A Study in Presence of Mind – A journal

Hypothesis: I think there are 2 aspects that are relevant to this topic: PoM – How to get presence of mind, and the base line of things – A general guide, playbook of common scenes.

PoM: exercises, focus, scanning, reflex, senses

General guide:

Action: Common wear, mindset, attitude, habit.

Time: time of day, season, the sequence of events.

Location: new construction,

Body language.

Will power

I just watched about half an hour of “How to increase you will power and tenacity” by Andrew Huberman and I think PoM is somewhat similar.

In this video, he said that will power is a limited resource, governed by a system in our brain. For the sake of understanding the concept, I will reword it as will power and idleness. Will power is your ability to do things forcefully outside of your habit, such as you don’t want to clean your room, but if you have will power, you can. Idleness is the inability to do things forcefully outside of your habit, same example as above, but there will be time that you cannot force yourself to clean your room.

These 2 systems constantly fighting in your brain to get the spotlight and it will balance out. Meaning there must be the time in a day that you have no will power because you’ve been using all the will power of the day.

Knowing this mechanism, you can manipulate it by intentionally give yourself time in the day, between working, studying session of idle time, which makes the “scale” moving towards its balance and you can use more will power. Idle doesn’t mean going to the bathroom and looking at your phone. Idle means sitting still, let your mind wander, don’t think about anything.

PoM

My initial thought after watching this video is that it’s similar to deduction. You need to get your mind wanders. Because your mind is not yet used to making observations and deductions a habit, it constantly forgets to do it, and when you do, you can’t do deduction for a long time or making a good deduction, you can’t make use of what you observe.

First step

I think I will choose 2 exercises to do each day. One to improve my PoM, and one to improve my “play book”.

PoM: scanning. A quick scan around the environment, left right, up down. Nothing too detailed, just a quick glance. The purpose of this exercise is to slow yourself down a notch, take some time to pay attention to the surrounding, making your mind 1 step closer to make observation a habit.

Playbook: clothes. I think clothes are the easiest, most visible and the most relevant to new observers. Clothes are related to weather, time of the year, trending, even social status, I think. The point of this exercise is to build up your knowledge of clothes, making quick judgement of someone either if they are to the norm or out of the norm and what does the norm means.

Playbook Report

Yesterday just happens to be my field trip day with my friends, we came to a different city and spent some time at a local market. This was a perfect opportunity to observe a lot of different people and worked on my “play book”.

It will sound pointless and obvious, but I found out that people have different vibes, and their clothes reveal these. I saw the same style, colors within a group of people, while others wear differently. There were a group of middle-class people, middle-aged guys who can be described as manly, middle-aged guys who can be seen as working in office, doing decently good financially, 3 different groups of school-aged girl, all wore differently but same style within the group. It was a cold day and people tend to wear dark color clothes, with the exception of red stripe flannel. There was this one particular lady stood out. She wore pink short and neon top, she was the only one who smiled the whole time checking out her bags.

On the way home, we crossed some homeless people, and you can immediately see the difference that they wore more layers than other people. It was about 50F or 10C yesterday, and normal people wore 2 layers, some even wore shorts. But homeless people wore 3 layers, with the outer layer is a big winter jacket. You can explain that by saying they’re outside more, so they need more clothes to stay warm. But why do the workers at my apartment only wore 2 layers? It’s because they were working, and they tend to produce more body heat. This is a good example of observing helps with deduction. Sometimes you don’t need to deduce, you just know it.

With further study, I think we’ll learn and “vibe” with their vibe. The clothes people wear are not random. It’s determined by weather, social class, vibe, the group that they would social around with, sense of fashion, activities, etc.

PoM Report

I stay in an apartment with 1 roommate, and we play this game of nutmegging each other’s. Nut meg means shooting or throwing the soccer ball between someone’s leg and for some reason, it’s a violation, meaning you lost. There’s no score to be kept, no rule spoken, time of the game is 24/7. Whenever you score, you get a dopamine boost in your brain, with the feeling you’re the man.

