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You know all the stuff we\u2019ve been talking about here the past few years - mental mountains, trapped priors, relaxed beliefs under psychedelics? The new keyword for all of that is \u201ccanalization\u201d. At least that\u2019s what I gather from a giant paper recently published by some of the leading thinkers in computational psychiatry (Karl Friston, Robin Carhart-Harris, etc).

A quick review: you can model the brain as an energy landscape . . .

. . . with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional space

Situations and stimuli plant \u201cyou\u201d at some point on the landscape, and then you \u201croll down\u201d towards some local minimum. If you\u2019re the sort of person who repeats \u201cI hate myself, I hate myself\u201d in a lot of different situations, then you can think of the action of saying \u201cI hate myself\u201d as an\xa0attractor - a particularly steep, deep valley which it\u2019s easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Many situations are close to the slopes of the \u201cI hate myself\u201d valley, so it\u2019s easy to roll down and get caught there.

What are examples of valleys other than saying \u201cI hate myself\u201d? The authors suggest habits. If you always make the sign of the cross when passing a graveyard, there\u2019s a steep slope from the situation of passing a graveyard to the action of signing the cross. We can be even broader: something really basic like edge-detection in the visual system is a valley. When you see a scene, you almost always want to automatically do edge-detection on it. Walking normally is a valley; there\u2019s a certain correct sequence of muscle movements, and you don\u2019t want to start rotating your ligaments in some weird direction halfway through.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-canal-papers

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