Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Physics of Non-duality

 I want to pass on this lucid posting by "Sean L" of Boston to the community.wakingup.com site:

The physics of nonduality

In this context I mean “nonduality” as it refers to there being no real subject-object separation or duality. One of the implications of physics that originally led me to investigate notions of “awakening” and “no-self” is the idea that there aren’t really any separate objects. We can form very self-consistent and useful concepts of objects (a car, an atom, a self, a city), but from the perspective of the universe itself such objects don’t actually exist as well-defined independent “things.” All that’s real is the universe as one giant, self-interacting, dynamic, but ultimately singular “thing.” If you try to partition off one part of the universe (a self, a galaxy) from the rest, you’ll find that you can’t actually do so in a physically meaningful way (and certainly not one that persists over time). All parts of the universe constantly interact with their local environment, exchanging mass and energy. Objectively, physics says that all points in spacetime are characterized by values of different types of fields and that’s all there is to it. Analogy: you might see this word -->self<-- on your computer screen and think of it as an object, but really it’s just a pattern of independent adjacent pixel values that you’re mapping to a concept. There is no objectively physically real “thing” that is the word self (just a well defined and useful concept). 
 

This is akin to the idea that few if any of the cells making up your body now are the same as when you were younger. Or the idea that the exact pattern you consider to be “you” in this moment will not be numerically identical to what you consider “you” in the next picosecond. Or the idea that there is nothing that I could draw a closed physical boundary around that perfectly encloses the essence of “you” such that excluding anything inside that boundary means it would no longer contain “you” and including anything currently outside the boundary would mean it contains more than just “you.” This is true even if you try to draw the boundary around only your brain or just specific parts of your brain. I think this is a fun philosophical idea, but also one that often gets the response of “ok, yeah, sure I guess that’s all logically consistent,” but then still feels esoteric. It often feels like it’s just semantics, or splitting hairs, or somehow not something that really threatens the idea of identity or of a physical self. 
 

I was recently discussing with another WakingUp user that what made this notion far more visceral and convincing to me (enough to motivate me to go out in search of what “I” actually am, which has ultimately led me here) was realizing that even the very idea of trying to draw a boundary around a “thing” is objectively meaningless. So, I thought I’d share what I mean by that in case others find it interesting too :) !

Here are four pictures. The two on the left are pictures of very simple boundaries of varying thickness that one might try to draw around a singular “thing” (perhaps a self?) to demonstrate that it is indeed a well defined object. The two pictures on the right are of the exact same “boundaries” as on the left, but as they would be seen by a creature that evolved to perceive reality in the momentum basis. I’ll better explain what that means in a moment, but the key point is that the pictures on the left and right are (as far as physics or objective reality is concerned) exactly equivalent representations of the same part of reality. Both sets of pictures are perceptual “pointers” to the same part of the universe. You literally cannot say that one is a more veridical or more accurate depiction of reality than the other, because they are equivalent mathematical descriptions of the same underlying objective structure. Humans just happen to have a bias toward the left images.
 

So then… what could these “boundaries” be enclosing in the pictures on the right? I sure can’t tell. Nor do I think it even makes sense to ask the question! Our sense that there are discrete “objects” in the universe (including selves) seems intuitive when perceiving the universe as shown on the left (as we do). But when perceiving the exact same reality as shown on the right I find this belief very quickly breaks down. There simply is no singular, bounded, contained “thing” on the right. Anything that might at first appear on the left to be a separable object will be completely mixed up with and inseparable from its “surroundings” when viewed on the right, and vice-versa. The boundary itself clearly isn’t even a boundary. Boundaries are (very useful!) concepts, but they have no ultimate objective physical meaning.

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Some technical details for those interested (ignore this unless interested):

You can think of a basis like a fancy coordinate system. Analogy: I can define the positions of all the billiard balls on a pool table by defining an XY coordinate system on the table and listing the numerical coordinates of each ball. But if I stretch and/or rotate that coordinate system then all the numbers representing those same positions of the balls will change. The balls themselves haven’t changed positions, but my coordinate system-dependent “perception” of the balls is totally different. They're different ways of perceiving the same fundamental structure (billiard ball positions), even though that structure itself exists independently of any coordinate system. The left and right images are analogous to different coordinate systems, but in a more fundamental way.

 

In quantum mechanics the correct description of reality is the wave function. For an entangled system of particles you don’t have a separate wave function for each particle. Instead, you have one multi-particle wave function for the whole system (strictly speaking one could argue the entire universe is most correctly described as a single giant and stupidly complicated wave function). There is no way to break up this wave function into separate single-particle wave functions (that’s what it means for the particles to be entangled). What that means is from the perspective of true reality, there literally aren’t separate distinct particles. That’s not just an interpretation – it’s a testable (falsifiable) statement of physical reality and one that has been extensively verified experimentally. So, if you think of yourself as a distinct object, or at least as a dynamical evolving system of interacting (but themselves distinct) particles, sorry, but that’s simply not how we understand reality to actually work :P .
 

However, to do anything useful we have to write down the wave function (e.g. so we can do calculations with it). We have to represent it mathematically. This requires choosing a basis in which to write it down, much like choosing a coordinate system with which to be able to write down the numerical positions of the billiard balls. A human-intuitive basis is the position basis, which is what’s shown in the left images. However, a completely equivalent way to write down the same wave function is in the momentum basis, which is what’s shown in the right images. There also exist many (really, infinite) other possible bases. Some bases will be more convenient than others depending on the type of calculation you’re trying to do. Ultimately, all bases are arbitrary and none are objectively real, because the universe doesn’t need to “write down” a wave function to compute it. The universe just is. To me, the equivalent representation of the same underlying reality in an infinite diversity of possible Hilbert Spaces (i.e. using different bases) much more viscerally drives home the point that there really are no separate objects (including selves). That’s not just philosophy! There’s just one objective reality (one thing, no duality) that can be perceived in an infinite variety of ways, each with different pros and cons. And our way of perceiving reality lends itself to concepts of separate things and objects.

 

There are other parts of physics I didn’t get into here that I think demonstrate that the true nature of the universe must be nondual (maybe to be discussed later). For example, the lack of room for free will or the indistinguishability of particles. If you actually read this whole post, thanks for your time and attention, and I hope you found it as interesting as I do!

