Ornoth

Meditation teachers will often refer to scientific studies on the effects of meditation, such as the Dalai Lama’s well-publicized cooperation with western neuroscientists, which goes back more than 30 years.

As a garden-variety practitioner, I never imagined my brainwaves would be of interest to the scientific community.

However, when our Wednesday evening meditation group leader forwarded an email from the CMU Brain-Computer Interaction lab recruiting experienced meditators as subjects, I decided to sign up. After all, I had the requisite background, ample free time, a modicum of curiosity, and willingness to pocket some easy cash.

The experiment’s primary question: “Does meditation help you learn how to control a computer with just your mind?”

This is part of their larger investigation into decoding a user’s mental intent solely through neural signals, to enable patients with a variety of neurological dysfunctions, such as stroke, ALS, and spinal cord injuries to control devices such as robotic arms, quadcopters, and so forth. There are explanatory videos on the lab’s web page.

And we won’t mention the obvious military and espionage applications of this technology, except perhaps to highlight its applicability for control of huge Gundam-style mecha-robots!

Over the past month, I went to the lab for five identical two-hour sessions. Each session began with the lengthy task of fitting and wiring up an EEG cap with about six dozen electrodes. Then the actual experiment, followed by calibrating the cap and washing gobs of electro-conductive gel out of my hair.

The experiment comprised a series of tasks wherein I controlled the movement of a dot on a computer screen on one axis (left/right), then another axis (up/down), and then both dimensions at once. To move the dot required only that I think about moving my left hand, my right hand, both hands, or neither.

That “neither” is a “gotcha” for most people, because how do you go from concentrating on your hands to not thinking about them? It’s a direct example of psychology’s “ironic rebound”, whereby deliberate attempts to suppress a thought actually makes it more likely (e.g. don’t think about a pink elephant).

It was wondrous seeing such thought processes play out on screen. I’d move my attention from right hand to left, but if the subtlest attempt to not think about the right hand crept into my mind, the cursor would stubbornly swerve in that direction.

However, an experienced meditator knows that we have only crude control over our minds, and quickly recognizes that “gotcha” because they've experienced it thousands of times. They’ve learned strategies for sidestepping it, such as dropping all thought by focusing on other sense input, or redirection (e.g. mentally reciting the list of prime numbers). So a meditative background was very beneficial for me.

After starting at a modest level, over time my accuracy and performance improved. And importantly for me, the amount of mental strain and fatigue I experienced fell away, too.

The experiments also confirmed my perceived pattern of learning and proficiency. In nearly any new field (with a few well-known exceptions), I’ll display remarkable initial aptitude, then gain basic proficiency steadily and quickly. However, not long after, I become complacent and my skill level plateaus, while others who started at a lower level of proficiency catch up and potentially surpass me. That was my experience in graphic design school, and it was confirmed by the lead researcher in these brain-computer interface experiments.

The CMU study called for six visits doing the same experiment, followed by a seventh that would feature a different set of tasks. Unfortunately, this was taking place while the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading into the US, causing universities like CMU to send students home; so out of an abundance of caution I regretfully cancelled the final two experiments. I was kinda looking forward to that final session, and the extra $160 that I forwent.

But now I can officially say that my brain was the subject of scientific inquiry and experimentation, and that I’ve contributed to the growing body of scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of meditation. And having done a proof-of-concept that I can control a computer with my mind, the next step will be total world domination!

Although due to concern over the spread of COVID-19, right now I’m focusing all my efforts on opening doorknobs using my mind, rather than my hands...

I really enjoyed reading “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” by neuroscientist David Eagleman, so much so that I’ll probably return to it again and again as time goes by.

It is an interesting overview of the current state of our knowledge about the brain, and Eagleman’s views on the implications both for society as well as for the individual.

One of his premises is that most of the things that make us who we are occur below the level of conscious thought. We already knew that vast swaths of the brain control autonomic behavior, but Eagleman asserts that more of the things we consider “us”—including our behavior, beliefs, motivations, and what we are allowed to think—are learned and burned into the brain’s circuitry at a level that is simply inaccessible to conscious inspection, modification, or control.

