Category Archives: Acceleritis

ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Depression on the Rise

Created May 10, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The inability to pay attention is a symptom of EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). My theory of Acceleritis postulates that the amount of question-producing stimuli experienced by the average person per day has been increasing ever since the start of written language. This produces information overload and the tendency to hasty closure – making up one’s mind too fast. It also causes reduction in considering the ultimate questions because we are too busy keeping up with the pace demanded of us by those around us, including media. The natural awe and wonder at life and the universe every child feels, fades away.

Do you let people complete whole sentences without jumping in to say something?

In EOP, one has little patience, because everything is happening too fast, and a part of oneself that wants to do everything perfectly is perpetually frustrated by this. Which makes us rush others to complete their thoughts.

Many people who have not yet been formally diagnosed as ADD or ADHD also have it.

In a recent New Yorker article, writer Nathan Heller cites a study by medical software company Epic which found an over-all tripling of ADHD diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, skewing even higher among younger people.

Inability to sustain attention doesn’t necessarily get optimally controlled by drugs, which often have side effects that bring down individual effectiveness in other ways. Metacognition would be a more successful medical strategy. Meditation could be more effective than medication in the long run. The optimal combination might include a gradual reduction of the drug and finally its removal.

50–70% of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also have ADHD according to the American Psychiatric Association:

“Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both associated with internalizing problems like depression and anxiety, and the two often co-occur. A recent study found that ADHD is more strongly linked to depression than autism. ADHD traits are also a stronger predictor of depression symptoms than autistic traits.

Youth with ADHD and autism are at high risk of experiencing mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Depression is one of the most common mental health problems in young people with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) like ADHD and ASD. Depression in NDDs can be more severe, have an earlier age-at-onset, and have a worse prognosis than in the typically developing population.

Some factors that might be driving the relationship between ADHD and mental health problems include: Genes linked to ADHD, Stressful life events, Environmental factors, and Social cognitive factors.”

Gallup in May 2023 reported that in 2017, 18-29-year-olds in the U.S. were about average in terms of being diagnosed with depression, but by 2023 that level had increased +68% in just six years, to over one in three people in that age group. The whole population is experiencing an increase in depression. Metacognition is not just a nice to have anymore. It is a must.
Rising trends: lifetime and current depression rates

Today science is finally looking objectively at the use of psychedelic drugs for their potential benefits in dealing with medical problems of cognition and affect. The Harvard professors who brought this up in the 60s spelled out the necessary setting and mindsets necessary for such experiments to have the most beneficial effects.

Millions of people today are using cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin, etc. mostly for mood elevation, and can be taught to also use them for self-reflection, under medical guidance respecting the setting and mindset best practices established by the former Harvard professors, much-maligned Timothy Leary and much-beloved Richard Alpert (Ram Dass).

Use of drugs is not a necessity for the achievement of self-awareness, even for those with neurodevelopmental disorders. To demonstrate that semantic and semiotic interventions without chemicals can have beneficial effects, you might try reading parts of this free booklet, The Navigator, from The Human Effectiveness Institute to someone you know who is having any kind of hard time.

Another exercise you might suggest to a person suffering from any of these variations of extreme EOP is to try doing this exercise:

- Get out along in nature.
- Find a flower (or any interesting object).
- Contemplate it.
- Maintain eye contact with that object.
- Gently focus your attention upon it.
- Allow it to permeate your mind.
- Notice what you notice about it.
- Sustain this attention for at least one full minute without checking the time.
- If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the object of contemplation.
- When you’ve had enough of the object, keep your eyes focused on it for a little while longer while using your peripheral vision – without moving your eyeballs – to see how much of the background you can see to the left, to the right, up, and down.

This exercise will also begin to bring attention under your conscious control.

Love to All,

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The Difference Between “Predreaming” and “Manifesting”

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Created March 29, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Predreaming

A recent article in The New York Times by Tara Isabella Burton, a fine writer of both non-fiction and fiction with a doctorate in theology from Oxford’s Trinity College, puts down a specific spiritual belief she refers to as “manifesting”. She writes:

“Today’s culture of wellness — predicted to be an $8.5 trillion industry by 2027 — is suffused with the pseudoscientific language of positive thinking, manifesting, useful and toxic “energy” and, above all things, the power and the potential of the self to create its own reality. If we can dream it, much of contemporary wellness language tells us, we can have it — so long as we focus our energy hard enough.”