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Titles and URLs for key MindBlog posts on selves

I pass on a chronological list of titles and URLs of MindBlog posts assembled in preparation for a video chat with a European MindBlog reader:

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2006/03/apostles-creed-for-humanistic.html

Some rambling on "Selves" and “Purpose”
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/10/some-rambling-on-selves-and-purpose.html

Self, purpose, and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations (or…Why why aren’t we all enlightened?)
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2020/05/self-purpose-and-tribal-mentality-as.html

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2020/03/mindblog-passes-on-note-on-relief-of.html

Points on having a self and free will.
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2021/03/points-on-having-self-and-free-will.html

I am not my problem
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/06/i-am-not-my-problem.html

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times?         https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/11/the-non-duality-industry-as-panacea-for.html

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/01/enlightenment-habituation-and-renewal.html

A quick MindBlog riff on what a self is….
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/01/a-quick-mindblog-riff-on-what-self-is.html

MindBlog paragraphs bloviating on the nature of the self ask Google Bard and Chat GPT 4 for help
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/05/mindblog-paragraphs-bloviating-on.html

A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/07/a-mindblog-paragraph-on-non-dual.html

Constructing Self and World
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/09/constructing-self-and-world.html  

Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind - a condensation of my ideas
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/10/anthropic-claudes-version-of-my-writing.html  

A Materialist's Credo
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/10/a-materialists-credo.html

How our genes support our illusory selves - the "Baldwin effect"
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/11/how-our-genes-support-our-illusory.html











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Friday, January 05, 2024

Capturing non-dual reality in language

For my own future reference and for MindBlog readers interested in my previous MindBlog posts on non-duality,  I want to pass on the start of a discussion thread in the Waking Up Community at WakingUp.com written by Rish Magal, London, U.K, on the subject of capturing nondual reality in language. One of the discussants makes reference to the Laukkonen and Slagter article whose ideas were referenced in my recent lecture on New Perspectives on how our Minds Work.  


From Rish Magal,   London, UK

Prompted by a really great discussion in another thread, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try and express some important nondual insights in English. Comments and responses would be very much appreciated 😀.
Disclaimers:
    1    Despite being a very long post (sorry!), this is only a very very rough outline. I’m cutting lots of corners, and it would take a book to explain and defend all these ideas.
    2    I needed to stretch some of our normal concepts. This is not surprising, since our concepts are integral to a misguided way of looking at the world. I’ve tried to explain the stretching, but I might not have succeeded to your satisfaction!
    3    This is only one attempt to describe nondual reality. I’m not claiming it’s The One True Way. The purpose of the exercise is to explore whether it’s possible to capture the essence of nondual reality. If this version looks at all promising, other versions are surely possible too.


I’ll label each step, in case anyone wants to respond to an individual piece.

A) What we call a “self” is a useful fiction. Humans use it to plan their interactions with each other, to hold each other accountable, to organise their own behaviour … and a host of other purposes.

B) The fictional “self” is created by the human brain, acting in concert with other human brains. From cognitive science comes the idea that the self is part of a predictive model used by the brain (e.g. Anil Seth). From philosophy comes the idea that a self is a ‘Centre of Narrative Gravity’ (Dan Dennett). Perhaps both of these can be accurate together.

C) From psychology, we know that the human brain does not understand itself very well at all. It has very limited understanding of its own reasons for acting (Michael Gazzaniga). In fact it can easily be mistaken about whether it has even acted at all (Daniel Wagner).

D) There is no ‘Free Will’ or responsibility for actions. (Sam Harris makes a strong case on this, but there are several ways to argue for this conclusion.) Causal chains move through human bodies in the same way that they move through billiard balls. There’s no agency in a human brain, much less a “self”.

E) Perhaps the biggest flaw in our language is the idea that objects cause events. We reify objects with nouns, and causing with verbs. It would be more accurate to say: reality is a succession of events. But even that is too dualistic. More accurate still: there is simply one continuously unfolding process. Events inside human brains are like tiny ripples in this huge universe-sized sea.

F) By various means*, a human brain can come to Realise** that its habitual way of looking at the world is badly flawed, and can grasp one or more of the preceding points.

G) Such a realisation is usually accompanied by a huge emotional sense of relief, release, and bliss — especially the first few times.

H) A human brain which doesn’t have access to a structure of revised concepts (such as the one outlined here) will struggle to interpret its own experience. It is likely to attach to the emotional content, and try very hard to recapture that.

I) Over the centuries, many human brains which have glimpsed these truths have struggled and failed to express them in language. (Until very recent advances in science, psychology & philosophy, it would have been almost impossible to fill out a plausible account of what's going on.) Over the centuries, it has become common to say that these insights cannot be expressed in language.

J) My first claim is that nondual insights can be expressed in language. These steps are one attempt to do so.

K) *My second claim is that describing nondual reality in language (however imperfectly) can be extremely helpful in triggering a brain to grasp these insights. And help it return to them reliably.

L) **By "Realise" I mean something beyond (but including) understanding and agreeing with a statement. "Realising" means deeply believing it to the point of feeling in my bones that it is true.

As an analogy: I understand and believe that I'm going to die one day. But in terms of my daily activities it doesn't really feel like it's true, and my behaviour is basically indistinguishable from someone who thought he was immortal 😁. If tomorrow a neurologist shows me a scan of a huge tumour in my brain, I will Realise the truth that I am going to die in an entirely different way, and my behaviour is likely to change radically.

Note that I already have all the concepts I need to understand this truth. I think the shift from simple understanding & cognitive assent, to what I'm calling Realisation, is a much more immediate and tangible kind of belief, with much more emotional content. I now feel it to be true, as well as simply agreeing with the statement intellectually. But the content of the belief is the same, and can be expressed in language and concepts.
 
M) In this brain, the experienced shift from understanding to Realising usually produces symptoms like laughter, releasing, euphoria, connectedness, presence, empathy, equanimity. But after many such experiences, their intensity varies (at least in this brain). Importantly (IMO): these feelings/experiences are not the point of meditation. The point is the insights themselves — to realise/recognise the nondual nature of reality.

N) These statements above are not an attempt to capture the experience of realising/recognising them. There’s definitely a limit to the usefulness of words in conveying an experience. When people say that the experience of realisation cannot be captured in language, I would agree (though I think we can say a few things about it). But that’s not the case I’m making here. My case is that statements about nondual reality can be expressed in language, and doing so can be extremely helpful.

O) This list is not meant to be exhaustive. No doubt there are more statements about nondual reality which can be expressed in language, which this brain hasn’t grasped. If “your” brain knows of some, please post about them! Thankswhich can be expressed in language, which this brain hasn’t grasped. If “your” brain knows of some, please post about them! Thanks

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4

This post is using MindBlog to archive a further example example of the sort shown in Monday’s post ...of GPT bots editing  a paragraph I wrote, this one being on non-dual awareness.  The paragraph:

The fact that  there is no there there means it. Empty is empty. The ground state is just the mute body doing its thing. From its depths storylines rise and fall, bonbons to savor or ignore. The body can know that it has found a new ground state, and can be no longer willing to just play nice if the upstairs word salad is dinking around with or threatening its peace. It can withdraw from the fray. It can rest as a calm non-dual self centered within a cosmic perspective of time and space that views the rise and fall of human civilizations during the anthropocene as minor dances in the music of time.

