People are driven by the need to acquire new skills, resources and perspectives. This is the most fundamental need that people have, above pleasure, career, friendship and love. In psychology, this need is called self-expansion.
When people are limited in their capacity to self-expand, they run into emotional problems.
Dreams
People have a variety of goals they want to succeed in. These goals are inherited from their family and society, who punish and reward them for their success in those goals.
Success in career, friendships, love, happiness, and wealth are prevalent goals. People’s success and failures in achieving these goals teach them skills and perspectives such as effective communication, advocacy skills, ethical thought, and so forth.
However, improving at these skills becomes rewarding in itself at a point, which is where people’s problems usually start.
Problems
As people get better at a skill, it becomes a habit for them, and the brain rewards forming habits.
There are many skills a person can have. Intellectual processing, escaping situations, reading the room, and many others.
As people get better at their skills, those skills can become maladaptive because their brain will reward them for performing those skills. However, happiness isn’t the fundamental driver that humans have.
Rather, the most fundamental driver is self-expansion. If the skills that people are rewarded for don’t fulfil their self-expansion drive, then people will stagnate. It’s more important to remove blockers to self-expansion than to pursue immediate happiness.
Facilitating self-expansion
Psychologists and therapists have four primary roles. These roles are ways to promote a person’s self-expansion.
The first is to provide solutions to people’s problems. If someone is non-functional due to anxieties over leaving a hair dryer at home, then carrying the hair dryer with them would allow their functioning in society.
The second is to change people’s thought processes so that they find solutions themselves. Take cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). People have thoughts in their conscious awareness at times. CBT trains the brain to go to useful thoughts, such as thoughts that promote action-taking. These action-taking thoughts urge the impulse for self-expansion.
The third is to change people’s emotional response to their environment. Therapies such as exposure therapy can change people’s emotional reactions to a given environment, opening up a sphere of possibilities for their self-expansion needs.
The fourth is to change people’s goals. As an example, in abusive families, people often seek their parent’s approval. Goals dependent on others are often unattainable so people’s goals have to change or their environment has to change.
Solutions in problematic cases
Most untreatable problems lie when therapists and psychologists are placed with the task of performing the fourth role.
A person’s goal might be to fit in with society, or to not procrastinate excessively. However, that might be impossible because of the natural instincts of their brain.
The main issue is that people’s conditions related to an abnormal brain are rare enough that there’s little experimental research on how to treat these problems, due to a lack of funding or research interest.
The barrier that researchers have to overcome to treat these conditions is that the brain returns to a status quo. Little to nothing changes people’s baseline functionality much over time.
Often, when people experience improvements in their life, that occurs as a result of a change in their environment, or a change in how they interact with their environment.
Very few methods can perform the rare step of changing how a brain responds to an environment they have to deal with and can’t find a workaround for. These brains are structured in such a way that makes living in a modern environment impossible.
For these rare conditions, there are four main solutions I know of.
The first solution method is medical treatment. People with severe depression will receive electroconvulsive therapy – giving people a brief seizure to change people’s brain chemistry. Additionally, people can change their gut microbiome, their heart function, or any of their sensory perception inputs.
The second solution method is meditation. Creating a feedback loop with positive emotions can allow people to enter states known as jhanas. These have the possibilitity of dramatically altering the brain’s perception of the world.
The third solution method is medication. Medication can dramatically change the brain’s status quo by either allowing people to perceive altered states of consciousness or by changing the state of their brains (so long as the medication is active).
The fourth solution is near death experiences (or extreme events). The brain will create a sense of deep peace and serenity, or regret, and the emotional perception of that can alter a person’s brain patterns.
For most of these solutions, the reason why they work is that the sheer extremity of the event shifts the brain’s processing. The brain engages in ‘illusions’ that are so powerful and believable that the brain will perceive them as real, thereby rewriting large sections of the brain.
However, these treatments often change too much of a person’s brain and personality, and there’s no guarantee that a person’s life will be better than it is before.
A more theoretical approach is to use brain sycnchronicty. Peoples brains end up similar to those they find themselves around over time.
Hence, theroretically, people’s brains can add functionality from interacting with people who are similar to them, but have brain characteristics they lack.
One article describing the idea is presented here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10962391/
Reasearch Aims
Currently, the brain can’t add functionality except in an incredibly uncontrolled manner.
There are quite a few promising research directions to solve this issue. The main research direction I hope to investigate is brain synchronisation. When people interact with one another in close proximity, the emotions of one person can be felt (to varying degrees) by another person, depending on how similar people are to each other. Then, the brain returns to the status quo. [Emmett Shear and Nick Cammarata, both from OpenAI, mention similar thoughts with relation to the Jhanas]
This is rare enough that people can go a lifetime without being in the presence of extreme enough emotions to know this is occurring. However, some people can produce extreme emotions on command.
The idea then is that at the precise moment of brain synchronisation for a patient, measurements of the brain can be taken before and after. Then, some treatment can be applied to repeated allow the brain to experience that functionality, such as via magnetic stimulation of the brain. The hope is that repeated experiences of a brain-state will allow some functionality to become natural and permanent in the brain.
Ideally, the research will allow people with problematic brain functionality to make progress in adding functionality in a controlled manner.
From a broader perspective, everyone’s conscious perception of the world is different from one-another. However, people can agree to the reality of a shared external world. When people come to the same conclusion via different methods, that makes it more likely the conclusion is true.
Through this concensus method, even though our conscious perceptions of the world are different, people can co-ordinate to understand the external world. Interacting with other people will cause people’s conscious awareness to align with other people over time.
Problematic cases occur when people’s conscious awareness synchronises abnormally with others. Those people will have perspectives that deviate from common conscious concensus. That produces extraordinary creativity, but limits brain function in some way. To escape that nature being permanent for no reason apart from genetic inheritance, brain synchronisation allows conscious perception to be self-controllable.
In doing so, the quality of people’s existence might be freed from causes which occur through no fault of their own.
Closing Touch
Some people are aware that there is something ‘amiss’ in them, in relation to others. They watch others demonstrate behaviours that they would never do. The brain filters this information out, but it becomes clear on inspection that other people’s brains have differing functionalities.
At the extremes, abnormal states of consciousness create a hellish existence. Here, the research aims to change that unlucky trapping of the mind.
Moonbeam 