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Well this had more upvotes than I was expecting.
Tracking emotions with kinesthetic memory
I've been trying to manage my negative thoughts and I've stumbled on an interesting technique. In order to increase my mindfulness of my ruminations and my thoughts. I started making a check mark on a piece of paper when I had specific thought. I didn't feel like I had the emotional strength to battle every thought, but at least making a little checkmark was easy. Then, deciding I wanted to do this anywhere, I started instead making a quick checkmark gesture with my pointer finger.
The results have been interesting. One effect is I can now more easily sense the heartbeat of my mood. Usually, I could tell how I was feeling at any one time, but I never noticed the flow of things. But with gestural movement, I can remember how often I've been doing it. I can also see if I'm doing it every few minutes or every few seconds.
There's another result that's very interesting and offsetting. Sometimes, the movements are semiautomatic. This fits in with a modular theory of the brain, I think. So, I'll have a fleeting negative thought, reflexively make the gesture, and go "Oh, I just had a negative thought, I didn't notice that. Maybe I should do something." It feels a little strange from the inside.
So, just something that was interesting to me. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or interesting information.
INTP, yes. I think-- been a while since I took one of those tests, the P might be iffy. The rest doesn't match, although there is mental illness in the family tree-- just not that close to me. Unless you count religion, anyway.
Ok, just curious. One friend of mine is very similar in many regards and those were three of the biggest parallels in our lives. Technically he was INTJ, iffy on the J too.
Additionally, you would have been freaking out if all 3 had matched.
As a teenager I trained myself to recognize specific small details that reliably distinguish between otherwise similar-looking expressions; tightened muscles, gaze direction, shoulder height and angle, things like that.
Could you do a discussion post on this? It would really help me.
I frequently experience emotions as physical sensations. I can even physically locate them in my body sometimes. For example, I feel tend to feel sadness and sleepiness in my eyes and anger in my forehead.
I get this too, and in fact have long speculated it to be the way that most people probably experience emotions. For example, I feel fear as a ripple through my chest with two distinct parameters. The larger the waves and the more they travel outward from the epicenter, the greater the perceived danger. And the further to the right or left of my chest the center of the splash, the more likely the alleged danger is coming from that side.
I have introspected plenty more where that came from, and have gotten confirmation from plenty of different people that their subjective experience of emotions is similar. This isn't common knowledge, but I assume that's only because of the difficulty of introspecting such fundamental mental facts. Most people have had this sort of mental phenomena on auto-ignore since they were in their single digits, so it's usually quite hard to dig up.
There must be a subjective experience constituting each emotion (or they wouldn't exist), and it generally seems to be a combination between (1) a comfortable or uncomfortable bodily sensation and (2) various other things that would take a while to explain.
In the Netherlands it's apparently quite rare too.
It looks like I have to take back what I said. I was watching Moulin Rouge and a friend covered her eyes. It was the elephant room scene.
Your first three paragraphs describe me to a bizarrely high degree of accuracy.
Do the the dimples on the side of your face approximate the big dipper? We are a part of a cloning project run secretly by the government in the late 80's.
More seriously, are you an INTP? Does one of your parents have a severe mental illness? Is the other an electric engineer?
Finnish actually has a word for this feeling - myötähäpeä (a literal translation would be something like "co-shame" or "shared shame"). Me and some people I know have occasionally wondered if Americans generally experience it less, because American TV shows seem to have a tendency to produce enough myötähäpeä to make them unwatchable more frequently than shows from other countries do.
I can say, as an American, I've never met another person who had to cover their ears or eyes during a show because of this sensation.
I also had an uncomfortably strong level of empathy specifically towards people doing something that would make me uncomfortable, in a social sense. When I watched someone talking and embarrassing themselves in class for example, it felt like my insides were trying to escape my skin.
This actually went away after watching all of the seasons of The Office (the American version).
However, I'm pretty sure I feel an abnormally low amount of empathy for other emotional states in other people (both positive and negative, this was unaffected by watching The Office)
Have you found any negative consequences from this exposure therapy?
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So the key idea is that of "Hilbert space," which is a way to describe the universe named after a guy called Hilbert.
So for example if I flip a fair quantum coin, it's 0.5 heads and 0.5 tails. "Heads" and "tails" here are actually dimensions, like x and y, in Hilbert space, and the universe is at the point (0.5, 0.5). If the coin wasn't fair, then the universe could be at the point (0.6, 0.4) or even (0.999, 0.001). The number of dimensions didn't change, because there's still just heads and tails, but the point that represents our universe changed.
When you look at the coin, the universe collapses to two possible points: (0,1) and (1,0). The coin is either heads or tails. This corresponds to two "worlds." It doesn't matter whether, previously, your description was fair or not - the coin is still either heads or tails, so there are two worlds. Though I suppose if your previous description was (1,0) - definitely heads - you wouldn't assign any probability to it being tails, so there would only one "world".
Of course, it can get much more complicated. If you roll a quantum d20 instead of flipping a coin, you have to assign a point with 20 coordinates: (0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05, 0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05, 0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05,0.05). And if you throw a dart at a continuous dartboard, you have to assign a value to an infinite number of points! But don't worry - that's just the same as a function, like x^2 or sin(x). But if you throw a dart at a dartboard, does that mean you just split off an infinite number of worlds? If you flip a coin, and then throw the dart, is that 2*infinity = infinity?
So basically, when there are lots of possible outcomes the idea of "worlds" becomes not so useful.
Congratulations, you just earned yourself one "click." I've never really gotten quantum physics, not that I've tried much. But your description as a Hilbert space makes a lot of sense to me. It also helps me understand why "decomposing the wavefunction" is important or even necessary as a concept.