Next time you should stay with us. I should? Yeah. All I did was ride my motorbike home and ride it back again. Really? Yeah. So that was something for your lunch? Yeah, that was my lunch break. Wow. That was for your motorbike. I take it out and come back just to taste it.
Okay. So I hope you feel like your animal is satisfied and that there is no needs that need to be fulfilled, except the need for and craving for the knowledge, scientific knowledge, that we're going to hopefully get, but no expectations.
So what we did in the morning was looking at meditation through meditation.
So I want to thank you, Anthony, for being with us and sharing your experience. Each time, even though we see each other often, I attended two of your retreats, which is not so many, but still, it's always like a new seat there, always something wise that you can take and actually apply in your everyday life.
So did you feel something similar? That's what I felt.
A lot of seeds.
A lot of fruits.
One for you, one for us.
It was really special.
Yeah.
So, and now we'll continue with uncovering the truth and reality about meditation.
And this afternoon we will devote it to the scientific part of meditation
and now Mike Johnson will see that.
Because it was so amazing.
After only seven day retreat, he came out with mind blowing ideas.
What was actually going on during meditation.
Not in our mind, because the Buddhism is more about the mind and practical thing.
But what was going on in the brain.
So yes.
Yes, and then after Mike will tell us the theory,
we will discuss a little bit my experience
in Chong Tong Monastery,
and Mike will try to uncover what people,
what the teachers were trying to do with me there,
because one of the girls thought
that it's actually a human experiment,
that something is, she's like a genie pig there,
but thanks to what Mike wrote and what thoughts he has,
it was very clear that it's not the experiment.
There is something, there is an order,
and this order he will help us to understand.
So, thank you for the lovely introduction.
So, one frame in all of this is
why does it matter?
perhaps most relevantly for us,
if you follow the recipe,
then in a fairly reliable way,
great things happen to you.
And this is really important.
It's an impressive technology.
We think of technology as things in
We our iPhones or TVs or whatnot, but Buddhism is high tech.
And it's a form of technology that has not been equaled yet.
And so, Buddha was an amazing innovator in this space.
And he made this amazing thing that we call Buddhism, that we call meditation.
I mean, he didn't come up with the idea of meditation, but this was kind of in the water supply earlier.
But he arguably perfected it.
And so, this recipe for having amazing things happen to you if you follow it has been passed down through several traditions.
And it's mutated and changed.
Maybe some of the realities got knocked off.
But at the same time, it's gotten down to us.
But it feels like a lot of traditions have sort of forgotten how to cook.
That they have this recipe, they have these tips or tricks or mental hats or whatnot.
And there's...
There's kind of, I would say, confusion about why these things work.
And Ivana will be discussing some of the things that her retreat leaders had to do.
But it feels...
I mean, I don't mind following recipes.
But I really want to know how to cook.
Because sometimes you want to change the recipe.
You want to add some more...
You want to make it bigger, smaller, add some more spices, whatever.
And this...
I would say that the concept of applying neuroscience to meditation is let's really make this technology ours.
Let's really figure out how it works.
How to improve it.
How to change it.
How to adapt it to different people's needs.
So that's what I think is really at stake here.
And I think it's very important.
Finally, of course, there are lots of technologies on the horizon.
And it's not outside the bounds of reality to think that we can start to use neurotechnology
to actually improve meditation as well.
But again, we have to know how meditation works to improve it.
So before I discuss this, does anyone want to take a crack at how they think the neuroscience of meditation works?
Works or interconnects, correlates?
I'm not sure.
How a neuroscientist...
A neuroscientist, in your mind, would explain how meditation works?
Or why it makes sense?
It's like training certain parts of your brain.
Yeah, it's basically like training and causing effects.
Well, discovering or exploring or unlocking more potential.
Because I don't remember now exactly the number, but we're using like 1% of our abilities, right?
And then there is like 99% which is unlocked.
So my understanding is that neuroscience explains how meditation can unlock this, well, a part of this other 99%.
I would say that the 1%, 99% figure is a little...
Yeah.
But it is true that we...
Perhaps one could phrase it that we spend almost all of our time in a little corner of the possible space of human experience.
And meditation unlocks a much wider, wider area.
So, yeah.
I...
So, I've listed some ways that neuroscience tries to explain what's going on in meditation.
And I like yours better than any of these.
So, yes.
Right.
Generally speaking, neuroscientists might try to explain what's happening in the brain.
I think the term brain urges that it down-regulates the glagata or increases the cical cortex or who knows.
