This experiment and its associated reflection on how the brain does it has led me to some (possibly obvious/well known) insight I’d like to share:
What does concentration mean brainwise? Roughly speaking letting ‘activation patterns’ of a perception (or thoughts) stabilize and suppressing non-salient aspects of the perception e.g. environmental noise.
(To do this with neuronal nets implies moderation feedback from a higher network level to a lower level)
Such a concentration allows to detect and learn finer differences in the perception structure because these finer differences can be picked up better in the absence of the filtered out ‘noise’.
(for neuronal networks this seems to correspond to e.g. selective training of kernels of deep learning nets)
Concentration/meditation on body perception then allows to become aware of its inner workings (as far as that is possible in principle given the ‘body noise’ and suppression capabilities).
If there are conscious control paths leading to feedback via the perception (and in the end even most subconscious control paths should be in principle controllable to some degree) then it should in principle be possible to learn the cooccurence patterns of control to perception (the same way that thoughs feedback on thoughts are routinely learned).
And this effectively means to consciously control (to a some degree) body functions normally working subconsciously.
This answers one question I long had: How it is possible for e.g. zen monks to achieve such feats as selectively controlling body temperature.
(for neuronal networks I’m not aware of algorithms for this kind of cooccurence learning)
Eureka!
This experiment and its associated reflection on how the brain does it has led me to some (possibly obvious/well known) insight I’d like to share:
What does concentration mean brainwise? Roughly speaking letting ‘activation patterns’ of a perception (or thoughts) stabilize and suppressing non-salient aspects of the perception e.g. environmental noise.
(To do this with neuronal nets implies moderation feedback from a higher network level to a lower level)
Such a concentration allows to detect and learn finer differences in the perception structure because these finer differences can be picked up better in the absence of the filtered out ‘noise’.
(for neuronal networks this seems to correspond to e.g. selective training of kernels of deep learning nets)
Concentration/meditation on body perception then allows to become aware of its inner workings (as far as that is possible in principle given the ‘body noise’ and suppression capabilities).
If there are conscious control paths leading to feedback via the perception (and in the end even most subconscious control paths should be in principle controllable to some degree) then it should in principle be possible to learn the cooccurence patterns of control to perception (the same way that thoughs feedback on thoughts are routinely learned).
And this effectively means to consciously control (to a some degree) body functions normally working subconsciously.
This answers one question I long had: How it is possible for e.g. zen monks to achieve such feats as selectively controlling body temperature.
(for neuronal networks I’m not aware of algorithms for this kind of cooccurence learning)
Does this sound plausible?
PS. Focussing on nostrils did work.