To paraphrase the popular philosopher Hamlet, “There are more things in your speech and behavior, Horatio, than are thought up in your consciousness.”

I find this dovetails nicely with the Buddhist belief that the unexamined life is ruled by long-established habit patterns from our past, and that most of our behavior is a straightforward, linear result of the coming together of conditions: specifically the intersection of those established personality patterns with the external conditions we find ourselves in.

Amusingly, this echoes something I theorized a good 30 years ago. In a document I titled “Orny’s Hypotheses”, entry number one reads as follows:

No organized religion can never reflect the true beliefs of its nominal adherents, for each such individual must learn the tenets of the religion from an external source and accept them without any possible reservation. In truth, individuals cannot consciously modify or mold their beliefs; faith comes from within the individual, and what is in his heart is his true faith, no matter what his professed faith. This faith may be discovered through introspection and be consciously acknowledged or it may remain hidden in the subconscious of the individual. One cannot decide what one believes, merely discover it, although this does not prohibit change in beliefs over time.

Getting back to Eagleman, his view of the human mind differs greatly from the popular conception of a single conscious entity. He regards the brain as what he terms “a team of rivals”. In his mind, the brain has different factions, each of which wants to influence the mind’s single output channel: our behavior. Even the language is familiar to us: we’re “of two minds” because part of us wants to eat that bowl of ice cream, but part of us says we shouldn’t. Rather than a unified single computing machine, the brain is more like a parliament or a family. But your conscious mind is only made aware of this when there’s an unresolvable conflict between factions that requires an arbiter, when a decision needs to be made.

All this sounds like Eagleman has a dim view of our vaunted concept of free will. We think we’re in control of our body and our mind and our personality, but that is largely false. Freedom—choosing to think and act in ways that are not influenced (if not determined) by our biological, chemical, and material makeup—is an illusion.

Eagleman diverges briefly into a discussion of the implications this has for criminal justice, based as it is on guilt, blameworthiness, and personal responsibility. For most people, there is an ethical difference between a responsible person committing a premeditated crime and someone whose brain chemistry causes them to perform socially proscribed actions. As we understand the brain better, our justice system should drop such outdated concepts as blame, responsibility, and punishment in favor of altering the criminal’s conditioning and mental habits such that in the future they will act in accordance with the law.

The thread that most interests me in Eagleman’s book is his demonstration that who you are and what you think is extremely closely tied to the chemical and biological state of your brain. He illustrates how easily the brain can be changed by various means: narcotics, viruses, genetics, neurotransmitters, hormones. We tend to think that we all share the same basic brain function and capacity, but that’s very much not true. We aren’t even guaranteed that our own brain performs consistently from day to day. And those changes can have dramatic effects upon our personality, outlook, opinions, speech, and behavior.

At the same time, Eagleman isn’t a strict material reductionist. While we are inseparable from our physical componentry, he views consciousness as a kind of emergent property that might indeed be something greater than the sum of its parts. But the parts are a whole lot more important than we’ve been led to believe.

For me, the book prompted a lot of soul-searching (or mind-searching). It brings up the idea that the ego—the self—is ultimately nothing more than a very convincing illusion. In that respect, I must admit that it’s a much more accessible introduction to that concept than all the esoteric writings and talks I’ve seen regarding the Buddhist concept of not-self.

Most people have a visceral reaction against the idea that who we are is wholly determined by this three-pound bag of neurons. After all, their sense of self is real and immediate, and giving up that view comes with a very powerful sense of loss. Perhaps future humans will equate those emotions with what people felt back in the 17th century when Galileo’s observations disproved the Ptolomaic view that Earth was the center of the universe.

Over time, that earlier fall from primacy opened our eyes to the incomprehensible scale and majesty of the solar system, our galaxy, and the known universe. If neuroscience winds up evicting our conscious minds from the central seat of our internal world, it will simultaneously reveal the brain’s truly incomprehensible complexity and renew our sense of wonder at the unbelievable natural achievement that is the human mind.

I’d like to know “what you think”.