The neuroscience of meditation is a very important part of the brain. It's a very important part of the brain. It's a very important part of the brain. It's a very important part of the brain. It's a very important part of the brain. It's a very important part of the brain. It's a very important part of the brain. activity in the brain near the surface and then we can kind of see these brain waves put labels on them alpha data gamma delta and finally there's this way of understanding the brain through mirror transmitters well
Well, depression is a shortage of serotonin,
so you just add some serotonin, and you're good.
Or meditation increases endorphins,
or decreases something.
So I would say that all of these explanations generally
hide or obscure more than they actually explain.
Put another way, they don't actually let us build anything.
They're stories, but they're not predictions.
They're correlations that we've observed,
but not causal sort of gears to level explanations.
So that's to say that there's a lot of bad neuroscience
out there about meditation.
Feels like this bad part we'll explain tomorrow.
No, this session was nice.
I'm actually looking forward to hear what's next.
Okay.
We'll still have time to change the session.
Yeah.
Or to have fun.
Quick update.
Thank you, Mike.
Team member.
Yes, teamwork, right?
You're welcome.
All that, sir.
What a bad viewer, sorry.
Sorry.
It's too bright for me.
So what's the alternative? And I think the alternative is to look at concepts of information and especially self-organization.
The brain built itself, evolutionists built it to sort of self-organize along certain principles.
And it's absolutely true that the brain is horrifically complicated.
And I think in these other stories, the problem is they don't have good ways of cutting through the complexity to something simple.
And so I think the path forward is to reverse engineer the core,
the core of the brain,
And this lets us, if we can do that, then we can understand the how and the why of, okay, how does the brain do what it does?
And I think this is going to be enormously productive.
And to give the punchline first, I think the brain already has incredibly powerful and elegant algorithms that can be triggered to heal itself, to purify itself, to basically improve itself.
And it's not something external that you need to hack.
Your brain already has a bunch of cool technology built in.
Evolution has done that for us.
And then meditation is a clever way, we can call it a hack, to trigger some of this technology that we just have in us by virtue of reading.
And it's this idea that first of all the brain's core job, if the brain has one job to do, it's to minimize surprise.
Because if you can predict what's going to happen, then you can sort of behave in an intelligent manner.
And so there's this process that there are two things, two actors in this play, you could say.
And the first actor is bottom-ups in the sense data.
Just the raw information that we get from our senses.
And then we have these stories about what this data means.
And we need the stories because just the raw data can get very overwhelming and confusing very fast.
And basically,
if we can, if our stories, if our predictions can predict the sense data coming in,
we ignore the sense data.
So right now I'm getting information from a lot of nerves all over my body.
I mean, you're all sitting down, you're not, but you're getting just this flood of information from your thighs
and from your skin that's covered with clothes and from every part of your body, really.
And you just ignore it because you're successfully predicting it.
It's not surprising that you're getting data from your thigh that you're sitting down.
It's not surprising that you're getting a little bit of the sense of weight from your hair or something.
So your consciousness basically only pays attention to surprising things.
So if you get bit by a snake, that's surprising.
If there's pressure on your feet when you're standing up, not surprising.
So this is a very basic organizational principle about how the brain works.
And
there's something about this story that is very interesting.
That the data coming in drives brain activity.
It makes the brain more active.
And then the stories, if you have a story that can predict what sense data that you're getting,
that basically tunes activity in the brain down.
So
it's kind of this war that, or battle,
between the bottom-up stuff that is adding energy to the brain
and the top-down predictions that are sort of, they act, I guess, I would call them energy sinks.
But basically they just kind of soak up the energy.
And one thing that I would also mention is that modern life tends to
reward us for focusing on our brain.
Our top-down stories.
For thinking.
Not feeling.
So we were just talking about this before the talk.
That this system can basically get out of balance.
And we can come to live
in our stories and basically ignore our sense data.
And that's kind of too bad because the stories are just hallucinations and sense data is what's real.
So we can kind of get disconnected.
The story that I'm going to tell about this, about meditation, is that meditation is basically a tool to shift the balance in this battle between bottom-up stuff and top-down stuff.
And it does that by sort of turning off the stories.
And sort of by focusing effortfully on the stories.
And we can get a little tension on our sense data.
We feed that and we get more energy into the brain.
So it's kind of...
Meditation is a way to cause the brain to enter a higher energy state.
And this is...
It feels odd to say, but meditation takes a lot of effort.
There is this sort of build-up of something.
And I would say that's this...
This is the mechanism by which the build-up happens.
So, first story, predictive coding.
