I don’t see why, it seems that the paper doesn’t challenge the assumption that the “enlightened” state or the “dmn reduced activation” sate or whatever you want to call it results in less happiness.
Even more so, a lot of the effects described could also fall under aging and might be confounded by the fact that most of these people have aged during the time they trained (e.g. not being able to remember appointments).
Finally, you don’t have to bring meditation/introspection practices to the point where you get that “enlightened” state a constant in your life. I think there’s a fair argument to be made for dzogchen-like practices (e.g. the kind of quackery people like Sam Harris and Loch Kelly expose), if done in moderation, can allow you to “silence the dmn” or “separate awareness/attention/consciousness”, in a selective way rather than all the time. I.e. get to a point where your brain is able to experience something close to a small-medium dose of psilocybin for a short amount of time.
But, again, this final point is based on empirical quackery,but then again, so is most of the “research” around meditation when you compare it to other types of research (Note: I’m not blaming the way the research is done, I’m saying that the thing that they are trying to observer in combination with the tools they have means they will get very little insight… you can only do so many diffusion tensor MRIs on healthy people until it becomes unethical and the data you get from is very broad compare to, say, that you would get about kidney function from a biopsy + blood/urine testing using a broad range of separation techniques and chemical assays within reasonable cost)
I don’t see why, it seems that the paper doesn’t challenge the assumption that the “enlightened” state or the “dmn reduced activation” sate or whatever you want to call it results in less happiness.
Even more so, a lot of the effects described could also fall under aging and might be confounded by the fact that most of these people have aged during the time they trained (e.g. not being able to remember appointments).
Finally, you don’t have to bring meditation/introspection practices to the point where you get that “enlightened” state a constant in your life. I think there’s a fair argument to be made for dzogchen-like practices (e.g. the kind of quackery people like Sam Harris and Loch Kelly expose), if done in moderation, can allow you to “silence the dmn” or “separate awareness/attention/consciousness”, in a selective way rather than all the time. I.e. get to a point where your brain is able to experience something close to a small-medium dose of psilocybin for a short amount of time.
But, again, this final point is based on empirical quackery,but then again, so is most of the “research” around meditation when you compare it to other types of research (Note: I’m not blaming the way the research is done, I’m saying that the thing that they are trying to observer in combination with the tools they have means they will get very little insight… you can only do so many diffusion tensor MRIs on healthy people until it becomes unethical and the data you get from is very broad compare to, say, that you would get about kidney function from a biopsy + blood/urine testing using a broad range of separation techniques and chemical assays within reasonable cost)