Elf Sternberg

Last night, while meditating with my Muse headband, I encountered one of those Dark Behaviorist Patterns that are, to my thinking, one of the worst problems we have with apps and our networked world today.

The Muse Headband is gamified. I have no problem with gamification in general; I think it's an excellent documentation pattern, and done well is one of the best ways to get people to use your product effectively. But "done well" means done with the user's interests in mind; "done well" means executed with kindness and compassion for the user's time and patience.

The gamification pattern for Muse is straightforward. While using it, it categorizes your brain state into one of four ranges: agitated, neutral, calm, and deep calm. There's a main score, and for that score it gives you 1 point for every second you're "neutral" and 3 points for every second you're "calm." It also has a score for how many times you transition out of "agitated," and another for how much time you spend in "deep calm," but that main score is the big deal. Depending on various scores, you get badges, like any gamified environment.

Since I usually meditate for 25 minutes (booking a half hour, with setup and teardown), my theoretical high score is 25⨯60⨯3 or 4500. Yesterday I hit 4400.

I got three familiar badges: "Marathon" (meditated for more than 20 minutes, which I get pretty much every day), "Lucidity," (calm for more than 20 minutes), "Birds of Eden" (persistent deep calm). I've gotten other badges, including the one labeled "Perfect Timing," which is awarded when you meditate for 10 minutes or more, but experience less than 60 seconds of "calm," and "Wanderlust," which happens when your mind starts to become agitated late in the session, indicating boredom and a lack of focus.

But I got one unfamiliar badge: "Precision Shooter." I looked up the description: "Your score was exactly 4400." I went and looked back in my history; I'd received this score once before, for a score of 2900. "Precision Shooter" is awarded when your score is evenly divisible by 100.

That's not just a terrible metric, it's a psychologically manipulative one. Nobody's going to train their brain for that kind of precision. It's not just a meaningless badge, it's one that's awarded out of sheer luck.

When psychology students do the rat behavior reinforcement experiment, they divide the rats into three groups: continuous reinforcement, fixed ratio reinforcement, and variable reinforcement. The first get a food pellet every time they press a button; the second get a food pellet every fifth press; the third set get a food pellet after a random number of presses. It could be two in a row, or it could take fifteen or more presses until the food comes out.

Then the researcher turn off the levers.

The first group of rats gives up pretty quickly. It worked, and now it doesn't. The second group gives up after a little while longer. The third group never gives up. Never. The behavior pattern lingers for months. The rats' brains have become addicted to the reward system itself and they'll keep slamming that lever even when they're not hungry.

"Precision Shooter" is a variable reinforcement mechanism. It only happens at random intervals because you meditate. It's meaningless in terms of one's progress (whatever "progress" means to Muse), but it is a form of manipulation meant to make you to come back and try again. And because it's tied to an observable metric, it feels like an "achievement," so the initial hook is powerful, even if that metric isn't one over which you can exert any actual control.

"Precision Shooter" is a Dark Behaviorist Pattern, and Muse should remove it from the product.

I had a strange meditation this morning. I woke up before my alarm went off, and good thing too as I'd forgotten to set it correctly. So I sat down with my Muse headband and decided to try a repeat experiment.

I've become suspicious of what the Muse considers "calm." When I'm particularly stressed, I can hear the tension in my left ear; the muscles in my jaw clench and twitch, creating a strange, deep basso rumble. This morning I heard that all throughout my meditation session, which didn't translate to me as "calm" at all.

Worse, I've discovered that the easiest way to cheat the Muse is to set up a dialogue in my imagination between two characters from my stories. Not even a particularly interesting dialogue, just a humdrum, domestic conversation. Imagining the setting, the characters who have been with me for thirty-five years, the ongoing reassurance that they've always been there for me and will always be there for me, drops the Muse's responses down to the "very calm" setting.

It was a twelve minute session with the rumbling going on in my left ear, and in my head my characters have a mundane, domestic chat, with no focus at all on my breathing, or my body, or my surroundings– and yet Muse insists I was "very calm" for almost the entire session.

I'm always suspicious of a computer-mediated anything. I'll try the Muse for a little while longer and see if it gets me anywhere, but I'm starting to suspect that, as I wrote earlier, it's going in a different direction from where my meditations were taking me when I started. Not necessarily headed to a bad place, but still, a different place.

For my birthday, I bought myself a new laptop and a couple of fun peripherals. The peripherals were mostly to round out and survive the coming wireless future, when there are no more USB connectors on our devices and everything has to talk over Bluetooth. One of the toys I bought myself was a Muse brainwave-sensing headband.

I have no idea if this thing is even vaguely legit. I've seen quite a few articles about how the sensors are legit, if inaccurate, and they only show a mash-up of a variety of electrical signals whizzing past at any given moment, but it's hard to know.

