I’ve been concerned for some time that intensive meditation causes people to stop feeling their emotions but not to stop having those emotions. Sam’s podcasts are in fact littered with examples where he clearly (from a third-party perspective) seems to become agitated, flustered or angry, but seems weirdly in denial about it because his inner experience is not one of upset. I’m not up to speculating on exactly how this happens, but there also seems to be an wide but informal folklore concerning long-term meditators who are interpersonally abusive or insensitive.
Did Sam Harris get into meditation in a big way before or during his podcast? If we have, say, several years of podcast material from before he got into meditation, then there’d probably be a paper or three to be found in analyzing the podcasts for e.g. upset demeanor.
Of course, a certain amount of that is subjective, but we could try to find some proxy or proxies (e.g. elevated voice), run the audio through and have a program enumerate every instance of those proxies, and then give a random selection of episodes to human listeners for them to measure, and see if the results are comparable.
Podcast started in 2013 to tie in with his 2014 book on meditation, Waking Up. :) He’s had a large interest in meditation since ~1986:
At age 19, he and a college friend tried MDMA, better known as ecstasy, and the experience altered his view of the role that love could play in the world. (“I realized that it was possible to be a human being who wished others well all the time, reflexively.”) He dropped out of Stanford, where he was an English major, in his sophomore year and started to study Buddhism and meditation. He flew around the country and around the world, to places such as India and Nepal, often for silent retreats that went on for months. [… H]e did work for one memorable three-week stint in the security detail assigned to the Dalai Lama.
I’ve been concerned for some time that intensive meditation causes people to stop feeling their emotions but not to stop having those emotions. Sam’s podcasts are in fact littered with examples where he clearly (from a third-party perspective) seems to become agitated, flustered or angry, but seems weirdly in denial about it because his inner experience is not one of upset. I’m not up to speculating on exactly how this happens, but there also seems to be an wide but informal folklore concerning long-term meditators who are interpersonally abusive or insensitive.
Did Sam Harris get into meditation in a big way before or during his podcast? If we have, say, several years of podcast material from before he got into meditation, then there’d probably be a paper or three to be found in analyzing the podcasts for e.g. upset demeanor.
Of course, a certain amount of that is subjective, but we could try to find some proxy or proxies (e.g. elevated voice), run the audio through and have a program enumerate every instance of those proxies, and then give a random selection of episodes to human listeners for them to measure, and see if the results are comparable.
Podcast started in 2013 to tie in with his 2014 book on meditation, Waking Up. :) He’s had a large interest in meditation since ~1986: