06 Sep 2024

PING

Yesterday I talked to a friend who works in a high pressure environment and is currently struggling with burnout/depression, which I wasn’t aware of. Something about the way she wrote was noticeably different. Noticeable not in a rational sense, but by the feeling the written words left in my body. Unusually distant and reduced, compared to how I normally feel after reading her messages.
I told her that, and asked if everything was ok. She told me about her struggle, but couldn’t understand how I was able to notice something was up, based on two short pieces of text. I told her that all I did was to notice how my body felt while I was reading her messages. A scientific discussion ensued.


There are efforts to establish the concept of so-called ‘neurological bits’ – as an expression of how many units of sensory or cognitive ‘bits’ of data the conscious mind can process per second vs the subconscious. The concept is somewhat debated, as it isn’t trivial to clearly define what a neurological bit is.
But the general consensus seems to be, that a rough comparative order of magnitude can be derived here- most commonly presented in numbers of about 40 bits for the conscious mind, and 11 million to 400 billion bits in the subconscious.
Meaning, every time we become aware of a (change in) feeling in our body, this feeling is, based on the hypothesis, on the order of magnitude of hundreds of thousands, to billions of data points richer than the thin bandwidth of words, that our conscious mind can churn through in narrative processing.

Take it with a grain of salt, but I don’t recall ever regretting informing my opinion based on noticeable shifts in the felt presence of immediate experience in my body, and using narrative processing as a supplemental input on top of the emotional response.
Meanwhile, when people are asked wether they remember suppressing an intuition or ‘gut feeling’, and later regretted it, most people will say yes, empirically (citation needed).

The only way to train this capacity that I am aware of are mindfulness excercises, my favorite approach into it is called MBSR or ‘Mindfulness based Stress reduction”[1]

Additionally, Saul, there is a non-trivial body of research into the neural processing of the heart within corresponding tissues found there. Who knows, the little bugger may end up explaining itself- with itself [0].
Have you asked it?

[0] My good friend perplexity was so kind to summarize the current state of research here:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-summarize-the-current-s-_3VPpcIgT_WOkhE.srmk1g

[1] This is the way I found into this kind of practice, given my western upbringing and the plight of reductionist materialist thinking, I needed a ‘scientified’ (‘scientificated’?), despiritualized approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TeWvf-nfpA&t=18m08s (Base conception – Jon Kabat Zinn)
https://youtu.be/5TeWvf-nfpA?t=36m42s (MBSR in depression – Jon Kabat Zinn)

(Practice – Jon Kabat Zinn)