She also associates “manifesting” with some other huge things, including besides the wellness culture: spirituality, capitalist individualism, positive thinking, denying aid to the poor on the grounds that they are not using their God-given powers of manifesting, and even Trumpism. She cites Google evidence that searching for the word “manifesting” spiked 6X when the pandemic began.

Burton traces how a faith healer’s book in the late 19^th Century triggered a spate of similar books which became so powerful that they inspired Mary Baker Eddy to found the Christian Scientist movement, and transformed Capitalism into a religion:

“In this way, the capitalist pursuit of profit was swiftly recast as a religion whose only tenet was desire… New Thought offered a convenient economic theodicy: a way of explaining and justifying wealth inequality as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, with the wealthy at the top and the suffering at the bottom. And it’s notable that manifesting, New Thought’s modern descendant, should rise to prominence at a moment when economic inequality is once again at an all-time high.”

In her description of “manifesting” she consistently communicates the idea that it is simply wanting X (generally, money) and focusing all our energies on it.

I rarely use the term “manifesting” but until now have never thought of it in a bad light, so I’m grateful for Burton’s very readable and intelligent article. I see now that “manifesting” has taken on a more narrow meaning that I thought it had.

I have always used my own term, Predreaming, which came to me in a moment of inspiration, as if from “upstairs”.

My definition of Predreaming is rather lengthy but I will quote it here from Chapter Seventeen of You Are The Universe:

Chapter 17
Predreaming

Just a reminder: all of this is theory, largely based on my own experiences. For readability the scenario is described as I imagine the details, and is intended to be the most parsimonious, plausible explanation that accounts for all phenomena.

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will eventually appear in your external experience on the Universal Computer Screen we call material reality.

You are tuning in these material experiences, ordering them, attracting them to you, by dwelling on them.

It makes no difference if your dwelling on them consists of prayer to get them (your desires), or dread of getting them (your fears).

The “dwelling-on” places the order, in either case.

Oblivious to our inherited “ordering power”, almost all of us are using it against ourselves.

One of the ways we have been (under-)using our “ordering power” in a constructive way is called “prayer”.

Prayer tends to be a heightened (i.e. more effective) form of predreaming to the extent that all four aspects of consciousness tend to be involved: thinking, feeling, perception (in this case, vivid visualization of the target situation), and intuition.

Intuition will tend to be present in prayer to the extent that the evolving mini-personality who is praying feels the target situation being prayed for would be good for other attention nodes, not just for him or her. Then the praying node has the intuition that “God has no reason not to answer the prayer”.

Now this is not synonymous with the Butler definition of “manifesting” where all you need is desire and focusing. There are a few differences.

1. Scientific support – it has been proven that previsualization improves performance.
2. Theoretical support – as documented in A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” , John Wheeler, Einstein and Hawking are the Newtons of our day, and they have left the doors open for consciousness to be a far more important component in reality than most present-day scientists – with Wheeler creating the Participatory Anthropic Concept which comes very close to supporting “manifesting” but especially “predreaming”.
3. With predreaming comes the concept of considering not just oneself, but how the desired state is a win/win from an enlightened point of view to a reality which is a single Consciousness.
4. The other vital side of predreaming is to avoid projecting negative situations, which appears from her argument that is not a component of “manifesting” under her definition. This comes with a battery of methods for truncating negativity at all times. Expressing woe, past a certain point, extends woe into the future, with an accelerating curve as you dwell on it.
5. The connections Butler draws between “manifesting” in social media and religious groups that have embraced Trumpism is another difference. The students of predreaming that I know are not affiliated with any of that.
6. Predreaming is only one aspect of adopting a lens of the world as a single Consciousness. Another is Noia, the science and art of looking for helpful clues from the Universe – The One Self. There are many aspects helpful to Observer state and Flow state.