The brain tries to minimize surprise.
There's predictive models that try and figure out the future.
And there's bottom-up sense data, what actually exists.
And meditation, by focusing on the bottom-up sense data,
it allows energy to build up.
Because the stories soak up the energy.
And so if we turn off the stories, more energy can be created.
Maybe someone...
Should we stop and if someone has a question of clarification,
for example, what is bottom-up stories and...
Because I think that might not be clear.
Yeah, yeah.
So do you mean real energy?
I mean, so more blood goes to our brain?
What do you mean by energy?
Right, right.
So this is not literal energy in the form of heat,
but energy in the form of more neural activity.
So waves of inhibition and expectation, I would say.
Which is neurons are more active.
They're firing a little bit.
They're firing faster.
Just...
I know that our brain tries always to save energy.
To just behave somehow, to save it.
Is it...
Makes sense?
Or just that energy that you mentioned,
Right, right.
I mean, I would say meditation takes calories.
It's not a low-cost process.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think I will be able to explain,
because I have kind of a different understanding
of the similar predictive coding system,
which might help you as well with your understanding.
So from what I have read,
which is basically a different model of the same predictive coding,
the sensitive data which comes in,
in whatever form, through neurons to the brain,
has, let's say, 100%.
And 95% of that, our brain has predicted.
So it's not surprising for the brain.
So it's only 5%, which is kind of surprising for the brain,
and that's what he puts forward to our conscious.
And that's what we are processing
as our actual understanding of the brain.
So in reality, that's 5%, right?
So let's say if Ilya stands up now,
that would be a sudden thing, right?
So the brain will actually...
React on that.
...react on it and push it.
Even though all this time,
the brain also saw that everybody else is sitting.
But it doesn't give me that information.
So basically, what the top-down stories are
is basically us,
using this 5% and exaggerating it
into these big stories and explanations and so on, right?
And when Mike is saying that meditation kind of refocuses your mind
into
neuroscience of meditation is the process of creating the stories out of 5% of the 95% of the data that is coming in.
That's what takes the energy away from creating the stories out of 5% into trying to focus on the 95%.
However, from what I understand, from what I have read, at all times the brain activity is actually the same.
At all times the brain consumes 25% of your energy.
Even when you are sleeping, even when you are relaxing, even when you are working on something and composing I don't know what, right?
It all takes the same energy. It's just normally it's all focused on creating the story, but now through meditation it's just focused on understanding the reality a little bit better.
So it's a bit of a balance. So where it goes?
Or even refocusing, yeah.
Yeah, the thing is, the problem is that these stories usually are not real.
They are not positive.
So this is negative stories because surprise is usually something that brain doesn't like.
There is something I haven't predicted.
So that's why predictive coding and meditation as a tool helps to calm down and tell you, okay, this is not such a big surprise.
This is not so bad for you, even though it's different from what you used to receive from external data.
And I would say that that's kind of how it works.
Meditation works by sort of getting ahead of sense data before it has to be a part of our stories.
That if I feel a twinge in my leg, my leg is not going to fall off.
I can just say, okay brain, don't worry, everything is fine.
You don't need to be working this into some sort of big story where I have cancer or something.
It always uses a lot of energy.
And perhaps the best way to frame this then is where the energy goes.
So, it's the exact same equations that you use to figure out what frequencies resonate in a guitar if you plug a certain string.
you should see higher harmonic peaks,
higher sort of...
a lot of energy concentrated in the brain's natural resonant components
So, the first story basically concluded that meditation adds energy to the brain.
And this story about connectome harmonics
tells the story of where this energy goes.
That if you just have more background energy,
it should naturally gather in the
What's going on there?
Why is it hard?
It's like if your brain is a bell, it's mud splatters on the bell.
And so the hard part of meditation is sort of trying to scrape off the mud from the bell
This tells the story about what happens to the energy.
That, okay, you have all this energy kind of doing its thing in the brain and it'll
naturally make its way into the brain's natural resonant moments if you do it right, if you
sort of successfully enter a force state.
And successfully build up this natural resonance.
So, this tends to increase harmony in the brain.
So, just, I would like to read this article about, just, this other soil article.
So, but, which experiments they did, I mean, maybe main experiments that proved that, you
know, this hypothesis and just what they measured and in which situation.
Just maybe in brief.
Yeah.
Sure.
So, this paradigm came out just over two years ago, in 2016.
And so far it's been used to study the effects of various psychedelics on the brain.
They, so I have to say, I believe, studied the effects of psychedelics.
