Without reading any other comments or rot13?

Once upon a time, Age-12-Ishaan realized that the universe was either deterministic or random, that minds were made of matter, and that this had weird implications for naive free will. The process of trying to wrap my head around this fact inspired the following game:

Step 1: Think of something random. As random as possible. Clown!

Step 2: In as much detail as possible, How did you think of that thought? (For me, "random" associates with "pig" because the first time I played this game I thought of "pig". the "ig" consonant is similar to the "ick" consonant, which Clown starts with.) Trace back the line as far back and completely as possible

I used to play this game regularly. The motivation was primarily the whole "free will" problem. If every thought could be traced to a previous thought, then my mind must work deterministically. And that was weird! After a while, I started doing it for normal thoughts, even when I wasn't playing. Subjectively, I feel like it made me build up a sort of meta-cognitive hyper-awareness which sticks to this day.

This game caused me to intuitively crack the "free will" issue. I was lying in bed late at night, tracing rapidly moving thought chains carefully. I was doing really well at the game - usually quite a few thoughts are untraceable, but on that day I was successfully tracking an unusual number of them. All of a sudden, it just became intuitively obvious that my brain operated by cause and effect, just like clockwork and rocks and waterfalls and the entire universe. The realization hit me all of a sudden. The conceptual boundaries between myself and the rest of the universe suddenly dissolved, and I started to cry.

I'd say that of all my introspective experiences, this one ranks the highest. It was the first and only time that a philosophical notion made me cry. Now of course the whole idea seems rather obvious and not worthy of strong emotions, but back then it was a huge realization.

It's a technique which is practically useful - whenever I think a thought, I can trace back why I thought it. For example, I can usually articulate exactly why I'm upset without much difficulty as long as I do the exercise soon after becoming upset.

Take this next with skepticism, but I suspect it might also be somewhat useful for distinguishing false memories from true ones. It's almost impossible, for me at least, to trace back farther than 30 seconds so I can't access the memory itself this way...but I think I can sometimes catch the moment that the memory is modified by an unrelated association. It seems like the act of trying to remember can sometimes alter a memory...and if I trace back I sometimes realize that the thing which has inserted itself into my memory was actually a thought which occurred during the process of trying to remember.

An anecdote: After a road trip, my father and I couldn't find a suitcase. We both remembered carrying it down the stairs and putting it on the driveway, but neither of us remembered putting it in the car. We concluded that we must have left it in the driveway. I used the technique, and realized that the memory of carrying the suitcase downstairs and to the driveway was in fact implanted because when my father suggested that I had carried the suitcase down the stairs, I had visualized doing so in order to see if it triggered any familiarity-match. The first time I visualized this, there was no familiarity match, but the second time I visualized it there was a familiarity match to the previous visualization, and I had interpreted the familiarity-match as a faithful memory. I told my father that it was probably a false memory, and sure enough it turned out that the suitcase had never left the apartment.

I'm not confident that this false-memory-discovery effect isn't false attribution on my part, but I would definitely say this thing which began as a child's game seems to have shaped who I am in a positive way. It allowed me to intuitively overcome mind-matter dualism, and probably also made me more emotionally and intellectually self aware.