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...

This spring, my Experienced Practitioners practice group finally closed the book on their interminable preoccupation with metta. Next fall we will take up a new topic which I’m particularly excited about: renunciation!

In our final sitting of the spring “semester”, Narayan gave us a new homework exercise to practice with over the summer break: “What would it mean to me to renounce suffering?” So I’ve been sitting with that question for a few weeks.

“Suffering” is an important but somewhat ambiguous term in Buddhism. The similie of the two arrows, which I’ve mentioned before, is key. If you stub your toe, that’s simple, objective, factual, unavoidable suffering. That’s the first arrow.

The second arrow is all the optional, unnecessary mental proliferation that we add on top of that: “I’m such a klutz! I’m always stubbing my toe. I hate my body. I’m a worthless person and unlovable and everybody hates me and I should just be taken out behind a barn and shot rather than continue to be a burden on the rest of the universe!”

This might surprise some of you, but all that additional “stuff” actually didn’t come from your big toe or from other people or from the rest of the universe; it came from your head, and you piled all that on yourself. The second arrow only ever comes from one place: your head.

Unfortunately, when a Buddhist says “suffering”, it’s usually not clear whether she means only the first arrow, only the second arrow, or both. That’s why, when I was doing my year of karuna (compassion) practice, I specifically differentiated between those basic life experiences that we can’t avoid (the first arrow, which I call “pain”), and the unnecessary mental suffering we manufacture ourselves (the second arrow, which I call “angst”).

Having said all that… My navelgazing with respect to renouncing suffering pivots on understanding what the questioner means by “suffering”: pain, angst, or both? Between these two poles, I see five different ways to respond, but only one real answer.

Let’s begin by working with “suffering” as unavoidable pain, with or without the optional angst.

The first (and by far most popular) way to respond to pain is avoidance. If this is how you renounce suffering, you believe that life would be grand if only you could avoid everything that might be unpleasant. Or at least minimize it.

How’s that project going for you? That’s nothing more than reactively hiding from the unavoidable, just like any other unenlightened, pleasure-seeking slob out there glued to his recliner with a fistful of Doritos and a Bud. I think you’ll find lots of examples who’ll tell you that’s not a particularly effective method of “renouncing suffering”.

The second way to escape suffering is to deny that it even exists, which is a surprisingly popular option, especially among people younger than age 50. “Death isn’t going to happen to me, nor will I ever get sick. I’ll never be in pain, or grow old and frail, and I’ll never owe the government any taxes, either. When I look back on my life, it’s been one long series of easy but emotionally fulfilling victories.” A Buddhist would call this delusion, one of the three poisons, rather than any effective method of renouncing suffering.

Both of these strategies fail because there is no way to get through life without experiencing some form of pain and discomfort and dissatisfaction. A really smart guy once expounded a theory along those lines; he called it the First Noble Truth.

There is, however, one obvious way to avoid pain. Most discomfort (like all pleasure) comes through our sense doors: the familiar five senses plus the mental sense that encompasses thought and emotion. So one could theoretically escape pain by permanently closing all one’s sense doors, so that one never again receives any unpleasant (or pleasant) sensory input. The only catch is that you can only reach that state if you’re clinically dead. That seems like a suboptimal strategy for renouncing suffering.

Okay, so we can’t eliminate all pain, because it’s unavoidable in this lifetime. What if we accept that fact and limit the definition of “suffering” to only refer to the second arrow: that additional angsty proliferation that we cause ourselves? That sounds like something we might actually be able to control. That would be a much more achievable goal, right?

The question hinges entirely on whether you believe that we can truly eliminate all forms of self-loathing, anger, and greed. Sad to say, but so far human history doesn’t provide many practical examples. How many people do you know who never get angry, upset, or down, even under the most unfair or difficult circumstances? Any?

That same smart dude (above) said that the suffering we create for ourselves is the product of just three things: our compulsive desires, our consuming dislikes, and our confusion and delusion about how the world (and particularly our hearts and minds) work. He called that Noble Truth Number Two (this guy was really into making lists).

If you’re like me, getting rid of desire, aversion, and delusion sounds like a gargantuan task. How do you get rid of something that appears just as inherent to life as breathing or digestion? The only obvious alternative is acceptance; learn to live with it. But giving in to our ignorant emotional impulses is totally contrary to the idea of renouncing suffering.

There’s only one option left. We’ve already agreed that we can’t get rid of the pain inherent in living, and our only hope is to eliminate the angst that we make for ourselves in how we respond to that pain.

We can’t do anything about the first arrow, but as for that second arrow… That smart dude had something to say about that. Yeah, it’s his big Third Noble Truth, which states that it is absolutely possible to uproot and remove the causes and manifestations of suffering. That is, after all, the base philosophy that the whole Buddhist project derives from.

