Berserk in the Brain- An Addendum to Part 2 of Zen vs Berserker

I’ve never advocated brutality in the absence of erudition, so I thought I’d add to the berserker article with an extra intellectual bit. In Putting on the Wolf Skin, Skallagrimsson has a little bonus for everyone- the use of madspace for intellectual pursuits. “Yogis have for centuries developed techniques of rapid learning involving what are called ‘experiential realms,’ wherein yogis induce visions or hallucinations that help them learn faster than is normally possible” (Skallagrimsson 110-111). Likewise, many of the great thinkers throughout history from Tesla to Sagan to Einstein to Descartes experienced something Skallagrimsson refers to as a visionary state, which seems to resemble the experiential realm of yogis. He posits that when either the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system is stressed to the point that it cannot handle the stimulus it is being fed, both systems engage fully to handle the computational load. This causes what Buddhist monks and Fransciscan nuns claim when they said they felt the presence of god, which was a state of enlightenment accompanied by visions- the eureka moment.

“It causes the eureka moment because the unitary state is what drives the full conversion experience. It is a build-up of stress that overloads the brain enough to trigger the unitary state, which causes the person experiencing it to lose their sense of self and become completely absorbed into whatever is on their mind. The psyche tries to heal itself of the enormous strain it is under by breaking down and rebuilding itself along lines that more easily handle whatever it is that caused the stress” (Skallagrimsson 113).

“Because the mind is unified and both halves of the nervous system are operating the problem is attacked with a force usually inaccessible in the normal conscious mind. Every subconscious resource, memory, and insight is used. And because solving that problem in the unitary state represents the ultimate union of the left and right brain; shadow and will; id, ego, and superego it feels like the ultimate truth, divine revelation. It is a moment of ultimate synthesis of the mind driving it to work like never before” (Ibid).

Author Steven Kotler has a very similar take and refers to madspace as “flow.” He quotes Steve Jobs on the subject, suggesting that “Creativity is just connecting things,” and Kotler explains that pattern detection is something our brains crave (Kotler 144). When we identify a pattern, our brain rewards us with a dump of dopamine, which explains the popularity of those ridiculous time wasters like Candy Crush- we’re satisfying an atavistic need to identify patterns in our lives. The need to identify patterns and pick out those things that shouldn’t be in one’s surroundings is a highly prized survival trait, and one that no longer gets any exercise in a world so safe and banal that people think that Five Finger Death Punch is “death metal.”

The feeling of excitement and satisfaction we experience when we identify a pattern increases the motivation to continue, and that in turn improves concentration and speeds our entrance into madspace. Echoing Skallagrimsson’s statement above, Kotler says “when you can’t proceed on autopilot, that’s when flow shows up. That’s creativity to a T. Once you’ve thrown out the rule book and begun making creative decisions, the risk involved tightens focus and triggers a neurological cascade- it sweeps you right into flow” (Kotler 145). At this point, your prefrontal cortex basically deactivates, which shoots that little voice that says “you can’t do that because you’re stupid” right in the fucking face, making you more receptive to unique experiences and abstract ideas.

Tragically, people have come to believe in our data rich internet era that data acquisition, and identifying the patterns within that data, is a measure of intelligence. They think this because they are clearly stupid, stupid people. As one computer scientist struggling to create AI that can actually learn stated, “Without intelligence we collect data- without creativity we build knowledge. Interestingly the knowledge is built on the name of creativity is used to kill the creativity” (Kulkarni 8). True creativity “has to grow from similarity identification to surprise experimentation,” not from data mapping and extraction. Thus, rather than simply recognizing and identifying patterns, one must use the excitement of that stage to move to synthesis and analysis, which will lead to creativity, which will lead to flow/madspace.

Reaching this state doesn’t happen overnight, obviously. Tesla spent the entirety of his childhood with his dad forcing him to memorize all sorts of crazy shit, then studying the living hell out of all things electrical for years while working in the field before he came up with the idea for alternating current- it didn’t just dawn upon him because he sat in his room alternately playing Candy Crush and trying to become a Super Saiyan while reading Zatsiorsky (which incidentally, has about as much effect on your strength as polishing doorknobs does. No one gives a fuck you got it for Christmas, dipshit- you’d be far better off with a subscription to Muscular Development and ten good deathcore albums). Before true intellectual madspace is possible, you’ve got to absorb as many facts and theories on the subject as you can, allowing your brain to reach sufficient “density” on the subject to trip the switch that sets you on the path to flow/madspace.

