This is useful to me as I'll be attending the March workshop. If I successfully digest any of the insights presented here then I'll have a better platform to start from. (Two particular points are the stuff about the parasympathetic nervous system, which I'd basically never heard of before, and the connection between the concepts of "epistemic rationality" and "knowing about myself" which is more obvious-in-retrospect).

Thanks for the write-up!

And yes, I'll stick up at least a brief write-up of my own after I'm done. Does LW have an anti-publication-bias registry somewhere?

I was waiting for Val to answer this, but I'll give it a shot. The relevant CFAR unit is called "againstness." You can think of sympathetic dominance as related to (being?) a sensation of "againstness," e.g. when you get angry during a heated argument your feelings are directed against the person you're arguing with. Val gave us both mental and physical techniques for releasing againstness ("fighting againstness" is kind of againsty). The mental techniques (which I'm just going to quote verbatim from the worksheet; hopefully Val won't mind):

• Gratitude: appreciate the opportunity to practice releasing againstness in adverse situations. (Also, appreciate the pleasure of PNS activation to help stabilize it.)
• When againstness is related to others:
  • Empathy: model the other person in enough detail to appreciate likely reasons why what they're doing is, to them, the most sensible thing they could be doing in that moment.
  • Connection: intentionally increase your sense of tribal togetherness; see the other person as a fellow human being and wish to help them realize their full potential.

That might sound a little woo but the above is intended to be a description of specific mental algorithms that you can actually run. The physical techniques:

• Open your posture. Shoulders back, spine straight & upright, head balanced on spine, belly exposed.
• Breathe. Deeply, smoothly, gently, and low - without pushing it low or sucking air in.
• Relax. Especially the hands, arms, shoulders, and eyes. (Smiling sometimes helps!)

I've found gratitude together with the physical techniques to be reasonably effective and have used them several times since the workshop already. I have not extensively tried using empathy or connection.

As for tests, one of the reasons it was valuable to learn this material at the workshop is that Val is very good at spotting the physical indicators of sympathetic dominance. Accordingly, the againstness unit had a practical component where Val or one of the other instructors would stress out participants in various ways in order for them to practice using the techniques above, and Val would diagnose to what extent the techniques were working. So testing yourself doesn't sound easy to me. If you just want some tips for noticing when your SNS is dominant, try looking for the following:

• hunched shoulders
• rubbing the neck
• positioning arms to protect the belly
• tensed muscles

Unfortunately I don't think it's easy to notice that you're doing these things.

Each of the CFAR worksheets also included a list of further resources. For the againstness unit, the further resources were the Wikipedia articles and two papers:

Fredrickson, B.L., Mancuso, R.A., Branigan, C., & Tugade, M.M. (2000). The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion. 24, 237-258. http://goo.gl/AP920

Heinrichs M., von Dawans B., and Domes G. (2009). Oxytocin, vasopressin, and human social behavior. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 30, 548-557. http://goo.gl/kGaz6

CFAR folk, please consider/research NYC as a location.

Logistics might be different of course, but there is a lot of people here who wouldn't have to travel or need sleeping arrangements, lowering the total time+money cost for them without taking away CFAR revenue (since they are not a hotel/travel agency).

Also, these workshops are entrepreneur-oriented and there is an active and geographically concentrated start-up scene here, in which I'm somewhat active and would be happy to help with promotion and maybe some of the logistics.

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Do you have a blog or summat?

The statement as he made it is correct, you are not correcting it but making a narrower, also correct, version of his statement.

(I think I need to gzip that sentence.)

I agree that they should uphold strict standards for numerous reasons. That doesn't prevent CFAR from discussing potential benefits (and side effects) of different drugs (caffeine, aspirin, modafinil, etc.). They could also recommend discussing such things with a person's doctor as well as what criteria are used to prescribe such drugs (they might already for all I know).

I'm glad to hear it is working well and is well received!

Once there has been some experience running these workshops I really hope there is something that CFAR can design for meetup groups to try / implement and/or an online version.

Is there a CFAR webpage that covers this particular workshop and how it went?

Thank you for writing up your thoughts, Qiaochu!

I feel the need to offer one very minor correction:

For example, sympathetic nervous system activity, which governs the fight-or-flight response, is unpleasant, unhealthy, and can prevent you from explicitly modeling other people.

It's actually sympathetic dominance over the parasympathetic side that does this. Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are running all the time, and that's really quite essential. You cannot stand up without the sympathetic system, for instance, nor can you lie down without going into a panic without the parasympathetic side doing its job.

But as long as you replace "activity" with "dominance," I think we're good!

Mathematicians' claims may too be explained by selective memory effects mentioned by fubarobfusco in the first comment in this thread. The question is how to discriminate between the case when the mathematicians' testimonies are reflecting an existing phenomenon and the case when they result from a bias. Even if the insights were less likely to materialise after stepping away, there would be plenty of cases of this happening, so the fact that virtually every mathematician can remember few of them wouldn't be surprising.

The phenomenon definitely happens. There's no question that insights pop into mind out of context for at least some rather large chunk of the population. Ask just about any math professor or graduate student: I'm willing to give 85% odds that they'll indicate that key insights to problems they had been working on have occurred to them more than once during times when they weren't thinking about the problems in question.

The question was whether the insight is more likely to pop into mind when stepping away from the problem.