Gratitude-- Turbocharged
Gratitude is the first of what we call the Six Portals– universal human experiences that contribute massively to fundamental well-being, and that can be vastly accelerated through assiduous use of AI and other tools.
The photo at the top is from a video about the Tau't Batu neolithic tribe, which lives in a volcanic cave in Palawan, Philippines. Tribal members are gathered together to give thanks to the Great Spirit for providing them with sustenance– in this case 5 very small birds. You can observe the whole scene starting at 28:47 of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zEhxkPgN4E. To our modern eyes, it seems almost absurd that these people devote to much time to expressing thankfulness for such a tiny reward, which must be shared with the whole tribe. But we can glean a lot from such videos about how gratitude contributes to mental health. These people have no technology, internet, smart phones, or AI, and yet their expression of a basic human emotion is immediately relatable.
We study primitive tribes a lot at AI Happiness Accelerator, because we want to know how feeling-states evolved over the last 300,000 years. Believe it or not, there are many tribes still extant on Earth that can shed light on human characteristics that have been evolving over that time period.
Contrast the gratitude practice of the Tau't Batu with the way moderns promote Thankfulness. Self-help gurus might ask us to take a few minutes in the morning every day thinking of and writing down 3 or 5 things we are grateful for.
There is nothing wrong with this, but it has limits. First, after a while it becomes difficult to think of NEW things to add to the list. Typically someone is thankful for their spouse, their children, their pets. But most of us quickly run out of new items, so we tend to repeat the same ones day after day.
So why not enlist the aid of technology so that we can make the expression of gratitude eternally fresh?
At AHA we employ AI-assisted social media and internet phenomena to supercharge the gratitude experience. In our Zoom groups we share the screen, and type 'Gratitude' into images.google.com. This gives us all access to hundreds of images that evoked the most gratitude among all of Humanity over the last week. We scroll down, and as a group remark on the different websites depicted. Eventually someone on the Zoom call says "click on that one" and we explore it together.
This makes gratitude a shared social, and almost spiritual, experience for everyone. We feel a kinship with our fellows, not quite accessible to the solitary person who follows a morning routine of sitting alone and giving thanks for family and friends. Gratitude explored in a group setting is far more powerful.
Two years ago we discovered a powerful addition to this practice. We now split the Zoom screen; one half still displays all the web phenomena certified by Google or Bing to have invoked the most thankfulness in the last week. We scroll down for 5 minutes or so, manifesting hundreds of these images.
But the OTHER half of the screen is a gallery view of the participants. The majority of them display visages which powerfully register a clear sense of gratitude in action. It turns out that sharing with fellow humans what has brought about an emotion in thousands of people over the last few days, and then WATCHING the faces of others who are undergoing the same affectual event, supercharges the feeling a hundredfold.
Imagine what it's like to experience this, and then watch again the section of the Tau't Batu video in which tribal members give thanks for the birds.
Now you have an example of how AI, together with social media, online video, and the Internet, can instantly accelerate our experience of feeling-states to a maximum level unknown by previous generations.
Having seen how this works with gratitude, perhaps you can envisage how, if you apply some imagination, the same thing can be done with other universally accessible human peak states, including awe, laughter, curiosity, storytelling, and the invocation of communal self-sacrifice often called the Hero's Journey.
We will go through some of these one by one in the following posts, to share what we've learned in inculcating these states effectively in many over the last 9 years. As you read them, keep in mind that you can use these protocols to invent your own unique affectual experiences.
