“A good approach to avoid depression when reality is depressing is to focus on finding and appreciating small, positive moments within the day, even if the overall situation seems bleak.”
— Artificial Intelligence
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.”
— Groucho Marx
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Clarifying A Basic Confusion
Artificial Intelligence will always lack insight as long as it reflects what it finds to be the most accepted ideas. A.I. cannot see the fallacy of what’s most accepted.
Large language models are designed to extract the most widely endorsed ideas, but depression is a misunderstanding of reality. It is a negative perspective on what is otherwise neutral. We’re inclined to make this mistake because humans are inclined, as A.I. system are programmed, to avoid what we don’t know.
Groucho Marx offers more intelligence because he identifies the dysfunction of accepted logic. Humorists often replace what we think we understand with what we recognizably don’t understand. We find the relief amusing.
Our failure to distinguish depression from being depressed highlights this category error. Depressed is a reaction; depression is a state of mind. As long as the language uses the same word for these two related but different states, both you and A.I. will be confused.
If you’re feeling depressed when nothing is affecting you or when things around you are positive, then you’re clinically depressed. If you are depressed by negative things that affect you, you’re not clinically depressed.
Situational depression is not clinical depression. Bad times are depressing and that’s the truth. Pain, heartbreak, grief, and loss are depressing, but clinical depression is a state of mind that is independent of the situation. The solutions A.I. presents address bad times. Groucho is talking about a state of mind.
Why So Depressed?
The Joker’s most famous line, “Why so serious?” reflects this confusion between inner and outer realities. Asking “Why so serious?” about an unhappy situation implies situational depression is just an attitude that can be replaced. Having a flexible attitude is resilient, while having an unstable reality is psychotic.
Clinical depression is a misunderstanding of reality. If all you see is one reality, then that’s all there is. If what you see is not reality, that’s psychotic. Failing to manage reality makes situational depression clinical.
Here’s a simple test for clinical depression. If you cannot feel good about a positive situation, you’re clinically depressed. I emphasize the “can feel good,” and I’m not saying that you “do feel good.” That is, if you cannot imagine a positive option, then you’re stuck in a negative state of mind. In such a state of mind you’re at risk of becoming more seriously disabled.
This isn’t a foolproof test. If you can imagine feeling better but cannot ever feel better, you may still be clinically depressed. Being free from depression must be accessible at some level or through some path. That level or path becomes a key to your recovery, so it needs to be attainable.
There is a Key
There is a key point most people who are depressed overlook. This is also overlooked by most who have never experienced clinical depression. That key is being able to differentiate different states of mind.
If you have never been depressed, or you have always been depressed, then you may not understand just how fundamental your state of mind is to your reality. If you don’t recognize how your state of mind provides a foundation for your perceptions, then you will not appreciate its importance in almost any task you undertake. Not understanding this is why it’s so difficult to convince people of the importance of brain training.
I will broach the topic of brain training with every therapy client at some point. Brain training is more pertinent for some people than for others. Where a person’s problem is more situational, or more relationship oriented, how you think may be less important than what you think. Brain training addresses how you think, not what you think.
However, even in matters of relationship and communication, your ability to listen, be receptive, and to feel what another person is feeling, might be essential to collaboration. These are brain skills, not logical or intentional skills. Brain training is entirely relevant to the project of being more receptive.
People have far too much faith in the reality they perceive. They believe what they see and hear are real, and what they don’t see or hear are not. You can say this is evolutionary programming because, when it comes to reality, there is little time to stop and think.
Faith in science has only made this more confusing because you will start to see whatever you accept, and modern life requires science. Unfortunately, the goals of science are not humane yet we’re asked to accept it as if it were. This is one of the reasons we continue to rely on religion.
You don’t need to struggle; ground your power , extend your tool set…
Let the Games Begin
The question of one’s waking reality is more subtle than that of one’s dreaming reality. Both realities share the same criteria, but we apply them differently. Just as you never seriously question your dream reality, neither do you question your waking reality.
