johnsonmx

Hey SSC folks - Scott has posted quite a few book reviews on meditation this year, but none of the sources have really gotten into what's physically going on in the brain during meditation (or 'Awakening'). I wrote up a (speculative) summary of how some of the ideas we're working with at QRI might describe what's happening during meditation at Marr's 'algorithmic' level. Here's , and below are some excerpts (there's more in the actual piece). Comments welcome, and if you know specific people who would be interested or who you think I should get in touch with, please let me know. Thank you!

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The core tool of Buddhism is meditation. Empirically, it seems to work for many people. But howdoes it work? There are a lot of good ‘generalist’ books in this space– Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True, Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated. My favorite attempt to date to unify Eastern and Western thought is Shinzen Young’s The Science of Enlightenment--
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I think a really powerful way to keep track of all of this is parallel description. In other words, we can attempt to describe what’s going on during suffering & during meditation at multiple levels of abstraction, and the more stories we can identify and weave together and cross-validate, the better our understanding will get. In particular, if we get ‘stuck’ on describing what’s happening on one level, we can hop to another level and try to see what’s going on from there. I also believe we should be neuroscience snobs and only deal with neuroscience models that the very bestneuroscientists are currently excited about, since the difference between an ‘industry standard’ neuroscience paradigm and a ‘best in the world’ paradigm is really enormous. Mostly people talk about better neuroscience being more elegant and predictive, but I think it’s even more important to not import old confusions, outdated and wrong ways of looking at the brain. As the saying goes, ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’

I offer four parallel descriptions of what meditation is doing in the brain, drawing from various neuroscience frameworks-- some excerpts:

Buddhism (i.e. Pali Canon):

Buddhism claims the self arises through the presence of craving and identifying with this craving, and this delusion, or ‘defilement,’ propagates through and infects our entire experience. Meditation helps because by ‘noting and knowing’ experiences which arise, we can notice their impermanence, and notice that what we call the ‘self’ is an illusion and our sensations don’t really have an ‘owner.’ Over time as we keep doing this, we slowly generate the inference space to build better intuitive perspectives on the real dynamics of our minds, and we feel less of a compulsion to reflexively cling to our objects of craving or aversion (or the craving/aversion itself). This ‘spaciousness’, or freedom from the usual web of intentionality, allows us to develop the seven enlightenment factors (mindfulness, wisdom, energy, rapture, relaxation, concentration, equanimity), and ultimately the conditions which sustain the self / craving / suffering can drop away.

Predictive Coding (i.e. Friston's Free Energy Principle):

Predictive coding is a formal framework which says that the brain’s core drive is to minimize surprise, and that it does this by constantly creating, testing, and adjusting stories about the world. This is a two-tier system: the first ‘tier’ is subconscious prediction, which tries to filter out the ‘easy stuff’ using simple algorithms. You don’t feel the weight of your shirt against your skin, or the pressure of your shoes, or hear the traffic in the background, because this stuff is easy for your brain to categorize then ignore. But if your brain’s subconscious can’t predict something— say you get bitten by a snake, or you fail a midterm you thought you passed— then this stuff gets sent up for the conscious mind to deal with. Essentially, the mind is a story-telling machine, and we make our stories out of the ‘unusual’ signals the unconscious brain can’t explain away. The more surprising/salient something is, the more the brain thinks it’s probably important and should be a part of whatever story we’re telling ourselves, and the more ‘sticky’ it feels. ... Under the predictive coding model, I’d describe the process of meditation as attempting to ‘tag’ sensations early in the prediction pipeline as “okay/nothing to worry about/not anomalous/not something to update on/doesn’t have to be part of our story”, before the sensation becomes high-confidence and sticky and needs to be part of the story.

Connectome-specific harmonic waves:

All systems with periodic activity have natural modes, frequencies they ‘like’ to resonate at. Wineglasses, tuning forks, and guitars have them; the brain has them too. Connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHW) is a new but promising paradigm for defining and measuring these natural harmonic modes in brains. ... How does meditation affect the brain? In the short-term, the ‘noting and knowing’ of meditation may act to dampen specific harmonics before their activity spills over into others and becomes self-propagating, leading to a quieter mind with a better signal-to-noise ratio.

Neural annealing:

Annealing involves heating a metal above its recrystallization temperature, keeping it there for long enough for the microstructure of the metal to reach equilibrium, then slowly cooling it down, letting new patterns crystallize. This releases the internal stresses of the material, and is often used to restore ductility (plasticity and toughness) on metals that have been ‘cold-worked’ and have become very hard and brittle— in a sense, annealing is a ‘reset switch’ which allows metals to go back to a more pristine, natural state after being bent or stressed. I suspect this is a useful metaphor for brains, in that they can become hard and brittle over time with a build-up of internal stresses, and these stresses can be released by periodically entering high-energy states where a more natural neural microstructure can reemerge. ... Furthermore, from what I gather from experienced meditators, successfully entering meditative flow may be one of the most reliable ways to reach these high-energy brain states.