After incorporating some changes suggested by Google Bard and GPT4:

When we say something is empty, we mean just that: it contains nothing. Our natural baseline or 'ground state' is the body performing its automatic functions without our conscious intervention. From the body's inherent depths, various thoughts or experiences emerge and recede, like bonbons we can savor or ignore. The body can grow to know that it has found a new ground state in the present moment, a ground state of awareness that no longer needs to be caught up in word salads of disruptive thoughts that can threaten its peace.  It can withdraw from the fray and can rest as a calm non-dual state of being centered within a cosmic perspective of time and space that can view the rise and fall of human civilizations during the anthropocene as minor dances in the music of time.


Saturday, June 10, 2023

How do we define spirituality and what it’s role is in our daily lives?

This post is primarily directed to Austin TX people who will be attending the Sunday 2 p.m. July 2 meeting of the Austin Rainbow Forum that is now in its 5th year. We will be discussing the topic of what spirituality means to each of us, and what its role in our lives is. Look below to see how the three major AI chatbots responded to my request for some guidance on how to moderate such a discussion.  Also I'll pass on this youtube video  titled "What To Remember To Be Happy" pointed to by Rainbow Forum discussant David Soileau. 

Question to the chat bots:  

I have to moderate a discussion session on the topic of spirituality in our daily lives. What advice would you give me? How would you define spirituality? 

Response from ChatGPT 4:

That sounds like an interesting topic, Deric! Here are some suggestions for leading a discussion on spirituality in daily life:
Start by defining what spirituality means to you and how you understand it. This will help participants understand the context of the discussion and provide a starting point for exploring the topic.
Encourage participants to share their own experiences of spirituality in their daily lives. This can include practices such as meditation, prayer, or simply taking time for reflection and introspection.
Explore the ways in which spirituality can help us cope with the challenges and stresses of everyday life. For example, some people find that spiritual practices help them find meaning and purpose in difficult situations or provide a sense of inner peace and calm.
Discuss the role that community and social connections can play in spirituality. Many people find that sharing their spiritual journey with others and being part of a supportive community is an important aspect of their spiritual practice.
Finally, encourage participants to think about how they can incorporate spirituality into their daily lives in practical ways. This might involve setting aside time each day for meditation or prayer, making a conscious effort to be more mindful and present in their interactions with others, or finding ways to give back to their community in a spiritually meaningful way.
As for the definition of spirituality, it can mean different things to different people. Generally, spirituality refers to a sense of connection to something larger than oneself, whether that be a higher power, the natural world, or a broader sense of humanity. It often involves a search for meaning, purpose, and transcendence beyond the material world.

Response from Google Bard: 

Spirituality is a broad concept that can be defined in many ways. For some people, it is a belief in a higher power or a connection to something larger than themselves. For others, it is a sense of inner peace or well-being. Spirituality can also be expressed through religious practices, meditation, or simply spending time in nature.
When leading a discussion on spirituality, it is important to be respectful of all beliefs. There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to spirituality, and everyone's experience is unique. The goal of the discussion should be to learn more about each other's beliefs and to explore how spirituality can impact our daily lives.
Here are some tips for leading a discussion on spirituality:
Be respectful of all beliefs.
Encourage open and honest discussion.
Share your own experiences, if you are comfortable doing so.
Ask questions to learn more about each other's beliefs.
Be open to new ideas.
Remember that there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to spirituality.
Here are some questions you could ask to start the discussion:
What does spirituality mean to you?
How does spirituality impact your daily life?
What are some of your favorite spiritual practices?
What are some of the challenges you face in your spiritual journey?
What advice would you give to someone who is new to spirituality?
I hope this helps!

Response from Microsoft Bing: 

Leading a discussion session on spirituality can be a great way to explore this topic with others. Here are some tips that might help you:

Start with an icebreaker activity that allows participants to introduce themselves and get to know each other better.
Be clear about your expectations and intentions for the discussion session.
Use inclusive language that welcomes everyone to participate.
Ask open-ended questions that encourage participants to share their thoughts and feelings.
Listen actively to what others are saying and show respect for their opinions.
Encourage participants to share their own experiences and insights.
Be prepared to handle any conflicts or disagreements that may arise during the discussion.
Spirituality can mean different things to different people, but it generally refers to a sense of connection with something greater than oneself. It can involve a belief in God or a higher power, but it can also be more broadly defined as a sense of purpose or meaning in life.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Sunday, April 23, 2023

How does a meditation app move toward becoming a corporate behemoth?

I've spoken highly of Sam Harris' "Waking Up" App, which now clocks me as having done 776 practice or theory sessions.  I would recommend his theory sessions on the fundamentals of meditation, the illusory self, and free will are the best I have come across. My use of the App has diminished as I have become habituated and mildly allergic to Harris' spoken delivery style, but the continual recruitment of new contributing gurus alleviates that problem. I could wish he would put all of his own material down in written form.   The app has been so successful that I'm not surprised to have two emails I recently received that I can't resist passing on in their entirety.  It would appear that "Waking Up" is moving for the big time, to become a complete and self sustaining corporate entity, even opening up a retail shop selling personal items. Perhaps this is permitting the intense Mr. Harris to pass on some of his chores to others, dial back his direct involvement, and take more of his deep breaths.  Here are the emails:

Over the past several months, we’ve put out two calls to our members: one for creators and another for potential show hosts. We’ve been blown away by the extraordinary amount of talent we’ve seen, and have already begun to develop various projects with our members.  

We know there are many brilliant people who use and love the app. And whatever we do out in the world, we prefer it to be with members 

So, we want to know who you are. 

Here are some roles we’re interested in, specifically:
 
  • Vocal producer for original series (working with our contributors to shape their content and delivery)
  • Creative marketing lead for various digital campaigns we’re planning to run 
  • Actors for potential video shorts 
  • Copy editors for transcription reviews (with a basic grasp of Buddhist and Hindu concepts and terms)
  • Corporate finance experts with CFO experience
  • Apparel executives (specifically, if you own an apparel brand or have deep experience in the industry)
 
But those are just for more immediate opportunities. Whether you’re a musician, actor, comedian, journalist, poet, lawyer, filmmaker, marketer, designer, author, artist, technologist, engineer, meditation teacher, scholar, or anyone else, we want to know about you. 