In any event, there are a few things I've noticed. The first is that the left temporal lobe sensor is always the hardest to calibrate. That's hardly surprising since my left temporal lobe is where the ADHD "storm" is happening; on the sorts of scans that track glucose consumption, that corner of my brain is constantly lit up like Iron Maiden night at the laser lightshow.

Since I have ADHD I take Dextrostat, which is basically a medical amphetamine. Omaha likes it when I take my meds because she says I'm calmer and easier to track when I'm on it— which is actually a better sign that it's really ADHD than any other test, since people without ADHD get jittery and easily distractable when on Dex.

So I tried an experiment. I tried using the Muse with, and without, the Dex. The Muse claims to track "calmness," the time when your brain wave levels are low and relatively harmonious. They rate your brain as "active," "neutral," or "calm," and give you a score: the number of seconds you spend "neutral" plus 3⨯ seconds spend "calm." While not on Dex, in a ten minute session I scored 385 points and wasn't "calm" enough to get a bonus; while on Dex, I scored 935 points and 5 times was "calm" for long enough to get a bonus.

That's just a pair of data points and therefore totally anecdotal. (The plural of anecdote, by the way, is data.) But it was fun, and kinda a neat way to play with the toy.

Someone asked, "What are the other meditations you do?"

Okay, so, here's the most important thing to know: I firmly believe that what you do with your first hour dictates who you will be that day. If I spend that first morning just absorbing social media and miscellany, I'm pretty much a distracted basket case for the rest of the day. If, instead, I set up my morning correctly, I'm going to be productive and happy. The next two meditation practices (they involve more than just sitting and thinking) are part of avoiding the distracted basket case mode:

The Prospective Meditation

My first 30 minutes are spent getting up, dressed, feeding the cats and making breakfast. That includes actually cooking over a stove most mornings, grinding coffee by hand, scrambling eggs and chopping vegetables. I find the physical act of cooking food from raw ingredients very grounding. 15 minutes are then set with what Stoics call the Prospective Meditation. I leave my to-do notebook with my schedule open on the kitchen table when I go to bed. I read it carefully, and then I take a deep breath and calm myself, rehearsing the day ahead in whole, always keeping in mind that the day may have other plans. I contemplate what could go wrong, and rehearse how to deal with hindrances and roadblocks. The last 15 minutes are spent making sure the kid is up and moving before we both head out the door.

This is one I always try to do. It's not always feasible (rarely, Omaha wakes up and she often thinks I'm too dedicated to my rituals), but I do manage almost every weekday.

The Retrospective Meditation

Usually, this Stoic meditation happens around 8:30pm, which means that many nights it may get pushed later as my parental and familiar duties require me to be out and about. I sometimes have to plan around my schedule and break this in two.

The first part of the meditation involves looking through the same notebook and asking myself, What did I accomplish?, What went amiss, and can I correct it?, and What is left unfinished? This often involves going through the day three times, examining the calendar and notes for every detail, trying to sand down the rough edges.

The second part involves writing down tomorrow's schedule, deliberately calendaring in time-blocks to accomplish specific tasks.

The Default Meditation

Okay, this one's a little weird, because literally no one else I know does this. Every meditation has a setting: The Prospective and Retrospective meditations are from Stoicism, and I do them at the dining room table, where I wind down and then set up my day. The breath meditation is the first Samatha meditation of traditional Buddhism, and I do it on a zafu.

The "default meditation" is done in a quiet room with a comfortable chair. I clip a voice recorder to my shirt (my trusty Olympus VP-10) with voice activated mode on. I set a timer for 20 minutes and then I just... think.

The default mode is what your brain is doing when you're not concentrating on something. It's about daydreaming. I find when I'm doing Samatha that many of my distracting thoughts are about accomplishing things and dealing with the undone. Default Meditation is basically an excuse to think about those things, get them into the tape recorder, and process them later, getting them out of my head while accessing them in the order and manner my brain prefers.

The process of giving voice to the thoughts, and then soon thereafter dumping the voice recorder to my laptop and writing down what is actionable or noteworthy, leads to my brain being "emptied" and ready for other things to think about. This one is usually a morning exercise, before I've started dumping too many outsider thoughts (Twitter, Facebook, the radio, whatever) into my head.

Others

In various religious traditions, there are the contemplative meditations, such as Vispassana, Lamrim, and for Christians the Twelve Stages of the Cross.

Stoics practice the Meditation of Tragedy, which is basically staging the worst thing that could happen in your mind and rehearsing how you would react to it meaningfully. Buddhists have a similar meditation. The Lamrim Buddhist tradition spends one week on this sort of thing, then a week on compassion, then a week on wisdom, and then they start over. Vispassana is an exploration of the senses that teaches us to both appreciate them and to understand that they're transient and impermanent. Stoics have the Meditation of Loss, which is similar to Vispassana, in that it teaches us to appreciate the sensations we're experiencing now, the love and affection of our families, the joy in our lives, because fate could take those from us, or us from them, at any moment.

