Tag: Doom Loop

The Loops

The characters have become weary and cynical near the end of the Incomplete States series. I wonder how much they influence me and the converse. It’s an interesting loop on its own.

But of course I taste what they feel. It’s necessary. Regardless of my process, whether it’s all deeply in me and I’m mining the story, or it’s being fed to me or channeled through me from some other existence, as it sometimes feels (thanks to the power of focus and imagination), I taste the words, and they affect me.

Balancing the scales, writing and progress continues, and I’m enjoying it. It’s an empowering experience. (The end is nigh!) Thinking about it, it’s almost the opposite of the Doom Loop. It’s the Success Loop. (Weird that as long as I’ve heard of the Doom Loop, I’ve never thought about the Success Loop. I looked it up, confirming, yes, such a creature exists – of course.)

Like the Doom Loop, the Success Loop is a spiral. But where the Doom Loop takes you down (because you expect less, so you try less, etc.), the Success Loop lifts you up. You’re building on what you’ve achieved, adding success. As success is added, success is expected, so you work harder for that success. You learn to know and love the taste and feel of success, and the power and confidence that it generates.

The Success Loop is often a strong but fragile thing in a writer. Like a spider web, it has impressive strength for what it is, but like a web, it’s easily broken. If I’m an average writer and others are like me, we worry about not having enough talent, skill, luck, drive, energy, or time to be the writer that we think we can be, that we want to be. We’re always worried that we’ll fall short.

That’s not bad. Those worries anger and inflame me, often encouraging me, try harder, work harder, and do not give up. 

The characters have become grittier as I come to the end. “I want to reach the end,” they tell themselves and one another. “This must be ended.” And they push, and push, thinking that they can succeed.

In this case, I know more than them. I know the ending. It’s been written. All of this action is the final bridge to what will be, what already is. What they do now will not affect their ending.

I think that with such confidence, knowing how I’m tricking myself. These are written words. They’re subject to change. Especially once editing and revising begins.

As a final loop, I wonder, has my ending been written? Is what I’m trying to write and achieve all for nothing because my destiny is established and sealed, and nothing will change it?

Maybe, but perhaps not. Perhaps there multiple loops.

Maybe I’ll leap onto one of those.

It’s been a good day of writing like crazy, once again. I’m hungry, the coffee is gone, and, man, my butt feels sore.

Time to go on to other things.

For now.

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Expectations for the Brain

This week, I enjoyed discovering and re-discovering reading regarding the brain and how it works, how we can change its workings, memory, and meditation’s effects on the brain. This all seems to be about practice, expectation, and changing expectations.

DelanceyPlace.com is a website that publishes excerpts from fascinating non-fiction. Back in 2015, they published an excerpt from a 2014 book. By Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz and Richard J. Davidson, the book, Mind of the Meditator, is about how mastering a task transforms the brain’s pathways.

“The discovery of meditation‘s benefits coincides with recent neuroscientific findings showing that the adult brain can still be deeply transformed through experience. These studies show that when we learn how to juggle or play a musical instrument, the brain undergoes changes through a process called neuroplasticity. A brain region that controls the movement of a violinist’s fingers becomes progressively larger with mastery of the instrument. A similar process appears to happen when we meditate. Nothing changes in the surrounding environment, but the meditator regulates mental states to achieve a form of inner enrichment, an experience that affects brain functioning and its physical structure. The evidence amassed from this research has begun to show that meditation can rewire brain circuits to produce salutary effects not just on the mind and the brain but on the entire body. …”

Addressing how ‘the adult brain be still be be transformed through experience’, HuffPost had a related story this week, To Increase Your Well-being, Train Your Brain. Mimi O’Connor wrote, “Dr. Richard Davidson, neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that practice is the key element in changing our brains for the better. He is well known for his pioneering study with Buddhist monks. In that study he hooked the monks up to fMRI machines and observed their brains as they meditated. The monks produced gamma waves, indicating intensely focused thought, which were 30 times as strong as the control groups.’ Additionally, large areas of the meditator’s brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions. This study showed that conscious effort can change the neural structure, activity and function of the brain.” Dr. Richard Davidson was one of the other book’s authors, of course.

“Similar to the inspiring theme of the film Field of Dreams, “Build it and they will come,” Davidson’s motto seems to be, “Exercise them (neural pathways) and they will strengthen.”

Offering another point of view that affirms the same was Sophie McBain in Head in the Cloud. Her article addressed human memory and studies regarding the impact of computers and digital systems on our ability to remember. What becomes clear from her intriguing article is that, part of what affects our ability to remember, is our expectation of a need to remember. Here, in essence, we’re seeing the opposite impact of the other articles, where people who have computers to help them remember, don’t practice remembering, thereby weakening their ability to remember.

They’re all ripple effects, aren’t they, a sort of Doom Loop on the one hand, of expecting less and trying less, and so spiraling into achieving less, or conversely, a Halo Loop, of expecting more and trying harder.

Of course, I need to tie this back to writing. Practice writing, pursue it, try to master it, and the pathways and areas of the brain used for writing can be strengthened and transformed. Instead of believing you can’t, believe you can, and try. Being human, it’s rarely that simple, and people like Judith Sherven, PhD, can inject insights and ideas for re-working the subconscious programming behind the Doom Loop.

I’d also like to tie all of this back to time, reality and the nature of existence, but that’s for another post. Instead, I need to go off and write like crazy, at least one more time.

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