I have no idea whether an experiment like one you describe would show a difference. I think there is probably some kind of bottleneck in the data the retina sends to the brain, and I imagine that could stand in the way of testing my attention in the way you describe. But the basic point is interesting.
I could imagine lots of experiments which I believe would likely show a difference in perception and attention between people who meditate in the way I’ve described and people who don’t. For example, I claimed that mode four perception has “wide attentional width”. It seems likely that this implies that a person in that mode of perception would be much better at attentional tasks involving simultaneous recognition of objects in different parts of the visual field. (For example, imagine watching a large computer screen that flashes two images, at the far left and right sides simultaneously, and having to explicitly say something about what properties those images had.) And since I can get into mode four perception when I want to, I should be better at these tasks.
On the other hand, most low-level cognitive processes are inaccessible to introspection, so without any knowledge of cognitive psychology, I have no idea whether the feature of experience I call “wide attentional width” would translate into this particular finding, or not do so because of some detail about human cognition that cognitive psychologists know about but I don’t.
So, ultimately, I expect that a variety of tests along these lines would find obvious differences, but I don’t have enough knowledge to pick out any particular one.
Risto Saarelma mentions EEG readings, and I imagine that meditating in the way I describe would produce obvious effects there, though I don’t know enough about EEG readings to predict what they would be.
In general I worry that this is not a helpful line of thinking to pursue. Finding these effects would show that the time I’ve invested in meditating has affected the functioning of my brain with respect to attention and perception. Would this really be a surprising result to you? I would expect that a person who pursues any exercise in attention and perception is likely to show differences in attention and perception compared to a person who doesn’t, simply due to neuroplasticity, even if they aren’t exercises in attention and perception that would ever lead to enlightenment. I don’t see that being able to demonstrate these differences would have a very large bearing on the claims I’ve made that people here have found controversial (though it would have some bearing on them).
anecdote: David Ingram (who claims to be enlightened) came to a cogsci lab at my school, and was able to perceive some normally-imperceptible “subliminal” visual stimuli (i.e. X milliseconds long flash or whatever). I heard it from a friend who administered the test, I don’t have the raw data or an article, grains of salt and all that.
I also remember reading that people doing awareness meditation can keep responding to a repeating stimulus as strongly as the first time they perceive it, while the repetition makes non-meditators respond less strongly to subsequent stimuli, but can’t find a cite for this one.
If true, that would be evidence that meditation changes one, and might be evidence that meditation deserves further inquiry, but since suppressing one’s startle reflex does not in itself have significant positive effects on a human life, it says nothing about whether the changes considered as a whole are positive or negative.
My impression at age 50 is that the ‘fuzzy’ self-improvement advice I took to heart was helpful in some ways and harmful in others with no significant net-positive benefit. By ‘fuzzy’ I mean that the advice might have ‘made sense’ in several ways and might have been supported by enthusiastic testimonials, but was not sigificantly informed by settled science. The OP’s advice is clearly ‘fuzzy’ under this definition.
If we were to read the relevant peer-reviewed medical articles (search engine target: mindfulness-based stress reduction) we would probably find solid evidence that meditation can significantly lower stress hormones, but that you only need to do it 4 minutes a day to derive that benefit.
I believe that for people with certain chronic illnesses, specifically certain kinds of infections, meditating an hour a day would be very harmful because it would supress the immune system for a number of hours after the meditation session. Note that quite ordinary things that healthy people can just shrug off, such as half an hour of sun when the sun is high in the sky, suppresses the immune system for a number of hours and consequently can be very harmful to sick people. Note also that controlling the effects of (my own) chronic illness has been my number-one concern for most of the last 25 years.
In contrast, I expect no adverse health effect even in very sick people (e.g., AIDS patients) from the four-minutes-a-day regime as recommended in mindfulness-based stress reduction, and to distinguish that from what the OP is talking about, I will refer to what the OP is talking about as ‘intensive meditation’.
I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just ‘raw numbers’) to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement to our civilization, but I cannot recall ever having heard of one. (I would love for someone to correct that deficiency.)
In comparision, Steve Jobs and Kary Mullis (inventor of (the first really important kind of) PCR) have taken LSD, and Steve claims that it was one of his 3 most important formative experiences, and there are probably at least as many English speakers who’ve tried intensive meditation as have tried LSD. I could also name a number of similarly seminal, fertile or creative people who have learned to play and to love playing a musical instrument, to give another example that stand in contrast to the situation with intensive meditation.
In other words, I have a habit of noting the biographical details of people I consider to have made a significant contribution to our civilization, and I am beginning to suspect that there is something about intensive meditation that makes one less likely to make a significant contribution to our civilization. I realize of course that there are other ways of leading a worthwhile life than becoming notorious for a significant contribution to our civilization, but well a lot of us here are interested in that sort of thing (which is often called ‘saving the world’ around here).
If true, that would be evidence that meditation changes one, but since suppressing one’s startle reflex does not in itself have significant positive effect on a human life, it says nothing about whether the changes considered as a whole are positive or negative.
This is the thing I was talking about in my previous comments. The simple stuff that actually can be tested easily doesn’t generally imply anything very impressive taken as it is. What we can do is try to guess at what other cognitive changes are probably going on that bring about the measurable effect, and what other, harder-to-measure effects they might have. I don’t have a really good idea on where to go from, say, the startle reflex thing correlated with the accounts on meditation, but someone with better cognitive science expertise might.
My impression at age 50 is that the self-improvement advice I took to heart was helpful in some ways and harmful in others with no significant net-positive benefit.
What self-improvement advice are you talking about here? Meditation instructions, self-improvement in general?
I believe that for people with certain chronic illnesses, specifically certain kinds of infections, meditating an hour a day would be very harmful because it would supress the immune system for a number of hours after the meditation session.
Link to this? All I find with a quick googling is stuff about meditation boosting the immune system.
I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just ‘raw numbers’) to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement to our civilization, but I cannot recall ever having heard of one. (I would love for someone to correct that deficiency.)
There’s David Lynch, but whether he’s improved our civilization is debatable. It is definitely interesting that there’s the widespread mythos of LSD contributing to scientific and technological innovation, but none about meditation. One factor here is that dropping acid is a very quick way to get into a very strange mental state, while, based on the accounts here, meditation takes at least months of deliberate, concentrated, high-volume effort, with good instructions being very sparse. There just might not be that much of an overlap between people who have successfully put the time into meditation and people who are predisposed to making scientific discoveries, often due to spending their spare time working on their skills on their field of choice rather than in concentrated meditative practice. It’s also not easy to tell exactly how much basis in fact LSD’s reputation has, due to it having been illegal to actually do research with it.
Ben Goertzel does share your sentiment though, I recall him telling that he used to be much into meditation and enlightenment thing, but then started thinking that he hadn’t heard of enlightened folk making notable scientific discoveries and decided to try to attain notable scientific results instead of enlightenment.
One possible problem is that a sufficiently good mind hack that makes you stop being stressed and worried about things might also stop you from becoming sufficiently irked by perceived shortcomings in your surroundings to set about on a laborious and complex process to repair them. Quite a lot of advancements in society sound a lot like people being caught up in the suffering-causing desire to stay attached to transient things like warmth, a food supply, memories or life.
Greg Egan has spelled out this suspicion with Buddhist thought in detail in a couple of places. In Diaspora, it was portrayed as a sort of memetic dead end that made the upload people fold into solipsism and permanently cease interactions with the surrounding world. In TAP, I got the idea it was promoted by a government as a way to make the populace stay content in the crappy conditions they lived in, instead of rocking the boat and demanding things to be better.
One possible problem is that a sufficiently good mind hack that makes you stop being stressed and worried about things might also stop you from becoming sufficiently irked by perceived shortcomings in your surroundings to set about on a laborious and complex process to repair them. Quite a lot of advancements in society sound a lot like people being caught up in the suffering-causing desire to stay attached to transient things like warmth, a food supply, memories or life.
That’s a good point and appears plausible to me. Changing a problem in your own mind in such a way that it doesn’t need fixing in the external world anymore seems fairly common among meditators in general (myself included). There’s probably a strong (but not necessarily intentional) overlap with wire-heading and its usual implications.
However, science as a social game (including very tight career paths), weirdness filters and some of the bad woo clustering around meditation seems more likely as a general explanation.
Still, there are some more-or-less scientifically trained meditators (e.g. Shinzen Young, B. Alan Wallace and they all tend to focus on their own lives or on teaching meditation afaik.
Much of humanity’s progress depended on being unreasonable and willing to suffer for questionable gains (see Jared Diamond). Enlightenment might not be useful for that.
I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive
course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive
meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just ‘raw
numbers’) to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new
kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement
to our civilization
This is an interesting point.
I notice no change in myself as a result of meditation that I would think is likely to have decreased my lifetime potential for scientific or cultural output, but this kind of “noticing” is obviously not especially reliable.
My inclination is to think that the culture of meditation typically draws in a certain type of person, but I’m not sure that’s sufficient to explain your observation (assuming your observation is true).
The world does, subjectively, appear to be enormously fresh and interesting to me (compared to before I went down this particular path), which may be related to what you read.
In general I worry that this is not a helpful line of thinking to pursue. Finding these effects would show that the time I’ve invested in meditating has affected the functioning of my brain with respect to attention and perception. Would this really be a surprising result to you?
