Marius K:
Just wondered if any of you guys on the AF path has had any marked cognitive improvement as a result of practice. The impression that I gained is that the actualism method is an excellent tool for becoming happy and harmless and that's about it. Personally, I'm more interested in cognitive advancements as I have a relatively stable and enjoyable emotional life. Partly because I want to keep my intuition, I'm not interested in expunging/deleting the affective faculty. I think that intuition and cognition form a formidable duet when used correctly, supplementing and complementing each other. That's how I see things at this stage.
I am not really on the AF path, so read the following with that in mind. I have reached what seems to be direct mode, with the fading of self into the present moment. I have, however, studied the subject of intuition and it's role in cognition from a philosophical/psychological/cognitive perspective, which hopefully will help. I also hope it is understandable, my writing tends to get somewhat dense when discussing these sorts of things.
Now, i'm not sure what exactly you mean by intuition, or what the actually free people mean by it. But there are a couple of ways in which we could look at this.
Affect, of the sort that seems to cease in direct mode, is, in addition to being a cause of suffering and (seemingly) self, also a mode of representing information. I know certain things through the arising of emotions, directly about my own state (especially said self and the way it relates to things), and indirectly about the state of my surroundings. This knowledge-presenting-as-affect is usually subtle, such as a sense of fear, dislike or attachment in regard to some object. When i argue that knowledge-presenting-as-affect actually tells us something about the world, it is because these responses come about through repeated interaction with the world. Through this interaction we learn skilled ways of responding and acting, ways that do use the linguistic/conceptual mind.
You do not think through how to turn on a bicycle, the master artisan has a complexity of "feel" for the tool and object that language is at a loss to express.
Now, what i call intuition a subset of the arising of "nonconceptual" knowing of this sort - Intuiting something means that you get a sense of knowing, but have no knowing of the reasons why this knowing should be correct, or how you arrived at it.
Here comes the point. This knowing can, but does not necessarily, present itself as emotion, and the affective faculty may in some cases be a part of whatever nonconscious cognitive process allows you to arrive at this result.
Thus, i would, hypothetically, expect some period of adjustment and some loss of the immediacy and flow of your skill in some areas, as you adjust to new ways of processing and representing knowledge.
That said, based on my own very small experience, i would also expect several other kinds of cognitive ability change. For much of what we do, affect seems more a distorted filter and a distraction than it does an aid. The increased clarity and reduction of distractions should increase your ability to think clearly and avoid some mistakes that come from attachment and dislike (yes, even in math).
Additionally, the ability to actually get anything useful done with your cognitive ability seems very bound up in affective factors. If i recall correctly, conscientiousness (in the five-factor personality model) is more important than all cognitive measures in predicting academic and workplace success. This is one that can swing both ways. Many major academic works seem to me the result of affective obsession, and an AF person might not be as motivated to undertake life-consuming projects, and thus also miss some of the cognitive benefits of working 24/7/365 on a specific task, such as more and more mental faculties turning towards the work, to the exclusion of everyday concerns.
I hope this helps you a bit. I'm going to finish with my best (but very uncertain) estimate: AF will be an enhancement of your ability to do meaningful cognitive work in general, but might be a hindrance to working at the very highest levels in a given field.
Some of the experienced actualists on the forum can hopefully tell us how wrong i am in all this.