Selfish neuremes adapt to prevent you from reprioritizing

• "Neureme" is my most general term for units of selection in the brain.^[1] 
  • The term is agnostic about what exactly the physical thing is that's being selected. It just refers to whatever is implementing a neural function and is selected as a unit.
  • So depending on use-case, a "neureme" can semantically resolve to a single neuron, a collection of neurons, a neural ensemble/assembly/population-vector/engram, a set of ensembles, a frequency, or even dendritic substructure if that plays a role.
• For every activity you're engaged with, there are certain neuremes responsible for specializing at those tasks.
• These neuremes are strengthened or weakened/changed in proportion to how effectively they can promote themselves to your attention.
  • "Attending to" assemblies of neurons means that their firing-rate maxes out (gamma frequency), and their synapses are flushed with acetylcholine, which is required for encoding memories and queuing them for consolidation during sleep.
• So we should expect that neuremes are selected for effectively keeping themselves in attention, even in cases where that makes you less effective at tasks which tend to increase your genetic fitness.
• Note that there's hereditary selection going on at the level of genes, and at the level of neuremes. But since genes adapt much slower, the primary selection-pressures neuremes adapt to arise from short-term inter-neuronal competitions. Genes are limited to optimizing the general structure of those competitions, but they can only do so in very broad strokes, so there's lots of genetically-misaligned neuronal competition going on.
  • A corollary of this is that neuremes are stuck in a tragedy of the commons: If all neuremes "agreed to" never develop any misaligned mechanisms for keeping themselves in attention—and we assume this has no effect on the relative proportion of attention they receive—then their relative fitness would stay constant at a lower metabolic cost overall. But since no such agreement can be made, there's some price of anarchy wrt the cost-efficiency of neuremes.
• Thus, whenever some neuremes uniquely associated with a cognitive state are *dominant* in attention, whatever mechanisms they've evolved for persisting the state are going to be at maximum power, and this is what makes the brain reluctant to gain perspective when on stimulants.

A technique for making the brain trust prioritization/perspectivization

So, in conclusion, maybe this technique could work:

• If I feel like my brain is sucking me into an unproductive rabbit-hole, set a timer for 60 seconds during which I can check my todo-list and prioritize what I ought to do next.
• But, before the end of that timer, I will have set another timer (e.g. 10 min) during which I commit to the previous task before I switch to whatever I decided.
• The hope is that my brain learns to trust that gaining perspective doesn't automatically mean we have to abandon the present task, and this means it can spend less energy on inhibiting signals that try to gain perspective.

By experience, I know something like this has worked for:

• Making me trust my task-list
  • When my brain trusts that all my tasks are in my todo-list, and that I will check my todo-list every day, it no longer bothers reminding me about stuff at random intervals.
• Reducing dystonic distractions
  • When I deliberately schedule stuff I want to do less (e.g. masturbation, cooking, twitter), and committing to actually *do* those things when scheduled, my brain learns to trust that, and stops bothering me with the desires when they're not scheduled.

So it seems likely that something in this direction could work, even if this particular technique fails.

1. ^{^}

   The "-eme" suffix inherits from "emic unit", e.g. genes, memes, sememes, morphemes, lexemes, etc. It refers to the minimum indivisible things that compose to serve complex functions. The important notion here is that even if the eme has complex substructure, all its components are selected as a unit, which means that all subfunctions hitchhike on the net fitness of all other subfunctions.