For pleasure/insight helmets you probably need intervention in the form of brain simulation (tDCS, tFUS, tMS). Biofeedback might help but you need to at least know where to steer towards.
The current SOTA is (AFAIK) 50% of people learning how to get into jhana given 1 week of a silent retreat
I’m pretty skeptical of those numbers, all exiting projects I know of don’t have a better method of measurement other than surveys and that gets bitten hard by social desirability bias/not wanting to have committed a sunk cost. Seems relevant that jhourney isn’t doing much EEG & biofeedback anymore.
Huh, those brain stimulation methods might actually be practical to use now, thanks for mentioning them!
Regarding skepticism of survey-data: If you’re imagining it’s only an end-of-the-retreat survey which asks “did you experience the jhana?”, then yeah, I’ll be skeptical too. But my understanding is that everyone has several meetings w/ instructors where a not-true-jhana/social-lie wouldn’t hold up against scrutiny.
I can ask during my online retreat w/ them in a couple months.
As for brain stimulation, TMS devices can be bought for <$10k from ebay. tDCS devices are available for ~$100, though I don’t expect them to have large effect sizes in any direction. There’s been noises of consumer-level tFUS devices for <$10k, but that’s likely >5 years in the future.
Regarding skepticism of survey-data: If you’re imagining it’s only an end-of-the-retreat survey which asks “did you experience the jhana?”, then yeah, I’ll be skeptical too. But my understanding is that everyone has several meetings w/ instructors where a not-true-jhana/social-lie wouldn’t hold up against scrutiny.
The incentives of the people running jhourney are to over-claim attainments, especially on edge-cases, and hype the retreats. Organizations can be sufficiently on guard to prevent the extreme forms of over-claiming & turning into a positive-reviews-factory, but I haven’t seen people from jhourney talk about it (or take action that shows they’re aware of the problem).
For pleasure/insight helmets you probably need intervention in the form of brain simulation (tDCS, tFUS, tMS). Biofeedback might help but you need to at least know where to steer towards.
I’m pretty skeptical of those numbers, all exiting projects I know of don’t have a better method of measurement other than surveys and that gets bitten hard by social desirability bias/not wanting to have committed a sunk cost. Seems relevant that jhourney isn’t doing much EEG & biofeedback anymore.
Huh, those brain stimulation methods might actually be practical to use now, thanks for mentioning them!
Regarding skepticism of survey-data: If you’re imagining it’s only an end-of-the-retreat survey which asks “did you experience the jhana?”, then yeah, I’ll be skeptical too. But my understanding is that everyone has several meetings w/ instructors where a not-true-jhana/social-lie wouldn’t hold up against scrutiny.
I can ask during my online retreat w/ them in a couple months.
As for brain stimulation, TMS devices can be bought for <$10k from ebay. tDCS devices are available for ~$100, though I don’t expect them to have large effect sizes in any direction. There’s been noises of consumer-level tFUS devices for <$10k, but that’s likely >5 years in the future.
The incentives of the people running jhourney are to over-claim attainments, especially on edge-cases, and hype the retreats. Organizations can be sufficiently on guard to prevent the extreme forms of over-claiming & turning into a positive-reviews-factory, but I haven’t seen people from jhourney talk about it (or take action that shows they’re aware of the problem).