We have no idea what might come of this, but we’re excited to continue growing Waking Up—and, as we do, we’d like it to be with some of you. Please know that, while we won’t be able to get back to most people, we’ll read every submission. 
 
 
Feel free to send us a note at hey@wakingup.com, too. We’re looking forward to learning about all the expertise, know-how, and creativity within the Waking Up community.
 
THE WAKING UP TEAM



The Waking Up shop is now live. 

We have a very limited number of t-shirts, hoodies, pens, mugs, keychains, and other items. 

We may or may not offer more items in the future, so we encourage you to grab whichever items you like. 

Thanks for your support of Waking Up—and for being a member. 
 
THE WAKING UP TEAM
 

Friday, April 14, 2023

Breath - Some basic facts and instructions

I’ve enjoyed reading through James Nestor’s book “Breath - The new science of a lost art,”  and I tried out some of the exercises he points to, such as Tummo, which increases breathing to deliver a brief shock therapy to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems that regulate breathing, thus temporarily resetting to a more appropriate balance between the two.  He describes numerous useful breathing therapies that have been discovered, forgotten, and then rediscovered over the past 3000 years by different cultural and religious traditions, and in the past 300 years by more modern medical and scientific insights.  Nestor: “Breathing is a key input. From what I’ve learned in the past decade, that 30 pounds of air that passes through our lungs every day and that 1.7 pounds of oxygen our cells consume is as important as what we eat or how much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health.”

The epilogue to his book provides a very concise list of breathing instructions that can serve as preventative maintenance to assist in maintaining balance in the body so that milder problems don’t blossom into more serious health issues and might restore balance when it is lost.  Here is Nestor’s list, with an assist from ChatGPT 4 condensations of the book’s text that I have tweaked where appropriate.  The condensations are amazing.  They cut through the folksy personal reader-friendly stuff to give the basic facts presented.

In a nutshell, this is what we’ve learned:

SHUT YOUR MOUTH    

A 20-day study found that chronic mouth breathing has significant negative effects on health, including increased stress hormones, risk of sinus infections, high blood pressure, and reduced heart rate variability. Participants experienced persistent nocturnal suffocation, snoring, and sleep apnea, potentially leading to hypertension, metabolic and cognitive problems. Although some measurements remained unchanged, the overall impact was negative, with participants experiencing fatigue, irritation, anxiety, and other discomforts. The human body has evolved to breathe through both the nose and mouth for a reason, and chronic mouth breathing is not a normal or healthy behavior.

BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE

Upon switching back to nasal breathing, participants experienced improved health, with normalized blood pressure, carbon dioxide levels, and heart rates. Snoring reduced dramatically and nasal infections cleared up. Nasal breathing also enhanced physical performance on a stationary bike. The positive outcomes of nasal breathing inspired further research into the effects of sleep tape on snoring and sleep apnea. The experience emphasized the importance of nasal breathing for overall well-being and debunked misconceptions about chronic allergies, congestion, and sleep issues being natural parts of life.

EXHALE

Carl Stough spent a half century reminding his students of how to get all the air out of our bodies so that we could take more in. He emphasized the importance of proper exhalation to improve various aspects of health and performance. By training individuals to exhale longer and more fully, he enabled emphysema patients to recover significantly, opera singers to improve their voices, asthmatics to prevent attacks, and Olympic sprinters to win gold medals. Practicing full exhalations and engaging more of the lung capacity can enhance breathing efficiency, leading to better overall performance and well-being.

CHEW

Ancient skeletons and pre-Industrial Age skulls exhibit large sinus cavities, strong jaws, and straight teeth, attributed to extensive chewing. Unlike other bones, facial bones can continue to grow and remodel throughout life, allowing for improvements in breathing ability at any age. To achieve this, incorporate rougher, raw, and heartier foods into your diet, similar to what our ancestors consumed, which require more chewing effort. Practicing proper mouth posture with lips together, teeth slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth is also important.

BREATHE MORE, ON OCCASION

While over breathing can be harmful, practicing controlled, heavy breathing for short, intense periods, such as in Tummo, Sudarshan Kriya, and vigorous pranayamas, can be therapeutic. These techniques intentionally stress the body to reset its normal functions and improve overall well-being. Conscious heavy breathing helps us gain control over our autonomic nervous systems and bodies, transforming us from passive passengers to active pilots of our own health.

HOLD YOUR BREATH

Dr. Donald Klein's research on chemoreceptor flexibility, carbon dioxide, and anxieties inspired further investigation into the connections between the amygdalae, breathing, and anxiety. The amygdalae, which govern perceptions of fear and emotions, also control aspects of breathing, and communication between chemoreceptors and the amygdalae is crucial. People with anxiety may suffer from connection issues between these areas, causing them to unintentionally hold their breath and ultimately panic. As a result, their bodies may adapt by over breathing to maintain low carbon dioxide levels. This suggests that anxiety might not be a psychological problem, but rather a natural reaction to an emergency in the body. Further research is needed to test this theory, which could explain why slow and steady breathing therapy is effective for panic, anxiety, and other fear-based conditions.

HOW WE BREATHE MATTERS

The perfect breath, according to the author, involves inhaling for 5.5 seconds and exhaling for 5.5 seconds, resulting in 5.5 breaths per minute and a total of about 5.5 liters of air. Practicing this perfect breathing promotes peak efficiency in the body. Many devices and apps are being developed to help people breathe at this optimal rate. However, the simplest approach requires no technology or equipment and can be practiced anywhere, anytime. This technique has been used by our ancestors for thousands of years, and the author uses it as a way to return to normalcy after periods of stress or inactivity.

 

An appendix to Nestor's book describes several different breathing techniques (such as alternative nostril breathing) and an extended bibliography available at James Nestor's website offers video and audio tutorial for numerous breathing techniques.


Monday, April 03, 2023

Can we fight cancer in ourselves with thoughts?