The PoM training has definitely paid out. With only half a day, I had these feeling of something doesn’t sound right here, immediately close my legs (defending against nut meg), just in time to block the ball from coming right through my legs. I grew up didn’t play sport and soccer was one of them. I could not shoot straight, while my roommate could. Lucky for me, I was able to plan a few ambushes, standing in a blind spot and deduce his move, getting the score balanced. Now, with the new PoM I just got, my defense will get even better.

It’s a what deduction is for, so here’s a example for deduction. With the practice of PoM, I was able to pay attention to the kitchen being slightly different every time someone used it, the bathroom, the living room table, etc. Though it’s not my focus right now, I can deduce a something about those differences, which I never paid attention before.

Plan moving forward

Once again, from the Andrew Huberman video about will power: Will power is limited, whichever activity that’s not in your habit, you’ll use will power to do it.

With this being said, deduction is not a singular skill, it’s a combination of various skills and actions. You would do yourself a huge favor by making observation, PoM a habit, and preserving headspace for actual thinking and deduction.

PoM: After sight, hearing is the second-best sense. I’ll start paying attention to sound around me when walking in a new room, and environment.

Playbook: Since people are back to their hometown at this moment, it’s not a good idea to study other people. I’ll pay attention to my roommate’s habits, making deduction and observation whether something changed.

Report

I realized there are ambient noise all around me. Most of the time, it’s the sound of the fridge, sometimes it’s the heater, sometimes it’s the people behind yelling. Even when there’s nothing running, there’s low constant noise going around. We’ve been so accustomed to them, stop paying attention and they became mute. Similar to air pressure, we’re so used to living in this air pressure that we don’t even feel it. But if you “meditate” and pay attention to your hands, you will start feeling some senses.

I think this is useful because this mechanism keeps us from being overstimulated of the world. Wanting to learn about deduction have led me to go against this mechanism a little. I started to listen to things as a part of my exercises for PoM and building up my “play book”.

Can’t say that I learn a lot from this exercise beside from understanding there’s noise everywhere. I think this particular exercise can be really good in a restaurant, a shop, etc. Somewhere that people make conversation with low volume.

Direction

PoM: After hearing, smelling is the 3rd strongest sense of human, and I’ll spend another full day trying to have PoM on this.

Playbook: People have started to comeback from their hometown, so I expected to see more activities outside now. I’ll start with their clothes, vibe and time.

Playbook Report

In observing clothes, I should point out that accessories should also be included. Not just jewelry, but also bag, air pod or air pods. What it is matters, the amount matters, the way they are carried matters.

Some of my observation time is from working at by desk while staring out the window. Even though I think it would be normal to have a laptop in front and side eye people, somebody was staring at me trying to figure out. My window is dark looking from outside, but I guess you can still see a little assemble of what’s inside. I need to cover it with blind to be more sneaker and less creepy.

PoM Report

With the information I gathered from PoM with sound, I was able to play a little deduction game with it.

This morning, I woke up before my 2 other roommates, one of them came in the bathroom, while the other came in much later when I was in the kitchen. The first one who came in the bathroom had a really light step, didn’t make much noise entering the bathroom, didn’t make a stream sound (lol), wash hands twice and came out. With that information, for some reason, I assume it was D. Later when I was in the kitchen, heard D yawned, stepped out and came into the bathroom, I started thinking, why is that.

It wasn’t more than 30 minutes and D has to go into the bathroom again? Then I think about the other possibility, I deduced wrong. It was C and not D who came in the bathroom first. Thinking about it, I remember there’s a crucial point that I didn’t pay attention to: the time. I knew that C works at home and started at 8am, so every day, he would wake up a little before 8, go to the bathroom, before starting to work.

Timing is indeed a very crucial axis in deduction, especially real time deduction. Now I added timing along with characteristics as the 2 axis in deduction.

As for smelling, I completely fail to get PoM on that.

Direction

PoM: Working on PoM with smell.

Playbook: Timing is indeed a very important factor. I need to start working on the timing of people.

Playbook Report

Today I stepped to a different spot of the same town, and I must say, people dress completely different from people in my familiar area. Completely different is a little bit of a stretch, but they didn’t wear the same style. In my familiar area, guys usually wear hoodie and jean, while girls wear sporty jacket and jeans/black pants/leggings. In the new area, people wear all sort of things, guys or girls. Puffers, puffer without the arm, leggings, jacket, flannels, etc. Shoes are also different.