Your faith in your waking reality is as complete as the faith you have in the reality of your dreams. This was the point of my book Becoming Lucid (Stoller 2019). It’s not a question of what’s verifiably true because, if your standards of veracity are twisted, then your reality is twisted.
When it comes to dealing with your very real problems in waking life, your skills at judging yourself are crucial. These are not issues of intention, they’re issues of perception and memory. If I can bring a client to the point where they will consider that aspects of their reality are determined by what they perceive, remember, and understand, then I can start to talk about brain training.
At its root, you train your brain to be more active and reactive in circumstances where you would otherwise be be insensitive or unresponsive. Insensitivity and lack or response are learned behaviors, and they are great for enduring things you can do nothing about, which is most of a person’s life in childhood. However, if you are to gain power, then you need to regain sensitivity and reactivity in uncertain situations.
I have also tried to alert prospective clients to the importance of brain training but this always seems to work against a prospect becoming a client. They simply think I’m selling an irrelevant gadget or scientific mumbo jumbo. Most people simply are not ready to enhance their mental functions. As a result, I find myself censoring my own mention of what is the most important aspect of a person’s dysfunction: how their brain works.
How Does My Brain Work?
No one knows exactly. In fact, no one knows approximately. All the fancy brain images presented as substantiating something say nothing about your consciousness. But there are some patterns that make sense and will help you appreciate who you are and how you have come to be.
There are parts of your brain that handle basic functions, but these are not reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are sense of place in space and time, ordering of thoughts, interpretation of images, memory, auditory comprehension, expression, pattern recognition, emotional perception and embodiment. This last area of emotions pertains to affect, attitude, mood, and motivation. All of these aspects are both genetically determined and develop through experience.
Everything you do trains your brain, but the official field of brain training focuses on modifying your brain waves to affect your thoughts and personality. Brain training aims to enhance underlying aptitudes rather than final achievements.
For example, brain training will not give you new ideas, but it will make you open to new thoughts. It will not make you write or compose music better, but it will improve the sensitivity of your expression and your interpretation of sound. It won’t make you a better athlete, but it will improve your aim, steady your balance, and accelerate your thoughts and reactions.
In particular, brain training will enable you to better appreciate how you interpret what you perceive and enhance your control over your thoughts. In all these areas brain training is not adding judgement. There is no “teaching” of what you should think or feel.
These mental skills apply to almost everything so, naturally, training brain skills applies to everything. But skills don’t provide answers, which is why people don’t recognize their importance!
You must face this dreary fact: we are still apes. Talking about meta thinking to most humans is like talking about thinking to apes. This is a weak metaphor since we don’t talk to apes about anything, but some people have pushed human-ape communication to surprisingly levels. This is what I think about when I ask a client if they’d like to train their brains.
“One day, Rumbaugh (the human) used the computer to say to Kanzi (the Bonobo Chimp), ‘Can you make the dog bite the snake?’ It is believed Kanzi had never heard this sentence before. In answering the question, Kanzi searched among the objects present until he found a toy dog and a toy snake, put the snake in the dog’s mouth, and used his thumb and finger to close the dog’s mouth over the snake.”
— Wikipedia, from Great Ape Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language)
Depression as an Aspect of Your Brain
Every aspect of our brain affects and interacts with every other aspect of it. In some regards speaking and listening can change your neurology, and in other regards training your neurology will change what you say and hear. Neurology is at the lowest functional level, intellect, along with spirit, is at the highest.
Right below intellect is emotion, which means your emotional balance is the foundation of your intellect. Emotion is more broadly connected to your mind than intellect, which is why working with emotion has a greater effect in changing one’s personality than working with intellect.
The two areas of your mind most responsible for depression are the management of your positive thoughts and the balance of your negative emotions. We cannot train the valence of these aptitudes, separating the positive from the negative, but we seem to be able to increase aptitude and balance. We hope, as brain trainers, that with greater aptitude you will find a better balance for yourself.