My experiential learning in testing and developing predreaming, the way I do it, has led to the strong conviction that it is working.

Seemingly being challenged sparks new thinking, it is wonderful to be challenged politely!

Butler has convinced me that the misunderstanding and misuse of one’s ability to “contribute mentally and physically to the happenings of reality, with positive emotion and functioning intuition” (shorter definition of predreaming), lead to unfortunate outcomes that spill over onto the rest of us evolving mini-personalities. Ego is the main reason this occurs, which is exacerbated by Acceleritis. Too many “manifesters” are focused on money and act exclusionary, and justify this on religious grounds so they feel righteous and unable to waver or consider any polite logical challenges, because no one is better or smarter than God, and “God is in my hand.”

In reality, God – The Original Consciousness that acts though each of us and everything – wants us all to enjoy learning how to find our way back inside his POV. “Manifesters” will not get the results they want no matter how much they focus, because it would harm more of us than help. God doesn’t use free will that way, and doesn’t want us to, either. God has no reason not to love us, God IS us.

Wheeler et al explain the mechanics, by which these Consciousness-driven actions manifest.

Manifesters beware of “using the dark side of the Force”. Make sure the types of simplified thinking* Dr. Butler describes don’t describe you. You will appreciate how much your manifestation rate increases.

I’ll close with this superb closer of Tara Isabella Burton’s article:

“After all, if reality is only ever what we make it, then those who possess the fewest scruples about conforming to the truth are the ones who will have the most power to shape the future.”

There is “a Darth Vader”. That’s the powerful people hypnotizing those follower folks, who deserve better, who have put themselves into magical superstitious thinking they think is spiritually driven, but it’s drawing down upon their spirituality account, to fool them like the metaphorical Devil, the ego.

Try predreaming and let me know if it works. Make sure to hold down the ego. Thanks!

*I refer to it as Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). Here’s how my AI [https://app.soopra.ai/bill/chat] explains it:
“Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is a term I coined to describe a state of mind where, due to sensory overload or stress, we simplify our thinking process. In EOP, we tend to see things in black and white, make immediate decisions based on precedent, and have little foresight. It’s like an emergency mode our minds go into when overwhelmed, but the challenge is that it can limit our ability to fully process information and make optimal decisions. It’s a state we want to avoid or minimize for more effective thinking and decision making.”

Love to all,

Cherchez L’Opportunité – Look for the Opportunity

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Pronounced Share-Shay Lopportooneetay.

Created March 22, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Seize the opportunities.

Whenever things go wrong, it’s natural for you to think about damage control. And you should. More about the nuances of damage control later on below. But it’s not natural to think “Where in this mess are there any opportunities?” That is the real focus of my column here today.

Yesterday I was recording a Zoom conversation with my partner in crime Natalie Johnston for our TikTok shortform (typically ~2 minutes) series “Ask Bill” which we’re now also posting in YouTube as a longform (typically ~45 minutes). Natalie who has her own international coaching business, said “people think of things happening TO them, when they should actually be thinking of things happening FOR them.”

Natalie and I agree on our view of the nature of reality, which is that unseen forces are actually trying to help us, a principle I call Noia, as the opposite of paranoia, the suspicion that someone is out to get us. In the Noiac view of life, everything that happens, including stuff that seems very bad, has a positive purpose. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, finding the good that is cosmically intended by what on the face of it is some sort of defeat.

First let me clarify what I mean by unseen forces. My best guess about the nature of reality is that there is just One Consciousness that is living through each item in the Universe (the part of the One Consciousness that we apprehend). So naturally It would be trying to help us because It IS us.

We live in a part of the Universe where fallibility is enabled. We traditionally think that there is another part of the Universe where everything is always perfect all the time. This latter part (traditionally called Heaven in English) might, over the course of eternity, become boring. Which explains the motivation for having this other part, where “God” (the One Consciousness that is all that exists) can play and learn from mistakes, and drama and humor are vibrantly alive.

In my picture of reality, you are God, temporarily stripped of memories from before this life, playing a learning game to (often painfully) reconstruct everything you knew back when you were cognizant of being God. At which point (perhaps after many reincarnations) when you have rediscovered your real identity in every way, you win the game, and are back in your full Self again, adding another layer of experience driven wisdom to enhance what You were before.