David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medical Schoo, has done an interesting piece on his own experience with a tumor in his heart, written 23 months after being told to expect to live 6 to 18 months after radiation and chemotherapy. The remnant tumor has become stable, and no metastases have developed.
And so, at the age of 61, I find myself in the weird and liminal state of having a terminal illness but feeling fine and having no immediate threat to my health...Since my diagnosis, I have received a lot of unsolicited medical advice. Much of this fell into the category of “mind/body medicine.”... meditate, breathe, pray or exercise in a certain way...when the explanations offered for the efficacy of mind/body medicine employ vague terms like “energy flow” and “resonance,” my baloney detector rings out strong and clear.
...part of my motivation to study neuroscience has been to understand the biological underpinnings of behavioral interventions in medicine. Some of the claims of mind/body medicine are almost certainly true, even if the pseudoscientific explanations offered for them are not...What about a potentially fatal illness that often manifests outside of the brain? Could the course of cancer progression be affected by behavioral practices like meditation or breath work?
...In recent years we have learned that certain types of cancer in the body receive nerve fibers, which originate in the brain and are passed to the body via electrochemical signals that travel in a chain from neuron to neuron. These include tumors of the lung, prostate, skin, breast and pancreas and the gastrointestinal system. This innervation of tumors often contributes to the growth and spread of cancer. In most cases, if you are a cancer patient and your tumor is innervated, then your prognosis is worse.
...the innervation of tumors and its role in cancer progression suggest an interesting hypothesis in mind/body medicine. If behavioral practices like meditation, exercise, breath work or even prayer can attenuate or reverse the progression of certain cancers (and, granted, that’s a huge if), then perhaps they do so, ultimately, by changing the electrical activity of the nerve cells that innervate tumors. It is a provocative idea and one that is testable in both humans and laboratory mice...if there is such a connection, it opens up the possibility that my own cognitive approach to terminal illness — in my case, hopefulness coupled with curiosity — could contribute to keeping my cancer at bay and do so, not through supernatural means, but by altering the electrical activity of tumor-innervating nerve fibers. I hope so, as however they are granted, these extra innings are a pure delight.

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Mindful attention enhances brain network control and uncouples past from the present

Zhou et al. (open source) do an interesting experiment on mindfulness and brain network control:  

Significance

Practicing mindfulness helps individuals regulate attention, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In recognizing these benefits, various schools, workplaces, and clinics are increasingly teaching mindfulness. How does mindful attention change brain function to support self-regulation? Addressing this question could inform how we teach mindfulness and whom we expect to benefit. We modeled the defining components of mindful experience using tools that probe the structure and function of the brain’s network. In a randomized controlled study of alcohol consumption, we found that a brain network’s dynamic shape predicts individuals’ future alcohol consumption and explains otherwise elusive components of mindful experience, such as being present. Our results provide new understanding of how mindful attention affects brain function.
Abstract
Mindful attention is characterized by acknowledging the present experience as a transient mental event. Early stages of mindfulness practice may require greater neural effort for later efficiency. Early effort may self-regulate behavior and focalize the present, but this understanding lacks a computational explanation. Here we used network control theory as a model of how external control inputs—operationalizing effort—distribute changes in neural activity evoked during mindful attention across the white matter network. We hypothesized that individuals with greater network controllability, thereby efficiently distributing control inputs, effectively self-regulate behavior. We further hypothesized that brain regions that utilize greater control input exhibit shorter intrinsic timescales of neural activity. Shorter timescales characterize quickly discontinuing past processing to focalize the present. We tested these hypotheses in a randomized controlled study that primed participants to either mindfully respond or naturally react to alcohol cues during fMRI and administered text reminders and measurements of alcohol consumption during 4 wk postscan. We found that participants with greater network controllability moderated alcohol consumption. Mindful regulation of alcohol cues, compared to one’s own natural reactions, reduced craving, but craving did not differ from the baseline group. Mindful regulation of alcohol cues, compared to the natural reactions of the baseline group, involved more-effortful control of neural dynamics across cognitive control and attention subnetworks. This effort persisted in the natural reactions of the mindful group compared to the baseline group. More-effortful neural states had shorter timescales than less effortful states, offering an explanation for how mindful attention promotes being present.

Friday, January 13, 2023

Materialism meets transcendence

I want to pass on the URL to a PBS series by Alan Lightman that I plan to start watching as soon as I can, based on the following description and review in Science Magazine:
In part 1, “The Stars & The Osprey,” Lightman undergoes functional magnetic resonance imaging and interviews neuroscientist Robert Desimone about how much neuroimaging can tell us about Lightman’s transcendental experience. He ultimately finds this approach unsatisfying and introduces viewers to the debate between mechanists, who believe that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are sufficient to explain life, and vitalists, who believe that living creatures are imbued with an additional spiritual quality not explainable by science.
Here, he interviews biologist and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak and the Dalai Lama as proponents of these two camps, respectively. Although the Dalai Lama expresses enthusiasm for scientific investigation, most scientists will likely resonate with Szostak’s declaration that “It’s not just atoms and molecules, it’s the organization…it’s no less wonderful or beautiful because we understand that there is a natural origin for [life].”
Part 2, “The Big & The Small,” begins with the familiar “powers of 10” view of the Universe, moving from the subatomic to the galactic. Lightman then queries what such explorations have to do with consciousness, conversing with BINA48, an extraordinary humanoid robot programmed by artificial intelligence with >100 hours of a real woman’s memories. Here, he speculates that BINAs of the future may achieve consciousness. He then probes this issue over Zoom with the Dalai Lama, whom viewers observe watching a movie of BINA48 conversing with the woman from whom BINA48 was programmed; this multilayered interaction is simultaneously disconcerting, comical, and wondrous. After additional interviews with a bioethicist, a rabbi, and others, Lightman ultimately concludes that we may be just atoms and molecules, but, in the words of Emily Dickinson, “The brain is wider than the sky.”
In part 3, “Homo Techno,” Lightman contemplates our inner world of perception, consciousness, and self-awareness. He meets Erik Sorto, who lost all movement from the neck down after being shot in the back. With electrodes implanted into his posterior parietal cortex and 2 years of training, Sorto learned to control the movement of a robotic arm by thought. This is an extraordinary achievement, and Lightman posits that it is an example of the beginning of our transition from Homo sapiens into Homo techno, part-human, part-machine entities that reflect the modification of human evolution by technological means. From an actual evolutionary biology standpoint, this is nonsensical, and it is unclear that Lightman even means to propose such an idea, but this section’s loose language will rankle some viewers.
At another point in the series’ final episode, Lightman finds himself dizzy from talk of neurons and galaxies and takes refuge in closely examining a single square inch of earth. His biophilia is obviously meaningful to him, and it would have been stimulating had the episode included interviews with an evolutionary biologist or naturalist, who might have helped to better articulate this facet of the human experience. The series closes, appropriately, with philosophical musings about the need for each of us to find meaning for ourselves.
A small problem at the outset is the inherent impossibility of conveying transcendence through description—the degree to which viewers relate to Lightman’s moment of enlightenment will depend on their own experiences and inclinations. Additionally, Lightman’s screen persona leaves something to be desired. There are, however, few people better qualified to explore these issues, and as the series progresses, his humanity shines through, bringing a welcome lightness to some potentially ponderous material.
Despite its focus on phenomena currently unexplainable by science, Searching is full of the joy and passion that can be found in the doing of science and succeeds in conveying how deeply meaningful science is to its practitioners. It is well worth your time and is especially recommended to families with kids curious about life and our world.