It wouldn’t be very close to the cognitive changes you describe, but it would be some outside confirmation that something is going on. The interesting claims are at higher level brain functions, but we don’t currently have many ways of examining those in ways that don’t require human interpretation that is itself vulnerable to bias. A not necessarily helpful approach would be to proceed to assume that only the effects measurable in some objective way are worth paying any attention to here.
Well, I’d bet that a battery of cognitive tests related to attention and perception would find a cluster of really obvious differences between me and the relevant control population.
But I am not a cognitive psychologist. Maybe someone who is or who knows about the subject has some input on what to test.
EEG might be the simplest measure, but does it give any really specific information?
I have no idea whether an experiment like one you describe would show a difference. I think there is probably some kind of bottleneck in the data the retina sends to the brain, and I imagine that could stand in the way of testing my attention in the way you describe. But the basic point is interesting.
I could imagine lots of experiments which I believe would likely show a difference in perception and attention between people who meditate in the way I’ve described and people who don’t. For example, I claimed that mode four perception has “wide attentional width”. It seems likely that this implies that a person in that mode of perception would be much better at attentional tasks involving simultaneous recognition of objects in different parts of the visual field. (For example, imagine watching a large computer screen that flashes two images, at the far left and right sides simultaneously, and having to explicitly say something about what properties those images had.) And since I can get into mode four perception when I want to, I should be better at these tasks.
On the other hand, most low-level cognitive processes are inaccessible to introspection, so without any knowledge of cognitive psychology, I have no idea whether the feature of experience I call “wide attentional width” would translate into this particular finding, or not do so because of some detail about human cognition that cognitive psychologists know about but I don’t.
So, ultimately, I expect that a variety of tests along these lines would find obvious differences, but I don’t have enough knowledge to pick out any particular one.
Risto Saarelma mentions EEG readings, and I imagine that meditating in the way I describe would produce obvious effects there, though I don’t know enough about EEG readings to predict what they would be.
In general I worry that this is not a helpful line of thinking to pursue. Finding these effects would show that the time I’ve invested in meditating has affected the functioning of my brain with respect to attention and perception. Would this really be a surprising result to you? I would expect that a person who pursues any exercise in attention and perception is likely to show differences in attention and perception compared to a person who doesn’t, simply due to neuroplasticity, even if they aren’t exercises in attention and perception that would ever lead to enlightenment. I don’t see that being able to demonstrate these differences would have a very large bearing on the claims I’ve made that people here have found controversial (though it would have some bearing on them).
anecdote: David Ingram (who claims to be enlightened) came to a cogsci lab at my school, and was able to perceive some normally-imperceptible “subliminal” visual stimuli (i.e. X milliseconds long flash or whatever). I heard it from a friend who administered the test, I don’t have the raw data or an article, grains of salt and all that.
Testable hypothesis: Enlightened people would be less likely to panic when stressed.
Less testable but still interesting hypothesis: Enlightened people would less vulnerable to PTSD.
Apparently skilled meditators can suppress their startle reflex much better than non-meditators.
I also remember reading that people doing awareness meditation can keep responding to a repeating stimulus as strongly as the first time they perceive it, while the repetition makes non-meditators respond less strongly to subsequent stimuli, but can’t find a cite for this one.
If true, that would be evidence that meditation changes one, and might be evidence that meditation deserves further inquiry, but since suppressing one’s startle reflex does not in itself have significant positive effects on a human life, it says nothing about whether the changes considered as a whole are positive or negative.
My impression at age 50 is that the ‘fuzzy’ self-improvement advice I took to heart was helpful in some ways and harmful in others with no significant net-positive benefit. By ‘fuzzy’ I mean that the advice might have ‘made sense’ in several ways and might have been supported by enthusiastic testimonials, but was not sigificantly informed by settled science. The OP’s advice is clearly ‘fuzzy’ under this definition.
If we were to read the relevant peer-reviewed medical articles (search engine target: mindfulness-based stress reduction) we would probably find solid evidence that meditation can significantly lower stress hormones, but that you only need to do it 4 minutes a day to derive that benefit.
I believe that for people with certain chronic illnesses, specifically certain kinds of infections, meditating an hour a day would be very harmful because it would supress the immune system for a number of hours after the meditation session. Note that quite ordinary things that healthy people can just shrug off, such as half an hour of sun when the sun is high in the sky, suppresses the immune system for a number of hours and consequently can be very harmful to sick people. Note also that controlling the effects of (my own) chronic illness has been my number-one concern for most of the last 25 years.
In contrast, I expect no adverse health effect even in very sick people (e.g., AIDS patients) from the four-minutes-a-day regime as recommended in mindfulness-based stress reduction, and to distinguish that from what the OP is talking about, I will refer to what the OP is talking about as ‘intensive meditation’.
I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just ‘raw numbers’) to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement to our civilization, but I cannot recall ever having heard of one. (I would love for someone to correct that deficiency.)