I don't do any of those with any seriousness. Just the three basics, plus the occasional Default Meditation when my brain starts to feel really full.

In some lines of Buddhism, the jhanas are emotional events that a practicing meditator may experience along the way toward enlightenment. The usual description of them is in stages or, as we might say today, leveling up: you experience "The first jhana," and then the second, and so forth, until you attain the fourth, which most meditators agree is both the most interesting and the most dangerous— people can get "stuck" in the fourth and become highly delusional, convinced that they've attained mastery of themselves and maybe have found all manner of psychic powers or whatnot.

I'm suspicious of this description, because I'm suspicious of Maria Montessori and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Montessori taught that children go through three distinct and concrete stages, and while there's some overlap these stages more or less coincide to seven years of a child's life: 0 to 7, 7 to 14, 14 to 21, each of which is characterized by a set of concrete traits that a child is developing, and the choice of which traits gets trained and emphasized is the responsibility of the parents and teachers. Kubler-Ross taught the five stages of grief, and claimed that the dying patient went through them in a fairly linear fashion. (It was only afterward that we started applying the stages of grief to the survivors, and then to anyone experiencing the aftershock of some disaster other than the death of a loved one.)

Kubler-Ross's prescription is nonsense unsupported by the evidence. Montessori's stages of development have likewise not been vetted for any correspondence to reality other than anecdote, which puts both of them in the same category as the jhanas.

What the jhanas, Montessori and Kubler-Ross all have in common is a framework onto which those teaching and those experiencing the teaching can channel their energies into handling one thing at a time. Enough people can be convinced that Kubler-Ross's framework is "true" that they can channel their emotional energy into handling that one particular experience, be in anger or denial or bargaining. Enough children succeed and even thrive under Montessori's program (mostly, I suspect, due to the intensely attentive nature of the adults conducting the program) that parents can be convinced it's "true" and works for all children. And the jhanas are likewise useful enough that when the student experiences something like one the teacher can say, "Ah, that's close to a first-level jhana, here's what you can expect," and the student will search for those experiences and filter out everything else until the teacher says, "Now here's what you should look out for the second jhana..." and, even if the student has been experiencing those phenomena for some time, now that experience gets attention and the student starts to level up.

I've spoken often of my love for *Illuminatus!*, the book that I discovered at 13 that made me realize life was worth living, if only because life was ridiculous and therefore not too worthy of angsting over. One of the best lessons from that book is Korzybski's "The Map Is Not The Territory." Robert Anton Wilson (pbuh) taught us all just how true that was with examples that, while silly, were also so plausible that they couldn't help but illuminate.

It's also possible to confuse the *mapper* with the territory. In many styles of meditation, what we seek is to understand how we shape the world, how the world shapes us, and to pick and choose from the many possible shifting shapes we may adopt to better fit the world around us. When we succumb to fatalism, when we insist there's no changing "fate's design," we are confusing the territory with ourselves.

Meditation taxonomy calls this "experiential fusion." The purpose of many meditations, some explicitly but almost all of them implicitly, is to separate the map-*maker* from the territory, to make us aware that we are not mere subjects of nature but agents in our own right, agents within our own skin, able to pre-decide how we'll react to stresses and disasters.

It is also okay to allow this fusion at times. Watching a movie or reading a book, it's acceptable to let this fusion happen, to become one with the storytelling, to feel it deeply. We've developed incredible cognitive vocabularies for maintaining a sense of self and other while deeply identifying with others, and learning this is part of the basis of compassion-based meditations. Strengthening that reflex, however, in a conscious and vital way, is as important as strengthening one's muscles and bones for the long haul that is life.

When we separate who we are from the world enough to make choices, then we start to exercise the only real form of free will we actually possess.

Meditation isn't relaxing. It's work. There's a reason we call it the practice of meditation. Like all practices, it's hard, it requires reflection at the end of the session to know what went wrong, what went right, and what your goals are.

The purpose of meditation, for me, is to cultivate two characteristics that seem at odds, but are completely complementary: a sense of serenity, and a force of will. This is a traditional silent zazen sort of meditation, but unlike the full Zen tradition, it stops there: it's an exercise in mindfulness, in building up an ability that one already has, just as one already has the ability to do one push-up, but most of us can't do fifty.

And it takes a while to even reach the stage where you can recognize, and dismiss, the chattering interruptions of your busy mind. That's okay: at the beginning of any practice, you're not bad at it, you're just beginning. If you give up, then we can safely say you're lazy.

But the lazy do not meditate.

Anyway, I'm pleased to have successfully managed five days in a row without once saying, "Not today, I'm too busy." It's only fifteen minutes.