Visual deconstruction via eye gazing and verbal debugging
Sep 19, 20253 min read
2025-08-09
A meditation technique introduced to me by a friend in Toronto
Doing it with my friend a few times seems to have “hacked my brain” such that I can now do this solo by staring at myself in the mirror whilst meditating, relaxing any tension, relaxing and opening awareness, letting the gaze go fuzzy. Sasha Chapin recommended kind of technique to me too, he’s a big fan of open awareness practice (and thinks that Ānāpānasati (Anapanasati) is a terrible instruction for beginners)
Shamil says that the left is what our eye actually sees, vs the right is what we construct
Presumably via lots of eye movements (Saccades)
Therefore, to eye gaze with someone in a dyad (or yourself in the mirror) = to gaze at a single thing, allowing the rest of your model (i.e. the visual information from the surrounding room) to degrade?
2. Strong “face priors”
It’s too late in the evening to try to explain this well
My understanding is that the brain has strong “face priors”
So, something like… to stare at a face, you probably have a stronger “face prior” than whatever else is in the visual field. Like, a face is much more “salient” to your brain than the wall behind it, the table to the left of it, etc. Those textures are much less “feature rich”, less highly conserved
Like, we have a lot of neural circuitry re: e.g. detecting someone’s mood via their facial expressions
Also something like how you have a “that’s a dog, not a polar bear” prior if you’re walking around in London, you perhaps have a stronger “that’s a face” prior than “that thing to the right is a wall”, because the wall is very featureless and less salient?
So, to gaze at a face, whilst minimising saccades (which is bloody hard to do!), allows you to deconstruct the surroundings, and weirdly the face mostly deconstructs too
3. Out-loud debugging
A cool feature of my friend’s technique, where we’d talk out loud about the connection between us in the room at that very moment, how it felt etc
Really helped to relax and deepen
Other diagrams, I need to go to bed
This emphasises the fact that the sensory data is different from the coherent whole that your brain constructs it into
👇 this will probably be pixellated as hell but the down arrow says “un-fabrication” and I think he calls it “climbing down the cortical hierarchy.” oh yes that’s one of the terms on the slide, lol