Monday, January 02, 2023

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?

This New Year’s post is directed to the small number of MindBlog readers who might be sympathetic to some of my private random rants. Perhaps I should keep them to myself, but here goes…..

All enlightenment traditions - such as Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight - have a common issue. How can the central canon or dogma of the way things are be renewed and kept fresh? The usual practice is to repeat a liturgy set down by gurus of a given tradition, but with each repetition by a particular vendor the gospel begins to loose its force. The transforming clarity of the initial enlightenment fades as the habituation and desensitization associated with all repetitive activities begins to set in. ‘Reset buttons’ that are temporarily effective can sometimes be found by turning to different vendors of the central message, who in this smartphone age can each package and deliver their respective theory or practice sessions in a sonorous and calming voices. This frequently is done in 10-30 min chunks that better accommodate our modern diminished attention spans, as well as in longer lectures from workshops or retreats. This approach can be seen in aggregator Apps such as Sam Harris’ “Waking Up,” which delivers the messages of many different teachers. (I wonder if generation Alpha,  born in this century, exists in even more transient states of tik-tok mind, twitter mind, or instagram mind that preclude even this level of engagement?)

I would guess that over the past year or two I have listened to ~150 such lectures. As I see the same basic points reframed in many different ways, I begin to think “Y’know, it seems that the fundamental axioms of enlightenment that are expressible in language are being repetitively rediscovered throughout history and repeatedly archived.  I feel like their verbal messages are as ingrained in my consciousness as the language of the mathematical and chemical structures I have known most of my life.”

My flippant ‘mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes’ phrase in the title of this post is meaning to point to the fact that the market for vendors of enlightenment is a distinctive one. Existential angst, or worrying about value, purpose, and meaning seem most pressing to a relatively small number of highly urbanized and literate humans. I can’t imagine that my two Abyssinian cats, who I sometimes takes to be my best role models, spend a significant fraction of their time worrying about the meeting of it all, or pondering the subtleties of epistemology and ontology. 

So….what beyond words? A space or perspective that doesn’t contain them can only be pointed at by using them in the dualistic context of a sender and receiver. I can, for example, try to use words to give a crude voice to the mute homeostatic generative visceral organic axes of valence and arousal that underlie and generate everything that I am and experience right now: “Dude, get a grip, I (the visceral one) am the one who is actually running this show, deciding where it goes and whether it works or shuts down, the sooner the “I” you imagine yourself to be realizes this and lets go, the sooner some kind of sane space is attained. All of the surface behaviors acted out for others to see - the family man, the professor, the pianist - are shadow play shimmering on the surface of this basic organic substrate, like water insects skittering around on the surface of a pond. What is writing these words is just another one of the contents of consciousness flitting past. Just turn yourself around to look quickly for the writer…what do you see? What do you see as you imagine being first born into this world? The brief glimpses of expanded naive awareness sometimes elicited by questions such as these have the potential of permitting a scrubbing, refreshing, or renewal of consciousness in a way that permits more choice in selecting which prior individual selves and self habits rise to compose current self conscious life. 

Different iterations of these sentiments, different vendings of the sort mentioned in the first paragraph above, can be found in two previous MindBlog posts. One from Nov. 25:  

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises.  

And the other from Oct. 26, passing on a masterful exposition from James Low that I can not improve on.

If you want stability, if you want real peace, you already have that in the nature of awareness. But if you look to manifestation, to patterning of yourself, to thinking you could establish a stable personalty, to live a life in which you were happy all the time, or in which you were your own person, that way madness lies. To find our original face, to find the ground of our primordial being, we need to release our fixation on the dialogic movement of subject and object, and allow ourselves to be the space within which the movement of experience is occurring. Awareness means being aware that we are present without being something as such. This is a great mystery. When we look at phenomena the world, things exist as something. A car is not a cow, an apple is not an orange, compare and contrast, category allocation. That’s how our cognition, our conceptual elaboration functions to give a seemingly enduring structure to identifications. But awareness can’t be caught. It’s not a thing. You can’t pin a tail on the donkey, there is no donkey there. The mind is not an object for itself, it is self luminous awareness, but you can’t catch it. You can never know your mind but you can be your mind. We are awareness and that’s a very important distinction.

Friday, November 25, 2022

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times?

One of MindBlog's subject threads is meditation, and some recent posts have dealt with characterizing non-dual awareness (to find these, look in the right column of this blog, under "Selected Blog Categories, and click on 'meditation.') One of the descriptions I have pointed to is given by James Low, who has training in several lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and has been teaching the principles of Dzogchen in Europe for over 20 years. Low's website links to an array of audio and video (YouTube and Vimeo) presentations he has done. One of the participants in a recent discussion at my house urged me to check out YouTube snippets recorded by Rupert Spiro, also British, whose YouTube videos and personal wesite (The Essence of Non-Duality) offer his teachings. 

After finding the YouTube outlets for these two meditation gurus, I googled 'non duality websites' and was rewarded with an array of rabbit holes to jump into...further teachers, and a "Nonduality Institute" that engages scientific studies of non-dual awareness. 

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises. 

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

The Huberman Lab Cornucopia

A friend mentioned enjoying a podcast on meditation from hubermanlab.com, so I listened to it, and decided to look a bit further into who Andrew Huberman is and what he does. Regarding his "How and Why to Meditate" podcast, I think his pedagogy is good. He does some very effective chunking of just a few core ideas and repeats them over and over again. Starting about a year ago he began to generate - completely separate from his lab research as an associate professor in the Standford University Medical School Neurobiology department - podcasts, interviews, and writing (see The Neural Network Newsletter). at an amazing rate, a veritable orgy of self-optimization nuggets ideally suited for his age cohort of 40- to 50-somethings. He has a rapid, logorrheic and rambling speaking style that, at least to me, detracts from the effectiveness of his presentations. I think MindBlog readers might enjoy clicking some of the above links and grazing through his material. Before his social media with thousands of followers persona burst on the scene, his publication list shows him puttering along the conventional academic research route, with his laboratory generating 1-4 papers a year on brain plasticity and repair, split roughly equally between laboratory research and commentary/review articles.

