Digestion, thought, and meditation

Great thread. My sense is the basic (smooth muscle) logic of the gut was copied and repurposed to “digest” thoughts. These systems are still linked & if you update your mental priors via meditation, these recalibrated priors will propagate back to the gut

https://psyche.co/ideas/to-grasp-how-serotonin-works-on-the-brain-look-to-the-gut

The strong version of this thesis is that multicellular life started as a big stomach; organs we’ve added since simply take this core logic of digestion, remix it, and apply it to novel sorts of objects. The brain treats information as the gut treats food (ht E.P.H. & R.S.)

This implies that there’s a near-duality between problems of digestion and problems of sensory metabolism. E.g. we should expect there to be a sensory analogue to constipation involving the same dynamics+neurotransmitters; rhythmic undulations move things along; etc

Objects in the gut are processed through muscular effort; same with the mind*. But the vipassana frame is that many “objects” in the mind are also unnecessary synthetic constructions that can untangle and self-metabolize when we relax

*https://opentheory.net/2023/07/principles-of-vasocomputation-a-unification-of-buddhist-phenomenology-active-inference-and-physical-reflex-part-i/

“As you do anything, so you do everything” — switching your mind’s digestion algorithm may have echo effects in your gut. But the smooth muscle motifs for allowing things to self-metabolize won’t always work in the gut! It’ll sometimes produce type errors & the body gets upset

Lots and lots of implications / tacit predictions here; one simple prediction is that meditative attainments will correspond with digestive changes, and potentially vice-versa

Hope to write this up in more depth someday, time and resources permitting

Btw I think food sensitivities aren’t a foregone conclusion of meditation, just another type error to resolve; I think @meditationstuff has addressed a lot of his food sensitivities

(And as people say a lot of “problems” may just be higher sensory clarity)

I think a crucial question is the degree to which a successful meditation practice produces specific food sensitivities vs general changes in digestion. Curious what peoples’ experiences are

QC collecting anecdotes here:

Noting that Yohan John and others have a great paper on this: