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...

One of the gifts I asked for and received over the holiday season was William Barrett's 1958 "Irrational Man", which was one of the most influential books in introducing Existential philosophy to America. Despite being written 45 years ago, like most philosophy books it retains much of its value, and if anything the intervening years have only underscored many of its points.

The basic thesis of Existentialism, as interpreted by Barrett, is that man has become a stranger to his god, nature, and his increasingly technological and bureaucratic society, and that he has become alienated from his own self.

Barrett sees two key moments in human history. The first occurs during the lives of Socrates and, especially, Plato, who are among the first to identify rational consciousness as a differentiated psychic function. For the first time, western man began to deal with concepts as the true basis of meaning, and thus gave birth to the western sciences and their view of nature as a vast pool of resources to first understand, and then exploit: an orientation which was unique among all major human cultures.

The second key moment was World War I. For those who lived through it, this terrible war represented the logical and inevitable conclusion of the dispassionate logic of the Greeks and the relentless march of science up to the Industrial Revolution. Rationality had separated us from morality and our very humanity, and left to its own devices, seemed very capable of demeaning and destroying human life on a massive scale.

For philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzche who laid the groundwork for Existentialism, the single basic fact about the evolution of western man was the decline of religion. Religion once surrounded man from birth to death, and was an omnipresent concern throughout his life. As rationalism and scientific inquiry grew, spiritual faith declined because it required not merely faith beyond reason, but faith that was often in direct contradiction to reason.

While it might be a very healthy thing for western man to shed the heavy mantle of Catholic guilt or druidic superstitions, those revelations came at a very dear price. For in freeing himself from his connection to his gods, man also cut himself lose from the hope of redemption and an afterlife, and the meaning and structure that the religious framework gave to his life. A spiritual man always has a ready answer to the question of the meaning of his life, whereas modern man weaves his way through a life that, because it is devoid of spirituality, seems equally devoid of ultimate meaning or purpose. This is one of the ways that western man has suffered alienation.

This same faith in science which supplanted man's spiritual groundwork also disconnected him from his place in nature. To the scientific mind, nature became a challenge to explore, an adversary to wrest secrets from, and finally a resource to exploit. Barrett says, "Technological man faces the objects in his world with no need or capacity for intimacy with them beyond the knowledge of what button has to be pressed in order to control their working." This attitude displaced man's reverence for nature and separated him from his place in the natural world, much to his own loss.

But if western man's passion for dispassionate logic led him to view nature as simply a collection of resources to be managed and exploited, it did the exact same thing to man himself. Our very lives are now governed in exactly the same way. We, as "human resources", are impersonally ordered, organized, allocated, manipulated, and efficiently disposed of by a society that is optimized for mass production and mass consumption -- not just of natural resources, but of human resources, as well. Kierkegaard held that the chief movement of modernity is a technocracy that strips modern man of the sense of his own individuality and his value as a human being.

Pascal observed that men escape considering their condition closely by means of the two sovereign anodynes of "habit" and "diversion". "Solidly ensconced in habit, the good citizen, surrounded by wife and family and secure in his job, need not cast his eye on the quality of his days as they pass." Barrett dispels the illusion that America has an answer for life's meaningful questions when he says, "Despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refridgerators American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. Its final 'What for?' is not even asked, let alone answered."

Most Americans dismiss Existentialism as a European fad because of the residual optimism of America's fresh start as a nation. Even today, most Americans remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that the scientific and industrial age, along with its many benefits, simultaneously divorced western man from his spirituality, subverted his morality, disconnected him from nature, and stripped him of his human dignity. Modern man is spiritually impoverished, and is left at a loss to describe the purpose of his life or of his society.

For the Existentialist, the only things that are sure are life and death, and by soberly accepting the inescapable fact of the latter, the Existentialist comes to appreciate the value of the former, moreso than most. The Existentialist, having accepted death, knows that he is empowered to create his own purpose and is committed to experiencing the value of each day. Barrett, speaking of Dostoevsky, says, "His grasp of nihilism as the basic fact in modern life was itself never nihilistic". The reason for Dostoyevsky's hope, and the part of Existentialism that is most powerful for man, is that "The only meaning he can give himself is through the free project that he launches out of his own nothingness". This empowerment is the basic fact that Americans fail to see about Existentialism: "Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also liberating: it frees us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our lives personally and significantly our own."

In my own words, Existentialism is the freedom to decide you own life's ultimate purpose and meaning, and taking complete responsibility for that choice. I find that incredibly empowering, and as I've experienced it, it has been a very positive and rewarding philosophy of life.