The Eureka Technique

Luckily for you guys, Wayland Skallagrimsson seems to have found a way to jumpstart this process without spending years of your life reading endless treatments on a given subject. His Eureka Technique is designed, as he puts it, “to make the eureka moment more likely to occur than normal. It cannot come in direct response to trying to experience it,” a statement to which I can absolutely attest (Skallagrimsson 155). If you’ve ever noticed how irregular the pace of my article releases are, it’s due to the fact that I will write about a variety of topics simultaneously, until one of them grabs me and I have to finish it. I didn’t realize that was a scientific phenomenon, but if you’re curious it is known as the Zeigarnik effect– it’s a tendency to experience automatic intrusive thoughts about work towards a goal that has been interrupted, and you remember that interrupted goal and its details far more vividly than the one you have at hand. In any event, I bounce around from topic to topic until I have my “eureka” moment, at which point I am hell bent for leather on completing the article. In any event, this method obviates the need for keeping 100 drafts of articles going simultaneously and makes the user “accident prone,” in that having a eureka moment typically happens completely by accident.

1. Picture your goal (the problem you want solved) while meditating.
2. Seed the mind with relevant information. Grab all of the information on the subject you’ve compiled and scan it extremely rapidly (a page a second). You’re not trying to consciously read it, but to make an impression of the information on your subconscious mind. “It is very important to vary the speed at which you scan. Sometimes go faster, and sometimes slower. Spend time once in a while picking out one detail or another and focusing on it very much, even thinking about it consciously. It is also important to go back and forth between one section and another. Do not, in general, go in order from start to finish” (Skallagrimsson 155). If you lack written material, just review it in your head.
3. Build a mental map of the information you have. This should be a mental picture of the problem, surrounded by mental pictures of the various bits of information you have, or different points of view. Connect the various parts into a sort of fractal image, with a bunch of branches off a central picture. “This is a sort of mental mapping that has been shown to be effective in improving memory and creative thinking. It will be most effective if you use that kind of mind map known as a memory palace, where for each picture you have a room in a place you know very well. The mind is built to remember locations very well, and this will assist in the effectiveness of the mapping” (156). The construction of this mental image will trigger your subconscious into analyzation of the information you’ve compiled, and as your subconscious reaches critical mass with this, your eureka state should be triggered.
4. The last step is to go back to studying, in the normal fashion- reading the information carefully and attempting to draw conscious, rational solutions to the problem. “If the ‘density’ of information in your mind is high enough, the eureka moment will likely be triggered, even the full unitary state of madspace, which is the eureka moment extended” (156).

This method matches my own study habits in some ways, though I have a couple of tips and tricks for you in the event you need them.

1. Throw out your fucking highlighter. I never met an intelligent person who really used them. You take the first ten steps to indelibly inking something into your brain by rewriting the information in your own words. I prefer to hand write it, then go over the important terms over and over to bold them, which burns the term or name into my head. It also helps organize my notes for test prep or a paper.
2. Once all of my notes are compiled, I generally rewrite them for a test, though for papers the rewriting is done as I write. I will also do a lot of quick scanning of the pages to let my subconscious pick out important parts- I have no idea how I learned to speed read, but I learned it at an early age. Basically, my subconscious picks phrases that I consciously read, so if I read something three times I might learn something entirely new the third time through because I never consciously read it previously.
3. Always do one last pass on your notes, reading everything carefully. You never know what your brain skipped in the previous passes.
4. I’ll debate the utility of mnemonics to my dying day, because I think they’re trash. If they work for you, however, go for it. Use every tool at your disposal if they work- I just think they’re fucking nonsense for idiots.

There you have it- it had nothing whatsoever to do with lifting, but life tends to be more than just lifting. You can take it or leave it, but I thought it was an interesting tidbit and I spent entirely too long writing what was originally intended to be a sidebar, so it’s getting published.

Sources:

Kotler, Steven. The Rise of Superman. Boston: New Harvest Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

Kulkarni, Parag. Reverse Hypothesis Machine Learning. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG, 2017.

Skallagrimsson, Wayland. Putting on the Wolf Skin. Middletown: CreateSpace, 2014.

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