The One Self and other friendlies pull strings behind the scenes to supplement the free will you have been given. Hence Noia, and Natalie’s exhortation to think of things happening FOR you. And my exhortation to look for clues as to what the positive opportunities are in every pratfall you take.

For example, you lose your job. Might this be clearing a space for an even better use of your time? Is there some other type of work that you’ve been dreaming about but considered it too risky a move to give up the security? This pink slip might be what you need more than anything in the world to bring out your gifts to the world in constant Flow state and happiness.

For example, you have a new boss who makes your life a living hell. Is this the Universe prodding you to take the risk, give up the security, and quit? Or is it an opportunity to learn how to deal with such situations and become master of them? For sure it is some kind of opportunity, and inner contemplation is the way to discern your optimal action. Seize the opportunities.

For example, you dream of a certain vacation, perhaps that villa on the sand that you love and which has become wildly expensive, and you finally get to go, and it rains continuously. Instead of being brought down by the situation, what could the Universe be trying to tell you? Is it time to start that new novel you’ve been threatening to write? The rain you notice is falling straight down, so that you can sit at one of those tables on the beach with the thatched roofs, sipping a piña colada while you peck away at the keys? No sun in your eyes making the screen hard to see.

For example, you make a thoughtless remark and are publicly humiliated. What is the opportunity? I used to call it the Humiliation Evolution Opportunity. Humiliation is one of the worst possible experiences, and yet it is always telling us something about ourselves which needed improvement, so it is a powerful learning opportunity. In Noiac thinking, you might in subsequent contemplation look back from that moment of mortification and notice that there were light warning taps happening in your life that you missed seeing, which were earlier attempts by the Universe to get you to learn something, and after trying the velvet glove, the Universe ultimately had to hit you with the iron fist to get your attention.

Could it be that you had become too used to being praised and treated deferentially, and this was allowing your ego to sneak back into your control chamber, and you needed to be taught humility just a little bit? Or had you forgotten to consider other people’s feelings enough? Whatever it is that caused the humiliation will benefit you more when you unpack the lesson, than the humiliation will harm you. In Noiac thinking, one trusts God to only give us pain as a way of preventing us from far greater pain.

You can see that Noiac thinking installs a longer term view of things. This in itself is a benefit because the present Acceleritis culture imposes short-termitis.

Going back to damage control, there are better and worse ways to implement it. Let’s say you experience humiliation. The first thing to do is to neutralize the bodily and emotive reaction and keep it invisibly inside, your outside façade the same as it was before the bad moment. Your internal chemical-electrical reactions depend upon cognitive and affective attachment that you have formed to always being right, always winning, always being looked up to – all of these things are mere ego vanities, and they have no positive value, they are part of your robot, not part of the real you.

The second thing to do is to take responsibility for having said or done something wrong, and authentically apologize, without making too much of it, and move on.

Later when you are alone, contemplate what you should have said or done in place of the thing that caused your humiliation. Install a mnemonic device that will let you know when you are coming up toward a moment like the one that you mis-played resulting in your embarrassment.

Natalie and I in our conversation yesterday created a podcast as well as TikTok and YouTube videos, it’s called “What Is Reality?” and I’ll send you a link when it’s ready.

If you’d like any advice, or to debate any of my suggestions above, please visit my Soopra AI which is always available to you to bounce things off a really amazing simulation of me. My schedule is never too full for any of you who want to talk to the real me. Natalie Johnston can also be reached if you’ve been thinking about a life coach, and Jenny Baltazar is a life coach specializing in grief. They are both amazing coaches and people.

Love to all,

Acceleritis Theory Validated

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Created March 14, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The amount of information being processed daily by the average human being has been accelerating ever since the invention/discovery of written language.

In my 1976 book Mind Magic I postulated that the amount of information being processed daily by the average human being has been accelerating ever since the invention/discovery of written language.

