track-back meditation

A mental move that's not only for meditation, but let's start there for simplicity.

Suppose you're meditating, and you suddenly become aware that you've been distracted by a series of thoughts. You're not sure when that started, how long that's been going on.

Now here's an opportunity to practice an aspect of memory! Recall what you were thinking that led to the current thought – then recall what came before that, and then what came before that.

"I was thinking about trains just now; why was that? Ah, it was because I was thinking about how I have to catch the train later, and started thinking about trains in general. I don't remember what got me on that topic…"

That's "causal back-tracking", one of two forms of back-tracking. Abram Demski hypothesizes that it trains long-term memory.

The other form is "temporal back-tracking" or "by-the-clock back-tracking", and Demski hypothesizes it trains short-term memory. Instead of walking backwards in a chain of logical connections as above, you jump back many minutes to a point when you weren't distracted, and then walk forwards from there, reconstruct history.

If you're like me, once you try this you'll find it pretty fun, and it quickly comes to be natural procedure for all situations where you wonder how you got distracted or "how did I get here?"

It's a skill I'm happy to level up because of the direct impact:

1. Imagine if you could quickly trace a distraction back to the root cause, go "aha! that's what catches my attention today!", maybe even figure out a bugfix.
2. Not sure, but it seems to slightly expand my mental workspace when I have used the skill in recent days.
3. Last but not least! I hate forgetting that one great idea I had just a minute ago but what the hell was it, it's right on the tip of my tongue… Happy to reduce the frequency of that problem.
   • I'm also motivated to improve conversational memory, and that is essentially track-backing, so it should transfer.

• 2024-11-25