This really is good evidence on people wear things to their norms, for social purposes. And I think less so on the end of characteristic.

What about its purpose? Yes, purpose would be the first thing considered. Weather, job (uniform). I’m not sure if social event can be considered the first thing in dress code. I’ve seen people wear casual clothes to a wedding. Of course, this information can tell something about that individual, but it’s not the first rule.

First rule: Purpose of dressing. Weather, Job/Casual.

Second rule: Social norm.

The first rule would indicate things that you can deduce in single step. Is it cold, is it warm, do this person going to a job (that needs uniform). The second rule would be things that you can get a vibe for. You can vibe and see who this person would be around the most. Nerds, family, high class, etc.

PoM Report

Even though I’ve pay attention much more to smell around me, I have to admit that it’s tough. You can’t really smell different stuff all the time, compared to sight or hearing. The nice thing with smell is that it’s much more natural for you to smell when something is out of place. It’s built in PoM. Nice thing about evolution I guess.

Rambling

As I try to pay attention to more things (sight, hearing, smell) I feel like I got overstimulated. That word is not correct. I feel like I don’t have the headspace for it, there are too much to notice. Going to the real world, deduction in real time, that would be a problem. I need to size down all the data. The development of the playbook is really necessary, I can determine if someone is in the norm, and forget about that information, or I say there’s something different, I need to investigate.

With a lot more cognitive work, I need more cognitive rest. PoM for resting, knowing when I’m running in my head. Yesterday has been the day that my head ran me. I couldn’t take a rest and I couldn’t think or understand what I was reading around 7. Not a good sign.

Also, just took a part-time job to work in a dinner. A really promising job for deduction. I will get to see a lot of different types of people.

Direction

PoM: I think the other two senses of taste and feel are not as dominant and the range of them are not as wide as the first 3, so I won’t touch on it for now.

I think attention and focus is another area that can help with PoM. From this post by the deducter, you can see that people don’t have a lot of attention, and I agree with that. Personally, I can get distracted at boring task pretty easily. Focus is an ability to regain attention to a task, to relocate your resources to a specific action when you got distracted.

Do a focus training session after lunch.

Playbook: ?

Report

I’ve noticed that I’ve been noticing more stuff, more stimulus around me. Walk calmly, look, listen and smell. And this process doesn’t make me feel overwhelmed one bit. If anything, I feel cool, calm and collected. The only thing that has been bothering me a little bit is looking at people. I feel like because I was scanning and actively deducing them, when they look back at me, it feels kind of weird.

With the application of eye training from Prof Huberman, my eyes can see in distance better than ever, making my observation in distance a lot tolerable. One more instance that I should mention here is that my roommate was surprised when I said he’s been skipping 2 gym days this week. A nice little win.

How did I know? I’ll not mention it here, keeping a little secret to myself. But what I can reveal here is that the color neon, bright green is a difficult color to wear. It stands out and hard to mix with other materials as well as colors. Now, combining with my system, let’s see why people wear it. The system is 1. function 2. social aspect.

Looking at function, neon helps people stand out. So, people who wear this are on a job such as police, construction workers, hunters, etc. Looking at social aspects, most people think neon is ugly so who wears neon are not most people. Either they specifically wear neon to stand out, usually extrovert, popular people. Or they are unaware of the effect that neon brings (ugly), which makes them not social people, even as little as their shoelaces. I think this is a pretty tight theory, but still needs more time to prove it.

Report

A little win and a slowdown in progressing seems to have made me idle. The goal of the study has not been in my head for 2 days. Even though I still have a pretty good PoM compared to when I first started this study.

With this being said, for me personally, achieving PoM is much easier than having it being useful to me. The reason is that you need to have a huge amount of knowledge about various fields to be able to have it relevant. This is not a beginner level skill, may be even in the area of advanced deductionist.

Having PoM is by no mean any harm, but the time spent need to be considered. With this statement, this is a temporary stop to the study in PoM.