And I theorized that this was the cause of a mental/emotional state I called Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). This is a state of consciousness in which questions are set aside, experiences are not assimilated, personal effectiveness is reduced, creativity is blocked, the awe and wonder of life is invisible, one subscribes to black vs. white thinking imposed by others, one has prerecorded responses used all the time, new learning and growth are stultified. One is coping but not mastering life. One is a conditioned robot.

In 2011, in this article, I started using the term “Acceleritis” to describe the condition of information overload acceleration over time.

Recently my wife Lalita gave me a birthday present of a new book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. In this book, the author documents social scientists’ work, essentially proving that my theory is correct. Both the author and the scientists whose work he cites add greatly to the picture, and I highly recommend reading this book for that reason, and because it also is a great read.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

Hari concludes that external forces have caused our inability to concentrate, rather than being caused by a lack of willpower on our part. He divides the book into chapters to review these external causes one by one. And he starts with the digital devices which are so obviously part of the problem. One citation is a 2016 study which found that we touch our phones an average of 2,617 times every 24 hours.

Interestingly, he also cites studies which use data from digital platforms to prove that acceleration is going on. For example, a 2019 paper in Nature Communications, “Accelerating Dynamics of Collective Attention”, studied the major digital platforms and found that over time, topics spiking in public interest last shorter and shorter times before wearing out. For example, trending hashtags in Twitter (now X) remained in the top 50 for 17.5 hours on average, but by 2016 that had dropped to 11.9 hours. Similar accelerations were found in Google and Reddit but not in Wikipedia. The appearance and disappearance of new phrases were analyzed across millions of books in Google Books published since 1880 and the pattern looked a lot like Twitter’s (now X).

(In a recent meeting I was asked if they should be worried because their ad recall scores appear to be dropping over a period of years. I explained that day-after TV ad recall scores averaged 26% when I first got into the business and were now 4%, so they shouldn’t take it personally.

I also mentioned that attention to ads and everything else has shortened dramatically during my tenure, and in our biggest media type today, digital, it is 1-2 seconds.

Since that meeting I’ve seen results of a neuro study where eye tracking showed that, out of hundreds of viewable social media ads, 90% of them got 1 second of attention or less – and this was in a laboratory forced viewing environment.)

Hari also interviewed Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famous psychologist who coined the term Flow state, and had been an advisor to The Human Effectiveness Institute, and the author makes the connection between the state of distraction blocking Flow state, and advises slowing down, getting more sleep, staying off devices in much the way you’re used to reading in my posts here.

The amount of research covered in this book is impressive, and the writing is excellent. Where my own work is additive to this superb body of work lies in two main areas. (These may be addressed later in Hari’s book which I am not quite halfway through. I’ll let you know.)

One is the art and science of introspection. It’s important to spend as much time in Flow state and this is accomplished by first learning how to bring on the Observer state. Mind Magic and Powerful Mind are my two books on that subject. Powerful Mind was serialized in this blog last year and the book version will be out this year.

The other is our culture’s lack of an inspiring sense of mission for the vast majority of people. This is what causes the desire for distraction and the willingness to be led like sheep down any path that gives us a pleasant diversion from lives devoid of purpose and meaning. This is the source of the awful notion of killing time.

My recommendations as to how to develop an inspiring sense of mission are also included in the latter two books, and in my science-spirituality-synthesis nonfiction books A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” and You Are The Universe: Imagine That. The essence of my message: it is quite possible that we ourselves are part of a consciousness of such power that it earns the word “God”, and that if we watch for clues, we find we are being guided by events toward sharing our gifts with the world.

Because my view of reality is so different, I felt it would be necessary to also write fiction books which illustrate what I mean by getting into various characters’ heads. Hence Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, my series of four (so far) sci-fi/alternate history novels. In fact, Episode 1, The Great Being, was just published and became available on this site and Amazon yesterday.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

If you have questions, please feel free to have a conversation with my Soopra AI.

Love,

Live chat with my avatar now.

Chapter 17 Predreaming

Seize the opportunities.

We can regain the use of our individuality, solve our problems by focused attention, be happier, and give back more to others. We can accelerate our growth by slowing down and choosing what to do next based on real value.

Chapter 17
Predreaming