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Comment by blueyes | Hacker News Reader

For me, the amazing thing about the Vagus nerve is that you can stimulate it with your breathing. And since the Vagus nerve affects the autonomic nervous system (involuntary, not consciously controlled) while breathing choices are conscious, this is one of the few ways that humans can directly impact important aspects of their psychology and physiology, like how calm they feel. Mindfulness + breath choices + vagus nerve => altered state. And that's why traditions including yoga and buddhism empathize breathing. Couple great books that touch on this are:

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art https://www.amazon.com/Breath-New-Science-Lost-Art/dp/073521...

and

Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Brain https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Traits-Science-Reveals-Medita...

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This might go beyond how you feel and into direct biological impacts. I don’t listen to the Huberman Lab podcast much these days but I did listen to the episode with David Linden, which I found quite interesting. [1] At one point, they are discussing the mind/body axis and the latest scientific developments in exploring how mental states can affect the body. There is a fascinating although very untested - but, testable - hypothesis that meditation may be able to slow the growth of cancerous tumours. The mechanism here is via nerve endings that reach the tumour and their effect on immune responses at the site.

Linden was emphatic about how science requires a mechanism of action, and that when people refer to this potential effect against cancer as due to “alignment of chakras” or whatever, it is “bullshit” to use his word.

I get where he’s coming from, but on the flip side, the benefits of meditative practice were arrived at long before science took any note of them. In fact for many years, the scientific perspective on it was that it was entirely bullshit. Meanwhile the people who were (admittedly incorrectly) talking about chakras were delivering real benefits to their followers. As such it seems to me that more respect is warranted, and perhaps even more caution. What do you think?

1 https://hubermanlab.com/dr-david-linden-life-death-and-the-n...

Well put.

I think these eastern concepts (e.g. meditation concepts such as chakras, "organs" in traditional chinese medicine) are not meant as objective truths, but rather as useful mental models. Different mental models used in the same culture often contradict one another, which only makes sense if you don't see them as ultimate truth.

Chakras are real so as Kundalini [0]. However, these aren't physical in nature, rather, they are on subtle body of consciousness. Now, that's not possible to prove scientifically yet, but with your dedicated regular practice, you can experience them yourself as this guy on HN did [1] which inspired me to start my own exploration (back in 2014) and have intense experiences which remains with me.

0: https://www.amazon.in/Kundalini-untold-story-Om-Swami/dp/818... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910041

Haven't listened, but I think I understand where Linden was coming from, even if it's unnecessarily harsh. The idea that "you can breathe this way and get this effect" can be true and can come from folk wisdom, but they ascribe wrong reasoning to it which makes it mysticism. The reasoning is what's "bullshit". It's like saying "I tie my shoes tight every morning to honor the shoe gods or else they'll untie my laces." Well actually, you're right to tie your laces tight, but only because that's how laces work on a physical level.

The chakras thing, or any other mystical model, is only a low-resolution model. It's useful to point you to a correct belief, but we have to be careful not to get too invested in wrong reasoning. Or else you end up with a system of beliefs which may be mostly wrong - ie, "If my X chakra does this for me, I am sure my Y chakra does that for me," - when what you may be looking for is a completely different phenomenon.

> The chakras thing, or any other mystical model, is only a low-resolution model.

More importantly, they served their purpose continuing knowledge as both a practice and oral tradition such that they have survived millennia. This in spite of libraries burning down and the limited access to/absence of text, etc. I think in this lens, it's not right to condescend, or be confounded or annoyed that the mechanism still works today. Further to that, I think in absence of this instinct in the scientific community to condescend, the valuable knowledge preserved in mystical practices could be understood sooner

Well, it's a low-resolution model that ancient people converged on for a reason, which is that it is starts from a readily-attainable subjective experience, which is then used to explain things in ways that surely go too far.

It is relatively easy to feel some of your chakras, I've done it, it took about a week of effort via a hodgepodge of breathwork, stretching, yoga, and "somatic" meditation facilitated by THC. You try to awaken muscles all over the body, "unblocking" points of tension, and eventually you start to have this impression of "energy"/"heat" flowing in loops from points on the spine, out along muscles and back again; in my case "unblocking" some of these caused buried emotions to pour out, and temporarily gave me near-perfect posture. It's interesting: these are clearly a description of something real.

