It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness | Hacker News Reader

It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness

nytimes.com

53 pointspldpld23 comments

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, trained as a physicist, welcomed, encouraged Western science to validate Transcendental Meditation, a mechanical mantra repetition technique, with the stress on lack of effort which is opposed to mindfulness, concentration, self-observation, and other effortful techniques.

Electro-encephalographs of TM meditators, after just a few weeks of initiation into TM technique, show the various brain waves frequencies spreading from back to front, plus left-right hemispheric synchrony, and increasing in amplitude. This behaviour was seen a few decades ago, and is even more verified lately as detectors and signal processing advanced.

Was do the data mean? That's less "scientific", but clearly something is happening, and subjective reports are that it's a very positive experience with benefits that last outside of meditation.

Why does this behavior persist, is repeatable across many TM meditators, even neophyte meditators? It suggests, verifies even, that the TM technique recognizes inherent properties, abilities, behavior of the human brain.

Again, the benefits, if any, meditative sessions causing whole-brain wave synchrony, coherence, and increased wave amplitude? You'll have to ask TM meditators.

off topic of the article but on topic to your comment..

of transcendental meditation jd salinger wrote a book called franny and zooey(i) where the main character is obsessed with a little book about an individual who seeks an answer to a question developed after reading a vague reference in the bible to praying incessantly

it's biblical, but skeptical and the religious elements dissolve and are really only symptomatic of the period, the book wishes to tell a story and the infrastructure of christianity just happens to be the catalyst

the answer is sought in a pilgrimage around russia of the day, visiting the highest religious sanctums to question the foremost of the holy hierarchies, and the answer unfolds slowly to the pilgrim

the book in the story is a real 19th century anonymous work translated as the way of the pilgrim(ii)

the book is beautiful, and i would definitely recommend it

it walks you through the stages of transcendental meditation and then has the most beautiful final chapter

without the ending the story, for me, would have been a waste, but the last interaction is just so beautiful in its paradoxical self invalidation

the process of having a simple question, seeking an answer and finding innate complexity that leads to a simple solution that dissolves the complexity that led to the realisation is something i recognise in many pursuits

(i) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franny_and_Zooey

(ii) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Pilgrim

TM (and indeed vipaasanaa and other western hemisphere faddish takes on shutting up and sitting still for awhile) are just an offshoot of India's larger and longer tradition of yoga, no? Which isn't to say India has a monopoly on meditative tradition (cue ~neighbouring Daoists, Sufis, various extremo Christian sects though these usually limited to monks IIRC, etc.), just that it seems more dominant there than anywhere else. Point being, research on meditation has focused largely on yoga, and not without reason: I'd be surprised if TM isn't a sort of statistical aberration in the literature.

This seems like trying to understand how a car engine works by listening to the pitch of the sound it makes. Sure you can deduce somethings, but you aren't really going to understand the engine.

This is how I feel about neuroscience. Like sending signals through a processor to store heat maps. Some abstraction is missing.

Hmm, interesting thought, how much would we learn about a computer by a combination of stress testing and heat-mapping?

I'd say, quite much. I'm sure there would be no problem to figure out at least a few layers of memory, the existence of a separate GPU, the fact that it has a limited capability of concurrent computation and that most computation occurs at a very minor part of the CPU etc. Then, if we also figured out that the CPU is based on a lot of small transistors that'd probably give some insight as well.

But this would obviously not be nearly enough to build our own computer with capabilities similar to a modern computer. That'd require a lot more detailed knowledge and advanced equipment

I'd say neuroscience is somewhere at the beginning of the mapping process, certainly not nearly enough to construct our own brain, but still very informative on the subject of how the brain functions.

But it would allow confusion, describing CPUs as qualitatively different because of quantitative variations (register count, size, bus width) even though they're essentially the same (integrate, differentiate).

According to the article it's more like studying a computer and realizing it has clock cycles, where all the circuits are synchronized by a global clock. It's a very interesting finding.

The view of brain oscillations driving (or even partially modulating) neural activity is further supported by research involving stimulating the brain using Alternating Currents [1] I'm currently doing my PhD on this topic, and it seems so far that targeting AC (with an entrained frequency) to various motor-related neural networks can actually enhance the motor skill and even motor learning.

Brain oscillations are quite phenomenal, and the causal role of these synchronisations still require further research.

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.021

This is fascinating stuff, but what it means for how we think about conscious experience is quite open for discussion. We can't jump to either the consclusion that our conscious experience is not a "stream" or that the brain "fills in" the gaps.

It's been a long time since I've read about this stuff, but there's work by Daniel Dennett (http://cogprints.org/267/1/fillin.htm), and Alva Noe (http://www.alvanoe.com/action-in-perception/) that's quite relevant.

This is also the experience of experienced meditators in awareness type of meditation (mindfulness, vipasssana, shikantaza, silent illumination).

If you keep the focus in current moment prolonged periods of time, it's equivalent of "temporal zooming". Somewhere near 20-25 ms (40hz) is the "time resolution limit". In the limit sensations – thoughts are also considered sensations – come in as separate units and you experience the content of consciousness as very fast "flickering". There are units in higher resolution too, but they can be divided into these nuggets.

Concentrative type meditation (deep samadhi states, jahnas) is somewhat different experience because it shuts down most sensations.

Shutting down attention to sensory input is a prerequisite for realization of discrete nature of thoughts and what is between two thoughts.)

> thoughts are also considered sensations – come in as separate units and you experience the content of consciousness as very fast "flickering".

I've also had very similar experiences in sensory deprivation tanks.

Interesting, so far only music got me to slow down my perceptions to that point. It was a prerequisite for me to allow independent patterns without ending up focusing on one limb or another. As weird as pleasurable.

So essentially we have an event loop, right.

This seems similar to Alfred North Whitehead's idea of pulses/buds of perception, from the 1920's, sans the metaphysical aspect.

The metaphor I use in my research is the anapnoe of consciousness from the greek word for breathing.

I'm likening the 'chucks' to be undergoing wavelet transforms.

Just because a stream of water is composed of particles called water molecules doesn't make it any less of a stream.

It's more like if the stream was flowing in short bursts. One second a little water would be flowing, and then the next it would stop, and then it would flow again, and so on. As opposed to a continuous stream.

It's a flipbook!

It is "awareness" - what newborn babies have (born with).

To train a cluster of clusters of neural networks (which is the basis of associative, verbal mind) some "primitive" machinery is required. This is what we call "awareness" or pre-processing (pattern matching) of sensory input, which is prior to the intellect, which is based on a language and related mental concepts, which are socially and culturally conditioned and mostly wrong.)

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