I had some interesting results, like more energy in the harmonics in general,
So what is the main difference with just what you mentioned in the first slide
when it was how it was old methods, like alpha, beta, gamma, waves, yeah?
And it's also waves.
But it's not.
It's some other wave.
Right, right.
It's a good question.
So the old way, the sort of measuring brain waves with
EEG just gives a slice of the wave itself.
You can see, okay, there's a lot of neurons firing in this electrode, and then there are fewer neurons firing in this specific electrode.
This adds another dimension to the analysis in that you can not only measure the waves, but you can measure the medium in which the wave is resonating.
And if you can do that, then you can calculate the natural harmonics of the system, which lets you do all sorts of cool stuff.
I think so.
I guess this is a static picture, but you can just imagine waves traveling in the brain.
The blue is lower than average activity and the red is higher than average activity.
And I can show you guys a video of this, which definitely looks better in motion.
So, guys, this is where the magic happens.
Can you explain what is annealing before...
What is...
Yeah, he will go...
He will...
Let's Mike explain and if you still have questions then we'll explain in Russian.
So there's this, if you're a blacksmith and you're working on metal, maybe somebody brings
to restore the natural form, or rather the
order of crystals, the structure of the molecules of crystals of a certain metal, It is heated to the melting temperature until it accepts the previous structure of the molecule. The same thing happens during meditation with the brain. Now she will tell us about it.
So, the core insight that I would share is that brains work like this too. And brains can sort of... So, when a metal is bent a lot, it's stresses build up in the material. That's called cold working.
And if a metal is cold worked too much, then it becomes very hard and brittle.
And so, I think brains... that happens to brains too. And we can talk about it in terms of stress.
But I think this is a more precise way to... or perhaps more generative way to talk about that.
Emotionally intense experiences act as kind of a turning up the heat of the brain.
And then the brain can sort of self-organize into new, fresh, healthy equilibrium or balances.
So, this is studied in the context of neuroscience under entropic disintegration.
Robin Carhart-Harris has a paper in the Entropic Brain about this.
And basically, adding energy to the system makes existing patterns, existing attractors, break down.
And then the system finds new patterns that make more sense, that are more sustainable, that release the pressure that's sort of built up into the system.
And then as the system cools down, as the brain leaves a high energy state, then these new patterns sort of crystallize.
And these new patterns become more durable, more permanent.
And emotionally intense experiences, like what could cause this high energy state and stuff.
And I think you see this in...
For example, the birth of a child, or a really bad breakup, or really good sex, or your running day, or even crying.
So, the...
I guess I'll slide in here.
This is a very healthy thing to have happen to your brain.
Obviously, you want good things to happen.
To push you into these states.
Into these more changeable, high energy states.
That's a lot more healthy if you're pushed into this by good things happening versus bad things.
But this process, this raising the energy level of the brain, and then letting the brain sort of self-organize around...
New patterns.
I would argue that it's the basic mechanism by which the brain heals itself and updates what's important.
So...
I would say that to bring all this back home, so to speak...
Meditation is a very clever technology to basically...
Trigger these states at will.
And that's not to say that you can sit down and in 15 minutes you can trigger one of these states.
And kneel yourself.
Right.
But after a 21-day retreat, this is what's happening.
I think.
You're basically building up this...
This Heath-Brander.
And I think the...
So, a lot of things can push the brain into a higher state.
They can push us into this very emotional state.
But there's always tends to be some object of focus. I mean if you're in a hierarchy state because it's your wedding day, then that's going to be your focus. And if you're in this hierarchy state because of a breakup, that's going to be your focus. If you're in this hierarchy state because you just had a child, that's going to be your focus.
Meditation is different because it doesn't have a focus. And I believe that allows the scope of this annealing process to be larger, to be more general.
And specifically, this energy should flow into the brain's natural harmonics, its natural resonances, or eigenvalues is the fancy word for it.
And so, one way of thinking about this is by entering into meditation, the brain is basically retuning itself toward more harmony, toward more resonance.
And then as it cools, it saves some of these new patterns.
And it changes the default activity profile of your brain. It shifts it more toward harmony.
Questions? Yeah?
So, from what I understand, you're talking about changes in the brain after meditation.
And this is not connected to any external event, and it's your self-driven kind of activity, right?
To me, this is not equivalent of an intense event, right?
Which does it in a matter of maybe minutes or hours, right? Or a day.
It's rather more to do with neuroplasticity, which is a very long process, which takes a much longer time than a normal process.
So, I think that's why I put the 21-day retreat.