Much of this is unabashed speculation, but with some testable implications. Full article .

--Michael Edward Johnson, Qualia Research Institute

Hi - I've been putting together some (speculative) neuroscience models on what's physically going on during meditation and wanted to share. Here's , and below are some excerpts (there's more in the actual piece). Comments welcome, and if you know specific people who would be interested or who you think I should get in touch with, please let me know. Thank you!

-------

The core tool of Buddhism is meditation. Empirically, it seems to work for many people. But how does it work? There are a lot of good ‘generalist’ books in this space– Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True, Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated. My favorite attempt to date to unify Eastern and Western thought is Shinzen Young’s The Science of Enlightenment--

...

I think a really powerful way to keep track of all of this is parallel description. In other words, we can attempt to describe what’s going on during suffering & during meditation at multiple levels of abstraction, and the more stories we can identify and weave together and cross-validate, the better our understanding will get. In particular, if we get ‘stuck’ on describing what’s happening on one level, we can hop to another level and try to see what’s going on from there. I also believe we should be neuroscience snobs and only deal with neuroscience models that the very best neuroscientists are currently excited about, since the difference between an ‘industry standard’ neuroscience paradigm and a ‘best in the world’ paradigm is really enormous. Mostly people talk about better neuroscience being more elegant and predictive, but I think it’s even more important to not import old confusions, outdated and wrong ways of looking at the brain. As the saying goes, ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’

I offer four parallel descriptions of what meditation is doing in the brain, drawing from various neuroscience frameworks-- some excerpts:

Buddhism (i.e. Pali Canon):

Buddhism claims the self arises through the presence of craving and identifying with this craving, and this delusion, or ‘defilement,’ propagates through and infects our entire experience. Meditation helps because by ‘noting and knowing’ experiences which arise, we can notice their impermanence, and notice that what we call the ‘self’ is an illusion and our sensations don’t really have an ‘owner.’ Over time as we keep doing this, we slowly generate the inference space to build better intuitive perspectives on the real dynamics of our minds, and we feel less of a compulsion to reflexively cling to our objects of craving or aversion (or the craving/aversion itself). This ‘spaciousness’, or freedom from the usual web of intentionality, allows us to develop the seven enlightenment factors (mindfulness, wisdom, energy, rapture, relaxation, concentration, equanimity), and ultimately the conditions which sustain the self / craving / suffering can drop away.

Predictive Coding (i.e. Friston's Free Energy Principle):

Predictive coding is a formal framework which says that the brain’s core drive is to minimize surprise, and that it does this by constantly creating, testing, and adjusting stories about the world. This is a two-tier system: the first ‘tier’ is subconscious prediction, which tries to filter out the ‘easy stuff’ using simple algorithms. You don’t feel the weight of your shirt against your skin, or the pressure of your shoes, or hear the traffic in the background, because this stuff is easy for your brain to categorize then ignore. But if your brain’s subconscious can’t predict something— say you get bitten by a snake, or you fail a midterm you thought you passed— then this stuff gets sent up for the conscious mind to deal with. Essentially, the mind is a story-telling machine, and we make our stories out of the ‘unusual’ signals the unconscious brain can’t explain away. The more surprising/salient something is, the more the brain thinks it’s probably important and should be a part of whatever story we’re telling ourselves, and the more ‘sticky’ it feels. ... Under the predictive coding model, I’d describe the process of meditation as attempting to ‘tag’ sensations early in the prediction pipeline as “okay/nothing to worry about/not anomalous/not something to update on/doesn’t have to be part of our story”, before the sensation becomes high-confidence and sticky and needs to be part of the story.

Connectome-specific harmonic waves:

All systems with periodic activity have natural modes, frequencies they ‘like’ to resonate at. Wineglasses, tuning forks, and guitars have them; the brain has them too. Connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHW) is a new but promising paradigm for defining and measuring these natural harmonic modes in brains. ... How does meditation affect the brain? In the short-term, the ‘noting and knowing’ of meditation may act to dampen specific harmonics before their activity spills over into others and becomes self-propagating, leading to a quieter mind with a better signal-to-noise ratio.

Neural annealing:

Annealing involves heating a metal above its recrystallization temperature, keeping it there for long enough for the microstructure of the metal to reach equilibrium, then slowly cooling it down, letting new patterns crystallize. This releases the internal stresses of the material, and is often used to restore ductility (plasticity and toughness) on metals that have been ‘cold-worked’ and have become very hard and brittle— in a sense, annealing is a ‘reset switch’ which allows metals to go back to a more pristine, natural state after being bent or stressed. I suspect this is a useful metaphor for brains, in that they can become hard and brittle over time with a build-up of internal stresses, and these stresses can be released by periodically entering high-energy states where a more natural neural microstructure can reemerge. ... Furthermore, from what I gather from experienced meditators, successfully entering meditative flow may be one of the most reliable ways to reach these high-energy brain states.

Much of this is unabashed speculation, but with some testable implications. Full article .