I am going to ask myself a question for when my creative mood hits me again.
I am a student that has a summer internship working from 9 to 5. I come home tiered. It feels really hard to take action. What is the best thing that I can do to plan on making my escape so that I do not have to put up with this situation in the future? What are some steps that I can take? What would be the most effective way to do this? How can I escape the system?
The reason that I want to do this is so that I have as much time as possible that I can be creative to the purposes that I want to pursue. Absolutely huge purposes... change the world... ect.ect... While I was in HK I absolutely loved being able to think about one thing for hours on end without restriction.
If I did happen to figure out how to make a uniquely "intelligent" machine, then I would not want the company to claim it.
My internship is great. Its with an awesome company. Though I don't know if I can trust the leaders of the company. Not that they are evil or anything. But they might not know the best route.
7/22/04
reading "4 hour work week"
When I come home, during the weekdays, since I am living single, I will not stop moving. This is for the physical effect of avoiding depression. When I need to think about something, I will just print it off, take a walk with it outside.
The thoughts that I have while walking are not wasted because my subconcious still has the connections/knowlege/associations/invariant representations still in my mind, and so that I just have to remind myself latter of the knowlege that I have generated in myself by looking a reminders like this thread and my journal.
Just google "Social Isolation". The first result is how the people in the US are getting more socially isolated, and the second result says how "Social Isolation kills".
When I need to think about things for longer periods of time, I will go to a public place that has an internet, so to avoid social isolation. I've found that there is no resistance when I am around other people.
Here is a stunning article that proves that you have to be around people and if you are not, then it gets to be stressful.
Quote:
Nature Neuroscience 9, 526 - 533 (2006) Published online: 12 March 2006; doi:10.1038/nn1668
Social isolation delays the positive effects of running on adult neurogenesis
Alexis M Stranahan, David Khalil & Elizabeth Gould
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08544.Correspondence should be addressed to Elizabeth Gould goulde at princeton dot edu
Social isolation can exacerbate the negative consequences of stress and increase the risk of developing psychopathology. However, the influence of living alone on experiences generally considered to be beneficial to the brain, such as physical exercise, remains unknown. We report here that individual housing precludes the positive influence of short-term running on adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus of rats and, in the presence of additional stress, suppresses the generation of new neurons. Individual housing also influenced corticosterone levels—runners in both housing conditions had elevated corticosterone during the active phase, but individually housed runners had higher levels of this hormone in response to stress. Moreover, lowering corticosterone levels converted the influence of short-term running on neurogenesis in individually housed rats from negative to positive. These results suggest that, in the absence of social interaction, a normally beneficial experience can exert a potentially deleterious influence on the brain.
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Here's my rule:
If my social tank is empty,[like when I come home directly from work (I work with people but it seems that my social tank is used up immediatly because I'm always thinking intently, and my conciousness is not focused very well on the people)] then I don't stop moving if I am indoors and I walk outside and think about things.
If I've been around people for like 9 hours, then the next day, (say its the weekend), I can be in isolation safely thinking/being creative about things for 9 hours. After that, it feels like I'm taking a dip into hell.
Even if my "social tank" is full/not empty (I think, I sill need to test this some more) if I am learning really hard and dense and new concepts, then I have to close my eyes and let my left mind go silent and let my right brain think, and do meditation, like I said in my "How to not be a headless chicken" article, so that the new information is somehow(not sure of how it does this) integrated into my mind, and then it is ready to accept new information.
Also, another thing that I need to think about. It seemed to mention that exercising reduced the effects of social isolation. It said "diminish the effects" but I don't think that it would reduce it all the way. Therefore I need to test this out.
I was just out walking for about an hour and I can feel the isolation starting to kick in. Yesterday I was at a social gathering (BBQ) from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM. I don't remember the exact times. Today I woke up around 10:00 am and its now 5:00PM and I am starting to feel the familiar feeling of isolation. I'm going to try and go for a walk for about an hour and then observe the feeling inside of me when I return. It might be the case that it just delays the sinking feeling, by getting exercise, but that it does not actually add anything to my "social tank".
7/24/07
It seems to be the case that just walking around keeps me from being depressed. And its basically additive.
Its a combination of several factors:
Exercise, left/right brain synchronization, a huge part of our brains (30% I've read) are used for visual processing.
It would make sense to me that being around people is so effective because a huge part of our brains are used in reading each other's social cues. You've got visual aspect, and its quite a challenging thing to try and predict each other's motivations and things like that.
But If it is very inconvenient for me to be around people, then just getting out and walking (seeing the visual world moving [instead of still pictures]) is effective enough to stimulate my brain. I is also a form of meditation because I can just gaze off into nowhere and just let my mind wander. Which is quite effective itself.