Pleasure and the present moment

Intense athletic training often causes the athlete to focus intensely on the present moment in a way that distorts the overall perception of time. (This is sometimes called the flow state.) Many meditation practices also get you to focus on the present moment, as does smoking dope. In cognitive science terms, you can characterize this focus as a constriction of the window of short term memory. (This at least describes the experience of smoking dope, which can create such a narrow window of short term memory that it cannot hold a longish sentence The beginning of the sentence drops out of your mind by the time you get to the end, and you forget what you are saying.)

All of these states are considered pleasant. But is it intrinsically pleasant to have your window of short term memory constricted? If there were drug that only constricted your window of short term memory, and did not have other euphoria-inducing agents, would the drug still be fun?

"about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment"

This interview (found via this salon article) makes some very good points. This is the quote people are talking about:

Therapists pretty much agree that there are three main causes of eating disorders, and most of us who get them have a combination of the three. One is your genetics. Second is your physiology, like the biology of your actual brain—your personality. Some people are incredibly resilient and slough off difficult messages; other people are not. In my book I call them Velcro; things stick to them. I’m Velcro. The third thing is environment. Environment is broken into two parts: the environment of your home, what your mom and dad said to you, the behaviors they modeled. The other part of environment is culture. So about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment, like the pictures we’re shown. That’s what I mean when I say skinny models don’t cause eating disorders. I just think that’s completely oversimplified and kind of ridiculous. If we magically were able to suddenly change the images we see in order to be diverse in all ways, gradually that part of the pressure would relieve itself. But it wouldn’t relieve that need of a girl to control her food intake because she can’t control her life.

A lot of this must be oversimplifying. Genetics and physiology are intertwined, so any attempt to separate them as causes must be a little arbitrary. She also exaggerates her own position when she jumps from "about one-sixth of eating disorders can be blamed on cultural environment" to "I say skinny models don’t cause eating disorders."

Still, I think there is something basically right here. It jibes also with the stories reported in conjunction with the trend of exporting the American style of mental illness. (See also here.) People in Hong Kong used to develop a form of anorexia different than the American model. They refused to eat, but not because they thought they were fat. However as more American culture got picked up in the Chinese speaking world, the way people talked about the illness changed. It became something about women wanting to look thin when it wasn't before.

The fact that a style of mental illness can be based in a culture and then exported is fascinating in itself. But what is also interesting is that we can talk about anorexia separately from its current cultural connotations. Even minus the skinny models, people can develop pathological desire not to eat.

one of the things that are wrong with me.

I've been reading in this book about the hypothesized existence of a "reorientation module." Googling the phrase leads quickly to this article which suggests a genetic component to such a module. Now I get lost really easily, and so did my maternal grandmother. There is also a distinct pattern to the way get lost that seems to go beyond simple inattention to my surroundings.* One problem comes when I go into an area that is psychologically closed off from a larger area--for instance if I am walking along a row of shops, and then enter one of them, or if I am walking along a corridor and enter a room--upon returning to the larger space, I am completely disoriented and unable to identify the direction I was originally traveling.

I don't know if that quite relates to the skills tested in material I'm reading. They mostly look at tasks where people and animal have to find an object hidden in a rectangular room, where you have to remember that the object is in a corner that has the short wall on the right and the long wall on the left. Its interesting stuff. there is evidence of modularity for this kind of task: people who can do it are unable to explain how they did it, the skill is only sensitive to certain kinds of environmental input, etc.


*Although inattention to my surroundings is clearly a factor, too. A few months ago I became lost while traveling from my work to home because I was completely distracted by this Philosophy Bites podcast.