And where I put the 21-day retreat, it's more under intensive event.
Because as it is, it's unlike your regular life.
And things were completely different.
And that's why it might happen after that intensive event.
As well as if you spend 21 days in any other challenge, right?
You can maybe go for, I don't know, a TV radio.
And your life shows for 21 days.
And it might bring the same unhealing in the way, right?
I do understand what you're saying in terms of it's much more healthy with this meditation.
And it drives the brain into the harmony system.
But I just think that the 21-day retreat is more of an intensive event rather than because of that the brain changed.
Right.
Well, one frame.
One of the things that I think is really important to this is it's not necessarily the time involved.
But it's the intensity.
And also the time the system spends above some critical threshold.
I mean, you can make it.
You can wave a fork in the sun all day long.
But it's not going to melt.
It's not going to get above the recrystallization temperature.
And it's only once it.
It breaks that threshold and stays there for a while that it can sort of self-organize.
Right.
And so in a 21-day.
And you can't cause this meditation you can do to yourself every day.
Exactly.
It's not like a fork in the sun.
This crazy experiment.
You can't break up every day or make a wedding every day.
Right.
Yeah.
And I'll get to this in a couple slides.
But one could think of the different cases of meditation.
If you meditate 20 minutes a day what's that doing?
Is that doing a dealing?
Probably not.
At the same time it's letting you basically clean the mud off the belt.
it's letting you fix the hurdles to residence that you're kind of stuck with.
And it's a very effortful process, it's a very unpleasant process sometimes, and it's also necessary.
But yeah, it's also, you know, 20 minutes a day that's waving the fork in the sun. An hour every day, two hours every day, then you're good. A 21-day retreat, then now you're good.
The important thing is maybe not the annealing. Yeah, annealing process by itself is of huge importance.
At the same time, the big importance is what you anneal. What is going to happen during the annealing process?
Are you going to anneal something positive and healthy for your future life?
Or you're going to anneal something that actually will make you feel unconfident and unsafe for the rest of your life?
So that's why that matters, I think.
So you mean that our brain updates what's important and he can update what is important and what is not?
Yes, yes, definitely.
And for example, I think PTSD is a form of annealing.
Annealing gone wrong.
A post-traumatic stress disorder.
The brain gets pushed into a high-energy state and then it's in the presence of trauma.
And you basically crystallize those patterns.
So how do you fix that?
Well, you might have to re-anneal, so to speak.
And likewise, I mean, something like ayahuasca could.
So if we take like drug experience as well, ayahuasca or LSD, is it like a shortcut to the annealing process?
I would say so.
It's going to not be quite as pure in that it sort of, I mean, different substances work in different ways.
One could say that they, some add energy to the brain, some disable the brain's energy sinks that kind of soak up extra energy.
And just based on the details of how each substance works, it will produce slightly different things.
I think meditation is going to be the healthiest, safest.
It's not that I think the drugs eat away.
It's the similar effect.
But it seems that the.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's, isn't it rather a short change?
And then you're back to your patterns?
It depends on the.
On the drug?
Yeah.
We can, we can talk about this.
And then you can't control what you get into, right?
Like what you anneal it into.
Yes, yes.
With the drugs.
Yeah, yeah.
There's, there's this phenomenon with certain.
Psychological drugs called imprinting.
Where the stuff that you're thinking about during the trip very terribly sticks with you.
Potentially for years afterwards.
And I've had stories from some people I know that this is not.
Not going to go away.
Yeah, this is not necessarily a positive thing.
So it's.
Kind of intriguing.
When you find yourself.
In a high energy brain state.
It's very important to take good care of yourself.
To be especially kind to your future self.
So the part of D is better than the part of A?
I mean this is a material science thing.
But in the brain.
The build up of stress.
It causes a lot of suffering.
And the brain becomes less plastic.
Less ductile.
There's less sort of elasticity.
Or just a default background neuro-elasticity.
It kind of beats into the reserve
of flexibility of the brain.
So if you can sort of turn up the heat parameter and let this sort itself out, self-organize
around new patterns, new attractors, then it'll be, it's basically a way to heal the
And predictive coding describes the mechanism Buddhism uses to build up what I would call
neutral energy, semantically neutral energy.
Tools to ring the bell and also to scrape the mud off the bell, too.
And then the three things, the four things given a sequence of noting, but then the
continuously
Until it's spinning so quickly. Yeah, you're getting into a high energy state and then maybe some!
so it's easier to go back into the
Yes
And I'll get to that part too
Where existing patterns break down and then self-organization?
based on the minimization of