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

A lucid exposition on non-dual awareness by James Low

The ‘Waking Up’ app by Sam Harris has posted a series of lectures by James Low that “makes the esoteric teachings of Dzogchen—a non-dual contemplative tradition from Tibet—profoundly accessible.”   I want to pass on to MindBlog readers the following paragraph made up of small clips of text  I have taken from his lecture #4 “The Field of Experience.” Low’s website points to his lectures, writing, and videos of his lectures.
If you want stability, if you want real peace, you already have that in the nature of awareness. But if you look to manifestation, to patterning of yourself, to thinking you could establish a stable personalty, to live a life in which you were happy all the time, or in which you were your own person, that way madness lies. To find our original face, to find the ground of our primordial being, we need to release our fixation on the dialogic movement of subject and object, and allow ourselves to be the space within which the movement of experience is occurring. Awareness means being aware that we are present without being something as such. This is a great mystery. When we look at phenomena the world, things exist as something. A car is not a cow, an apple is not an orange, compare and contrast, category allocation. That’s how our cognition, our conceptual elaboration functions to give a seemingly enduring structure to identifications. But awareness can’t be caught. It’s not a thing. You can’t pin a tail on the donkey, there is no donkey there. The mind is not an object for itself, it is self luminous awareness, but you can’t catch it. You can never know your mind but you can be your mind. We are awareness and that’s a very important distinction.

Monday, September 12, 2022

Non-duality as a platform for experiencing daily life.

I pass on abstracted edited clip from a recent podcast conversation between Sam Harris and M.I.T philosopher Kierna Setiya on “Philosophy and the Good Life” which has a succinct definition of what Harris takes non-duality or ‘having no self’ to mean, and how experiencing this can lead to a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudemonia, as well as solving a very wide class of psychological problems. I suggest that MindBlog readers who enjoy this subject matter also have a look back at my March 22 post, titled "Points on having a self and free will."
There can be confusion over what is meant by no-self in various meditative traditions. It’s not the claim that people are illusions, or that you can’t say anything about the psychological or biological continuity of a person. It’s not mysterious that we wake up today as ourselves and not someone else. These are not the puzzles being addressed.
The core insight, the illusion that is cut through, conceptually and experientially, is our apparent normal default condition of feeling like there is a subject in the center of experience. Most people don’t merely feel identical to experience, they feel like they are having an experience, they feel like they are appropriating their experience from some point - very likely in their heads - the witness, the thinker of thoughts, the willer of will, the guy in the boat who has free will, who can decide what to think and do next. That’s the default state for almost everybody, and commonplace as it is, it is a peculiar point of view. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, particularly biological sense. It’s not the same thing as feeling identical to our bodies, because we usually don’t feel identical to our bodies, we feel like we are subjects who have bodies, there is a kind of Cartesian dualism that is intuitive. People are ‘common sense dualists.’ As a matter of experience there is this feeling that “I am a subject behind my face.” “I” have a body, am a subject who is thinking, internal to the body, has a body. It is the final representation of the subject that is the illusion.
To put this in neurological terms, let’s just say for the sake of argument at all of this is just neurophysiological events in the brain delivering these representations. It is plausible that any one of these processes can be interrupted, so that you can cease to faithfully or coherently represent a world. You can suddenly go blind, may not be able to name living things but still be able to name tools, suddenly not be able to perceive motion or location, those things can break apart. All kinds of things can be disrupted for the worse certainly. But what these contemplative traditions have recognized is that certain things can be disrupted or brought to a halt for the better. The thing that can interrupt the usual cascade of mediocrity and suffering psychologically speaking is this representation of self as subject in the middle of experience.
You can cease to construct a subject that is internal to the body. What remains in that case is a sense that mind is much vaster than it was a moment ago, because it is no longer confined to the sense that there is this central thinker of thoughts. There is a recognition that thoughts arise all by themselves, just as sounds do, no one is authoring your thoughts - you certainly aren’t. The sense that you are is what it feels like to be identified with this next spontaneously arising thought.
So, you loose sense that you are on the edge of your life, looking over your own shoulder, appropriating experience and what you can feel very vividly here is a real unity. emptyness, non-duality of subjects and objects, such that there is really just experience. This is not a new way of thinking about yourself in the world, this is a ceasing to identify with thought. This is making no metaphysical claims about how this relates to matter or the universe.
As as matter of experience you can feel identical to experience itself. You are not standing on the river bank watching things go by, you are the river, and that solves a very wide class of problems, psychologically speaking, with respect to suffering. And, it does land one in a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudemonia (well being) that may seem counter intuitive in the midst of the cacophony of daily life. But again, it’s not about the negation of personhood, it is just a recognition that as a matter of experience there is just experience, and the feeling that there is an experiencer is yet more experience, so that if you just drop back… there is just everything in its own place.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Effortless training of attention and self-control

I pass on the highlights statement from a fascinating opinion piece by Tang et al. (motivated readers can obtain a copy of the text from me). 

Highlights

A long-held belief in cognitive science is that training attention and self-control must recruit effort. Therefore, various effortful training programs such as attention or working memory training have been developed to improve attention and self-control (or executive function). However, effortful training has limited far-transfer effects.
A growing literature suggests a new way of effortless training for attention and self-control. Effortless training – such as nature exposure, flow experience, and effortless practices – has shown promising effects on improving attention and self-control.
Effortful training requires cognitive control supported by the frontoparietal network to sustain mental effort over the course of training. Effortless training engages autonomic control with less effort, and is supported by the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, striatum, and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
For the past 50 years, cognitive scientists have assumed that training attention and self-control must be effortful. However, growing evidence suggests promising effects of effortless training approaches such as nature exposure, flow experience, and effortless practice on attention and self-control. This opinion article focuses on effortless training of attention and self-control. We begin by introducing our definitions of effortful and effortless training and reviewing the growing literature on these two different forms of training. We then discuss the similarities and differences in their respective behavioral outcomes and neural correlates. Finally, we propose a putative neural mechanism of effortless training. We conclude by highlighting promising directions for research, development, and application of effortless training.
Figure Legend: Core brain regions and their functions during effortless training.
Three colored areas represent the anterior cingulate cortex–posterior cingulate cortex (ACC–PCC)–striatum (APS) and their corresponding functions during training. The broken line arrows indicate that these regions actively communicate with each other during effortless training.

Monday, June 06, 2022

I am not my problem

An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. The title of this post - the (apparently nonsensical) sentence "I am not my problem” - is the latest example. The sentence can to be parsed to indicate in this instance that the "I" is referring to the illusory narrative self that our social brains have been designed by evolution to generate, and the "my" refers to our intuition or sensing of the vastly complex underlying interacting body systems (respiratory, circulatory, neuronal, muscular, endocrine, sensory, etc.) from which this veneer of a self rises. The brain is mainly not for thinking. It appears that several styles of meditation practice can expand our awareness of this fundamental generative layer. The "am not my problem" tries to make the point that distinguishing these systems can prove useful in trying to determine the origins of particular feelings or behaviors. 