The area most closely related to thought management—that is the selection and sequencing of thoughts and not their creation—is your brain’s left prefrontal cortex, the area above your left eye. Your right prefrontal cortex, above your right eye, manages the balancing of negative and positive emotions. These emotions are not created here, but they seem to be arranged and brought to consciousness through some process that takes place in this area.
Dysregulation in either of these two areas correlates with disordered thinking on the left, and uncontrolled emotions on the right. Dysregulation can be reflected in a lack of normal brainwave structure in these areas, or the occurrence of intermittent and unusual brainwave patterns.
Following these observations, established brain training for depression focuses on the EEG patterns recorded from the scalp above the left and right prefrontal locations. This training can take various forms such as rewarding trainees for creating a more normal EEG pattern, and exploring those thoughts and emotions that generate unusual patterns.
Depression as an Energy
Depression has a somatic aspect, a sense of throttled energy within your body. Just as fundamental aspects of thought elude us, fundamental aspects of body awareness do as well. Our habitual muscular tension and energetic obstruction are the sea we float on. If this is our only sense of being, then we will not see it as something we control or have the power to change.
Relaxation, mindfulness, meditation, disconnection, reflection, visual and auditory sensation, creativity, and thoughtful movement are different ways to sense energy in your body. These are connected with your brain states—they are brain states—but they are perceived as physical states.
Physical states can be below your awareness. They cannot be exactly thought into being but they can be experienced. It may be useful to conceive of these as non-thinking states that are entered through exercises in attention, perception, sensation, and awareness.
The eponymous “flow state” is such an energetic combination. It’s as difficult to describe as all of these mental states. In fact, I suspect “the flow state” is just some version of any or all of these neurological and somatic states, accessible through whatever means you choose.
In this regard, “the flow state” is another way to describe a release of constricted energy, anxiety, high blood pressure, and lymphatic constriction. The question is how to achieve this open energy state. I find the most enduring and direct answer is brain and awareness training, but if you’re more physically inclined, then yoga and exercise might be an easier way to it.
Depression is mostly a thought form, a frame of mind, but it has physical aspects. These aspects can be found in your physical habits of breathing, eating, resting, and sleeping. These form a background where depression persists. To rid yourself of depression, you need to see depression broadly.
Retraining For Depression
I’ve been involved with brain training for 30 years, attended conferences, classes, been mentored by leaders in the field, and published my own research in academic journals. My overall conclusion is that brain training is rarely enough to remedy dysfunction and alleviate symptoms.
This varies widely according to the issue. Issues that are mostly neurological can be mostly addressed with brain training, traumatic brain injury being an example. Attention deficit is largely neurological and so can be remediated through a combination of brain training, disciplined environment, and applied thinking skills.
However depression, which combines neurology, cognition, and emotion, requires more than brain training alone. Brain training is an essential component, with particular focus on negative rumination, but I don’t think brain training is sufficient by itself.
A depressed person also has to change their habitual thinking patterns. This involves both resolving burdensome past issues and creating positive future prospects. It’s not enough to be able to think more positively, one also has to have a more positive situation to think about.
My prescription for curing depression is holistic: better brain, thoughts, environment, diet, exercise, engagements, and sleep habits. I am ambivalent regarding the use of antidepressants. Some studies conclude the effects of antidepressant drugs are minor, other studies show they have no neurological effects at all. Yet many depressed people whom I’ve worked with rely on them despite their negative side effects.
Even if the positive effect of these drugs is largely suggestive, having a sense of control and safety can provide essential mental support. I do not subscribe to the idea that depression is a chemical deficiency, and that its cure requires perpetual chemical supplementation. I recommend those who take antidepressants aim to take less of them.
Neurology resides at the base of clinical depression and depressed emotions emerge at the surface of one’s personality. When these are rebalanced, a revitalized intellect forms around them.
In this sense, the depression that we speak of is not only the last thing we address, but we largely don’t need to address it at all. What we speak of is not the problem. The problem lies below it. You will start having positive thoughts when the causes of depression are taken care of.
References
Stoller, L. (2019). Becoming Lucid: Self-Awareness in Sleeping and Waking Life. Mind Strength Balance Books. https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/becominglucidbook/
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