That breakthrough would not be possible without ubiquity of personal computing at home and in your pocket, though, which seems like the bigger change in the last two decades.
"Life itsef", a "semi-monastic co-living hub" which is supposed to be "a place for experimentation, exploration, and learning, where people can engage in self-work, creative work, and spiritual practices" yet has only two and a half hours in the morning and three in the evening for unscheduled time to practice these. If I just do my yoga-qigong-kungfu, the morning space is filled, and do my normal morning meditation in the three hours in the afternoon. No time for experimentation, exploration or learning.
There are also in the direction of twenty people on the team with all kinds of expertise. This whole thing smells like the opposite of a monastic space, which usually consists of an abundance of time and space. Here it seems to be overflowing with all kinds of "modernized" practices and ideas about how that time and space is supposed to be filled. The absence of that normally characterises a monastic space.
I am probably misreading it, but I still wanted to post this. The blog post seems like normal psycho-development.
Not parent commenter, but I believe everything social should be kept to real life. The dynamics of online social media have almost nothing to do with real human interactions. It is a waste of time and a harmful superstimulus substitute, like empty calory fast food for real nutrition.
I am stumped: how does visualizing a scene in your minds eye and describing it lead to seeing it on the back of your eyelids as the article linked in the title of this comment section claims? And why call that "image streaming" instead of just "describing a visualized scene". Just advertising, right?
The sense of knowing where a character is in a space in fiction is the same sense that is used to visualize anything else. It is the same phenomenon. If you can "know" where a fictional character is in a fictional space, you can also "know" how a fictional apple looks like, or how a fictional coffee smells.
How or where do you hold the knowing of the location of the fictional character? Look at that psychic phenomenon. Aphantasia seems like not knowing what psychic operations one does all the time, while someone who can visualize can consciously use these psychic operations.
As someone who has used a larger number of psychedelics, MDMA, ayahuasca and so on - yes, alcohol at 16 for a few years was absolutely life changing for many of the same reasons: increased sociability and being able to talk to people uninhibitely about many things. I didn't overdo it and haven't drunken alcohol in years.
As someone who has practiced qigong and neigong over many years, feelings are absolutely localized - you can even match them with specific organs. Is is surprising that the adrenals are associated with feelings of panic for example?
The author is part of the tpot twitter sphere in which post-rationalists try to find ways to deal with body-mind/"woo" topics. That a member of this demographic develops a highly systematic methodology is to be expected.
Not an answer to your question but a comment toward the quote:
In Traditional Chinese Medicine terms, the spleen has always been described as the cause of chronic inflammatory disease. "Spleen deficiency" the core feature of ulcerative colitis and arthritis f.e.
But I was wondering how much of this is the effect of the internet on cognition? Specifically in the "ADHD bingo", there are things like "having 50 tabs open" or "forgetting why I was looking at my phone". Isn't that just computers destroying our attention? Or do I have ADHD?
I do not get the ego angle, but I am also skeptic of aphantasia. My own experience could be described by either 1 ("no image") or 5 ("perfectly vivid") in any questionaire concerning it - when I imagine anything, there is no image at all, yet I know I "see" something. E.g. I can think of a barn, and there is the mental impression of the shape, the color and so on, yet nothing at all is seen. I believe most of the difference is, as always, semantics: What does "seeing" an image mean internally? Some people who believe that they have aphantasia believe that there should be an image in front of their eyes when they close it - that is nonsense. It does not help that others who can imagine describe imagination in the same terms.
When I think of an abstract idea, the sense of imagination is exactly the same as if I was imagining a picture: there is an impression, but it is not one of the sense but one of mind.
The difference can be clearly seen with the use of psychedelics that do create real inner seeing: tryptamines like LSD only strengthen the internal knowing of mental imaginery (plus of course visual artifacts, warping etc. in the actual visual field), yet the combination of LSD and ketamine creates the famous "free-wheeling hallucinations" in which you enter a perfectly lucid photorealistic 3D dream which you can shape in any way you desire. Tropane alkaloids create real hallucinations which you experience instead of reality, but I have no experience with this. Classical psychedelics do not create hallucinations but only mental imaginery and visual morphing.
Do you actually hear the music in the fan noise or do you hear/imagine it in your mind? The first one is to consider carefully as it happens on LSD and in psychosis - maybe also strong synaesthesia or HPPD - , the second one is normal.
You are experiencing exactly the phenomenon the previous poster was describing. Because you did not have the experiences that produced theses cliched phrases, they seem mundane and not wise to you. Once you do have these experiences, you will go "Ooooh, that is what they meant!". Had this experience hundreds of times. You may need some psychedelics.
Is a little bit of umami taste really a significant part of your quality of life? When other parts go or die (health, friends, meaning), one can easily realize how little that actually matters for one's happiness.