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Attention and the Treewalk

nickcammarata.com · 3,734 words · saved by 1 readers

Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, had a theory of the brain he called the Reduction Valve. The theory went that the brain learned internal boring mechanisms to desensitize us to the world's innate interestingness. Animals that focused on food and sex rather than appreciating the world around them survived, and ones that evolved mechanisms to inhibit their senses from ever experiencing the true information around us did even better. Huxley invented this theory after a positive experience with mescaline, a psychoactive chemical akin to LSD or psilocybin producing mushrooms. These chemicals often give their consumers a feeling that the word is more enchanted than they realized before the experience. While it might feel subjectively like there's an increase the brain's activity, psychedelics actually decrease blood flow throughout the brain. Hence, the reduction valve theory. More recently, physicist Donald Hoffman proposed a similar idea called The Interface Theory of Percepti

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