By Chris
Has anybody ever left here, driving home, and noticed that your vision was a little blurry, or you couldn’t focus quite as well?
I have found that on many occasions when I’m driving home, it takes a while for me to get my clarity of vision back. I always just chalked it up to there being something funky happening with meditation that affects my vision.
Well, I recently discovered that I think I have unraveled the mystery.
I happened to be driving one time and heard some story on the radio about the local public library. I thought, “I haven’t been to my local public library in a long, long time.” So, I went and was just browsing around and saw an audiobook by Daniel Kahneman called Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is a kind of famous book many of you may have heard of.
He describes in this book these two systems of cognition, or our mental processing systems. There’s a system that’s very automatic, what he calls “thinking fast.” It just generates thoughts, ideas, impressions, and desires all the time with no effort. It’s this effortless system.
The other system, “thinking slow,” is more deliberative. It’s the kind of thinking you do if you have to figure out how to get from here to Albuquerque and how much gas it’s going to take. The book talks about the work that was done to understand the inner relationship between these two systems.
Researchers came up with a way of measuring the cognitive load of the “thinking slow” system. They devised an experiment where they would force people to have really high levels of System 2 thinking, which is very tiring. For example, they would be fed a four-digit number, and they had to add one to each digit and say that back. It was a way to create a measurable thinking load for their experiments.
And the way they were able to determine the degree of cognitive load is that there’s a phenomenon in the body where the dilation of our pupils is directly proportional to the cognitive load. That’s how they would measure your level of cognitive load—they would measure the dilation of the pupils.
It dawned on me: that’s it!
It’s the heavy lifting that we do here to really try to follow the breath and stay in control. All that fighting and effort.
That’s my sharing for today. I hope it might be relevant to more of you than just those who have experienced that. And maybe your eyes probably snap back a lot faster than my old eyes do!
Hakone Zendo 