I’m on board with most of this, but I get stuck at the “cellular‑level” part.
It is useful to ask how far meditation (or any mental practice) can actually influence the body at the cellular scale. In one sense everything we do is “cellular” because we are made of cells. I assume you mean something narrower, but I’m not sure what.
For context: there is roughly one nervous‑system cell for every 100 000 other cells in the body. So any mental intervention can only act on most tissues indirectly. Are you talking only about neurons and glia, or do you think the effects propagate further?
I think the answer is yes: it necessarily propagates further. An analogy is kind of like how not every human in society watches the news but the news generally diffuses through the entire network (I think increasing the connectivity of this is itself one of the things I expect meditation to do)
This is my intuitive understanding, you may find a more rigorous answer here in the theory of vasocomputation:
I’m on board with most of this, but I get stuck at the “cellular‑level” part.
It is useful to ask how far meditation (or any mental practice) can actually influence the body at the cellular scale. In one sense everything we do is “cellular” because we are made of cells. I assume you mean something narrower, but I’m not sure what.
For context: there is roughly one nervous‑system cell for every 100 000 other cells in the body. So any mental intervention can only act on most tissues indirectly. Are you talking only about neurons and glia, or do you think the effects propagate further?
I think the answer is yes: it necessarily propagates further. An analogy is kind of like how not every human in society watches the news but the news generally diffuses through the entire network (I think increasing the connectivity of this is itself one of the things I expect meditation to do)
This is my intuitive understanding, you may find a more rigorous answer here in the theory of vasocomputation:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2og6RReKD47vseK8/how-i-started-believing-religion-might-actually-matter-for?commentId=xxudw3eh4cLAApvSL