. There's actually very little reason to think that the auditory system of such people acts differently.
Uncontrollable imagination that you can tell from reality but can't get rid of isn't fun either. I'm pretty confident it's called 'hallucination' too, although we'd need to look that up in a diagnostic manual to resolve the question of definition.
True. Sometimes I find it annoying when a song gets stuck in my head. I usually just replace it with a song I like better, though.
Still, it would be nice to be able to learn how to suppress auditory information like that... which sounds like something you learned to do. Any pointers?
This came up awhile ago; actually, we went back and forth a few times about it, here. That discussion looks like a clear case of the typical mind fallacy, on both our parts, but there may still be something of value there.
I'm not very susceptible to this. On the rare occasions when it happens, a session of thinking about something with total concentration consistently does the trick. The routine of concentrating on one question or another during the day is possibly the reason this problem got away since childhood, but I won't count on that explanation. The statistics on what portion of people gets that effect, how often it goes away, and how often if goes away for e.g. mathematicians will be more informative as a start.
So, when you say "thinking about something with total concentration", how does that work, exactly? Do you consider "thinking" to be visualizing, talking to yourself, what?
I guess it's the same for everyone, the state where you are so inside a puzzle that the rest of the world gets pushed to the background. Visual imagination is a primary working tool, but that's form, not the causal structure of what gets represented by it, which is the thing that ought to be universal, a level below the obvious levers, even if implemented on the same substrate.
Okay, I guess now it's my turn to have no idea WTF you are talking about. ;-)
Reading between the lines, it sort of sounds like you're talking about visual imagery that's associated, up close, or both, where you "push the rest of the world to the background". In NLP, that'd be a change in the "distance" submodality... which it occurs to me I've never tried. I've played with changing the volume of the song, but not the position of it. I'll have to remember that one.
Whether that actually relates in any way to what you just said, I don't know, but it's interesting anyway. ;-)
Nothing about position, I used 'background' as a metaphor for something not being attended to. For example, if I indulge myself with thinking too seriously while commuting to work, I'm more likely to make a cached turn along the way that happens to be contextually incorrect, or to miss my station, or to run into someone.
I understand that; the question was how you made that distinction. Taking your language literally, you said you "pushed" those things to the background. One observation of NLP is that quite often (though not always), people describe their mental processing quite literally, even though their language is "metaphorical".
NLP also observes that if you take those descriptions literally and then perform the same "metaphorical" steps in your own mind, you can often more-or-less reproduce the subjective experience of the other person.
So when I read what you said, I realized that there are times when I more or less literally "push things to the background", but that I had never done so with a song in my head. So it seems worth trying, whether it actually has anything to do with how you push things to the background.