Octopus have enormous numbers of nerve bundles in their arms, such that when you account for them, they rival humans in computing power. I think our bodies work the same way. We hold intelligence in our whole bodies, not just our brains. You used your muscles to store knowledge that your brain couldn't handle.

> The idea that "you can breathe this way and get this effect"

You are not exercising when meditating, ergo your CO2 levels will drop.

I'd love to put a top meditator in a hyperbaric chamber and change the gas levels to something like CO2 @ 600ppm and then see how relaxed they are, unless they have high levels of myoglobin.

The higher the CO2 levels the more stimulated the body becomes. Its why some athlete's take a heaped teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate for asoda boost that has a stimulating effect on the body. Sodium causes the release of calcium from the bones which is stimulating, alters the metal profile in the blood, and the bicarbonate is double the CO2 which also stimulates the body and immune system. People who have trouble breathing used to be told to breath into a paper bag, as this increased the CO2 they rebreathed, which was useful when coal use was high.

So yes meditating can be relaxing, mainly because they are increasing oxygen levels in the body which is less stimulating than CO2 levels from running around.

The vagus nerve runs all the way down to the rectum in many animals, so be careful about stimulating it. One might have to suddenly evacuate in more ways than one, and this article seems like someone's idea of a joke, on the unprepared.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952396/ Effects of autonomic nerve stimulation on colorectal motility in rats

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15074355/ The role of the rectal branches of pelvic plexus in defecation and colonic motility in a canine model

I thought athletes used sodium bicarbonate to buffer the production of lactic acid during anaerobic activity. I've never heard of it as a stimulant. Can you provide a source for that mechanism?

Try it. Heaped teaspoon in a glass of water, give it 30mins. You'll notice the difference if you are walking around or doing more vigorous exercise like jogging or running.

Sodium/potassium kinase pump. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537088/

Sodium - releases calcium, increases a chance of a heart attack. FYI! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2158146/#:~:text=In%20respon....

CO2 levels. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-06/documents/co...

This is what you are referring to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6544001/

There are other mechanisms, like the effect sodium has on adrenal gland.

It's just that there's so many people walking around with their shoes untied because they think the shoe gods are bullshit

A great point. That's also wrong reasoning and in this case more harmful.

It sounds like something I'd expect to read from Douglas Adams, i.e. the prehistoric person doing something, then the modern/scientific person telling everyone it's wrong until they discover the science behind it, then smugly telling people they're right now and they were right to be wrong before.

There's a whole different set of heuristics people develop when working with reasonings that might not be right but give a better outcome for whatever reason.

Scientific reasoning is a relatively new phenomenon on top of the old way.

Interestingly, scientific reasoning is getting so prevalent that people don't imagine the old way existed...

What is the specific “old way?” you are referring to?

> Linden was emphatic about how science requires a mechanism of action

I don't think this is correct. Science is based on empiricism. Of course we'd like to understand the mechanism of action, but it's not strictly required for scientific description of some aspect of reality. For example, Kepler's laws were derived from the observed paths of the planets — it was only later that these same laws could be explained with recourse to the theory of gravity.

Yeah, he likely meant "Nature" requires a mechanism of action.

Even if that is what he meant, I still don't think it's correct.

To speak of a "mechanism of action" is necessarily to speak about a model of Nature that you, an observer, have created.

Natural phenomena exist empirically and logically prior to any such model, thus is is metaphysically redundant to say that Nature as such requires a mechanism of action.

Meditation likely lowers stress levels which reduces cortisol levels which improves immune function/response to cancer. That’s a guess as to a mechanism.

A modern classic would be Holotropic Breathwork, developed by Stanislav Grof after the LSD based therapies he had been developing in the 1970s were made illegal. Yes, it sounds like hippie silliness. But it does have notable effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof

https://www.amazon.com/Holotropic-Breathwork-Self-Exploratio...

>Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

I'm a bit surprised that we don't have more criticism of this book. It was less of a pop science book, and more of an anecdotal gonzo journalism.

Just by box breathing you can willfully lower your blood pressure and heart rate a good percentage (low double digits) with only a little practice.

I first learned about it when studying martial arts, years later science is just starting to realize how important it is.

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