As I’m writing these words I begin to realize that my “novel” waking insight isn’t so novel, but more an elaboration or restatement of my post of Friday, March 13, 2020, on “the relief of not being yourself,” which described another spontaneous rising of ideas associated with the transition between sleep and wakefulness. I repeat that text here:

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective personal journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.
There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.
What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

Friday, November 12, 2021

Freedom From Illusion

A friend who attended the lecture I gave last Sunday (A New Vision of how our Minds Work), and mentioned in a Monday post, sent me an article from The Buddhist Review "TRICYCLE" by Pema Düddul titled "Freedom From Illusion". If you scan both texts, I suspect you will find, as I do, a striking consonance between the neuroscientific and Buddhist perspectives on "Illusion." 

From the beginning of the Düddul article:

A shooting star, a clouding of the sight, 
a lamp, an illusion, a drop of dew, a bubble, 
a dream, a lightning’s flash, a thunder cloud: 
this is the way one should see the conditioned.
This revered verse from the Diamond Sutra points to one of Buddhism’s most profound yet confounding truths—the illusory nature of all things. The verse is designed to awaken us to ultimate reality, specifically to the fact that all things, especially thoughts and feelings, are the rainbow-like display of the mind. One of the Tibetan words for the dualistic mind means something like “a magician creating illusions.” As my teacher Ngakpa Karma Lhundup Rinpoche explained: “All of our thoughts are magical illusions created by our mind. We get trapped, carried away by our own illusions. We forget that we are the magician in the first place!”
Compare this with my talk's description of predictive processing, and how what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations or illusions about the world. Here is a summary sentence in one of my slides, taken from a lecture by Ruben Laukkonen, in which I replace his last word, 'fantasies,' with the word 'illusions.'
Everything we do and experience is in service of reducing surprises by fulfilling illusions.

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Graphic depictions of an integrative model of mind

To hopefully enhance the chance that you will pay attention to the creative and seminal thinking in the open source Laukkonen and Slagter review article whose abstract I passed on in my July 21 post,  I now pass on their striking concluding statement and then  two graphics whose legends summarize the main ideas presented. I think this work offers a plausible and appealing integration of neuroscience and meditative traditions.  

We have taken on the daunting task of providing a theory for understanding the effects of meditation within the predictive processing framework. Contemplative science is a young field and predictive processing is a new theory, although both have roots going much farther back. All theories are subject to change, but perhaps particularly so for such new domains of enquiry. Nevertheless, we think the conditions are suitable for a more overarching theory that may also thwart further siloing and fragmentation of scientific research, as has been commonplace among the mind-sciences. A strength of our framework is its simplicity: Being in the here and now reduces predictive processing. And yet, this basic idea can explain how each meditation technique uniquely deconstructs the minds tendency to project the past onto the present, how certain insights may arise, the nature of hierarchical self-processing, and the plasticity of the human mind. There is scope here, we think, to eventually reveal what makes a meditator an expert, why meditation has such broad clinical effects, and how we might begin mitigating some of the negative consequences of meditation. Last but not least, our framework seems to bring ancient Eastern and modern scientific ideas closer together, showing how the notion of conditioned experience in Buddhism aligns with the notion of the experience-dependent predictive brain.

Fig. 1. Here we use the Pythagoras Tree to provide an intuitive illustration of how organisms represent the world with increasing counterfactual depth or abstraction. The tree is constructed using squares that are scaled down by the square root of 2 divided by 2 and placed such that the corners of the squares meet and form a triangle between them, recursively. Analogously, the brain constructs experience from temporally precise and unimodal models of present-moment sensory representations and input (e.g., pixels on a screen), into ever more abstract, transmodal, and temporally deep models (e.g., a theory paper). Meditation brings one increasingly into the present moment, thus reducing the tendency to conceptualize away from the here and now, akin to observing the pixels rather than the words. This reduction of conceptualization ought to also have profound effects on the sense of self, which also relies on abstract model building, and ultimately is said to reveal an underlying seemingly “unconditioned” state of consciousness as such (like the white background underlying the pixels).
 

Fig. 2. In this schematic we illustrate two aspects of the many-to-(n)one model. The first and most foundational proposal is that meditation gradually flattens the predictive hierarchy or ‘prunes the counterfactual tree’, by bringing the meditator into the here and now, illustrated in the left figure. Thus, meditative depth is defined by the extent that the organism is not constructing temporally thick predictions. In the right figure, we dissect the predictive hierarchy into three broad levels. We propose that thinking (and therefore the narrative self [NS]) sits at the top of the predictive hierarchy (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010, 2019). Sensing and perceiving and therefore the embodied experiencing self [ES] sits below it (Gallagher, 2000; Seth, 2013). Finally, a basal form of self-hood characterized by the subject-object [S/O] duality sits at the earliest level. FA brings the practitioner out of the narrative self and into a more experiencing and embodied mode of being. Then, through dereification from present moment experience (including bodily sensations) OM brings the practitioner more into a state where contents of experience are treated equally, and one is able to experience non-judgmentally (sensing without appraisal), but even in very advanced states, a subject-object duality remains. During OM, certain epistemic discoveries or insights about the nature and behavior of generative models may occur. Finally, through ND practices the subject-object distinction may fall away and the background or “groundless ground” of all experience—awareness itself—can be uncovered. Another way to characterize this process is as follows: FA employs regular (conditional) attention to an object of sensing, OM employs bare (unconditional) attention, and ND practice employs reflexive awareness that permits the non-dual witnessing of the subject-object dichotomy and finally pure or non-dual awareness by releasing attention altogether.

 

 

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

I had a chat with my former University of Wisconsin colleague Richard Davidson during my visit to Madison, WI last week, and he pointed me to an excellent open source review article by Laukkonen and Slagter, From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind. They offer an integrated predictive processing account of three main styles of meditation. I just finished reading through their lucid account and plan to carefully re-read it several times. I pass on the summary points and abstract: 

Highlights

• Predictive processing provides a novel theoretical window on meditation. 
• Deconstructive meditations progressively reduce temporally deep processing. 
• Insight experiences arise during meditation due to Bayesian model reduction 
• Meditation deconstructs self models by reducing abstract processing. 
• Non-dual awareness or pure consciousness is the ‘here and now’.
Abstract
How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of deconstructive meditation under the predictive processing view. We start from simple axioms. First, the brain makes predictions based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, deconstructive meditation brings one closer to the here and now by disengaging anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces counterfactual temporally deep cognition, until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness. Our account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual) on a single continuum, where each technique relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the predicted self. This deconstruction can also permit certain insights by making the above processes available to introspection. Our framework is consistent with the state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence and illuminates the top-down plasticity of the predictive mind. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms are needed to further understanding of how meditation affects predictive processing and the self.