In comparision, Steve Jobs and Kary Mullis (inventor of (the first really important kind of) PCR) have taken LSD, and Steve claims that it was one of his 3 most important formative experiences, and there are probably at least as many English speakers who’ve tried intensive meditation as have tried LSD. I could also name a number of similarly seminal, fertile or creative people who have learned to play and to love playing a musical instrument, to give another example that stand in contrast to the situation with intensive meditation.
In other words, I have a habit of noting the biographical details of people I consider to have made a significant contribution to our civilization, and I am beginning to suspect that there is something about intensive meditation that makes one less likely to make a significant contribution to our civilization. I realize of course that there are other ways of leading a worthwhile life than becoming notorious for a significant contribution to our civilization, but well a lot of us here are interested in that sort of thing (which is often called ‘saving the world’ around here).
This is the thing I was talking about in my previous comments. The simple stuff that actually can be tested easily doesn’t generally imply anything very impressive taken as it is. What we can do is try to guess at what other cognitive changes are probably going on that bring about the measurable effect, and what other, harder-to-measure effects they might have. I don’t have a really good idea on where to go from, say, the startle reflex thing correlated with the accounts on meditation, but someone with better cognitive science expertise might.
What self-improvement advice are you talking about here? Meditation instructions, self-improvement in general?
Link to this? All I find with a quick googling is stuff about meditation boosting the immune system.
There’s David Lynch, but whether he’s improved our civilization is debatable. It is definitely interesting that there’s the widespread mythos of LSD contributing to scientific and technological innovation, but none about meditation. One factor here is that dropping acid is a very quick way to get into a very strange mental state, while, based on the accounts here, meditation takes at least months of deliberate, concentrated, high-volume effort, with good instructions being very sparse. There just might not be that much of an overlap between people who have successfully put the time into meditation and people who are predisposed to making scientific discoveries, often due to spending their spare time working on their skills on their field of choice rather than in concentrated meditative practice. It’s also not easy to tell exactly how much basis in fact LSD’s reputation has, due to it having been illegal to actually do research with it.
Ben Goertzel does share your sentiment though, I recall him telling that he used to be much into meditation and enlightenment thing, but then started thinking that he hadn’t heard of enlightened folk making notable scientific discoveries and decided to try to attain notable scientific results instead of enlightenment.
One possible problem is that a sufficiently good mind hack that makes you stop being stressed and worried about things might also stop you from becoming sufficiently irked by perceived shortcomings in your surroundings to set about on a laborious and complex process to repair them. Quite a lot of advancements in society sound a lot like people being caught up in the suffering-causing desire to stay attached to transient things like warmth, a food supply, memories or life.
Greg Egan has spelled out this suspicion with Buddhist thought in detail in a couple of places. In Diaspora, it was portrayed as a sort of memetic dead end that made the upload people fold into solipsism and permanently cease interactions with the surrounding world. In TAP, I got the idea it was promoted by a government as a way to make the populace stay content in the crappy conditions they lived in, instead of rocking the boat and demanding things to be better.
That’s a good point and appears plausible to me. Changing a problem in your own mind in such a way that it doesn’t need fixing in the external world anymore seems fairly common among meditators in general (myself included). There’s probably a strong (but not necessarily intentional) overlap with wire-heading and its usual implications.
However, science as a social game (including very tight career paths), weirdness filters and some of the bad woo clustering around meditation seems more likely as a general explanation.
Still, there are some more-or-less scientifically trained meditators (e.g. Shinzen Young, B. Alan Wallace and they all tend to focus on their own lives or on teaching meditation afaik.
Much of humanity’s progress depended on being unreasonable and willing to suffer for questionable gains (see Jared Diamond). Enlightenment might not be useful for that.
(Also, checking out Egan.)
This is an interesting point.
I notice no change in myself as a result of meditation that I would think is likely to have decreased my lifetime potential for scientific or cultural output, but this kind of “noticing” is obviously not especially reliable.
My inclination is to think that the culture of meditation typically draws in a certain type of person, but I’m not sure that’s sufficient to explain your observation (assuming your observation is true).
The world does, subjectively, appear to be enormously fresh and interesting to me (compared to before I went down this particular path), which may be related to what you read.
It wouldn’t be very close to the cognitive changes you describe, but it would be some outside confirmation that something is going on. The interesting claims are at higher level brain functions, but we don’t currently have many ways of examining those in ways that don’t require human interpretation that is itself vulnerable to bias. A not necessarily helpful approach would be to proceed to assume that only the effects measurable in some objective way are worth paying any attention to here.
Well, I’d bet that a battery of cognitive tests related to attention and perception would find a cluster of really obvious differences between me and the relevant control population.
But I am not a cognitive psychologist. Maybe someone who is or who knows about the subject has some input on what to test.
EEG might be the simplest measure, but does it give any really specific information?