So for a Buddhist, there’s no question: of course you can eliminate those self-destructive negative mind states! Your whole life is built around both the premise and the practice of renouncing suffering. There is no more vital task for a Buddhist than abandoning all that unnecessary, self-generated angst.

So when asked “What would it mean to me to renounce suffering?”, my answer is immediate, unambiguous, and obvious. It means having an active practice, as expounded in the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth: the eight-step path (another of his lists) that describes how it’s done in detail.

Whatever my teacher intended with this question, for me there’s no need for a lot of intense inquiry about it. As a Buddhist, I have already renounced suffering, and while I have hardly defeated it, I have a pretty good idea what renunciation of suffering looks like.

QED, done, case closed. Next question please.

These days, it’s not so outré to live without a car, or a television, or to not bother going to the movies. But tell people that you’re giving up music, and you’ll be surprised at how strongly people react.

Music obviously has a great rep. It’s the stuff of life, it’s how you share emotions, it’s something you need in order to get through the day.

Meditation is all about watching your mind, and after seven years of practice, it’s pretty obvious to me that in addition to all that, music also has some negative aspects.

One is obvious to anyone who has taken mass transit or visited a school in the past five years: for most people, music is how they escape the unbearable tedium of whatever’s happening right now. All they need to do is stuff a pair of ear buds in, and they can avoid interacting with other people, escape being alone with their thoughts, and avert their attention from the present.

As you can infer from my language, I don’t consider those positive attributes. Without social interaction, life is bland and featureless. Without solitude and introspection, life lacks depth and self-knowledge. And living for some other moment than the present is an outright denial of life itself.

“But,” you say, “not everyone’s so desperately trying to avoid life. It’s possible for me to enjoy music in moderation, right?” Let me tell you what I’ve observed.

We’ve all experienced the phenomenon known as an “ear-worm”, a song you can’t get out of your head. Sometimes it’s a song you really like; sometimes it’s a song you really hate. But there’s a reason why we say some songs are “catchy” and have “a hook”.

What I’ve observed is that after you listen to it, every song echoes inside your head for a while, bouncing around at random. In addition to this short-term resonance, a verse can lie forgotten for decades, but has the power to interrupt your thoughts, leaping into the present from some vaguely-remembered childhood exposure. From Barney the Dinosaur to Pink Floyd, from Bach’s Brandenburg concertos to Einstürzende Neubauten, and from ABBA to ZZ Top, music resonates in our minds like nothing else.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing until you look at it with the perspective of a meditator. Meditation is about developing sufficient concentration to examine one’s sensory input and thought processes in detail, and the steadiness and equanimity to accept everything that this process of self-examination unearths. Meditators value attributes like stillness, calmness, and peacefulness of mind, and they seek to avoid mental states of agitation and distraction.

I’ve gone through long periods of my life that were filled with music and equally long spaces when it just wasn’t important to me. In my meditation practice, I’ve taken the time to examine my mind and how it operates when I’ve been exposed to music and when I’ve gone without, and the difference is clear. Music agitates the mind, interrupts concentration, and causes one’s thought patterns to return to the tune over and over again. But one doesn’t need to be a yogi to understand that an ear-worm interferes with calmness and steadiness of mind.

Interestingly, music never got much attention in the Buddhist literature I’ve read. However, I was intrigued to find the following passage while reading Bhante G’s “Mindfulness in Plain English”. While he is discussing storytelling, music clearly produces the same kind of energy for similar reasons.

Mental images are powerful entities. They can remain in the mind for long periods. All of the storytelling arts are direct manipulation of such material, and if the writer has done his job well, the characters and images presented will have a powerful and lingering effect on the mind. If you have been to the best movie of the year, the meditation that follows is going to be full of those images. If you are halfway through the scariest horror novel you ever read, your meditation is going to be full of monsters. So switch the order of events. Do your meditation first. Then read or go to the movies.

So I’ve gradually reduced the amount of music I am exposed to, and for me it has been a net positive. Naturally, there’s both benefits and drawbacks to this approach, and there’s clearly a middle way: a path of wisdom and balance to be found that allows one to integrate music into one’s life in a way that doesn’t agitate the mind nor encourage withdrawal from the real world.

Although I don’t consider myself particularly deprived by this action, I’ve been surprised by the visceral reactions people have when I mention it, as if music were the absolute last thing they would consider letting go.

Last night I went to see "Examined Life", film wherein the filmmaker gives a dozen-odd modern philosophers ten minutes each to pontificate.

The 2008 film reminded me far too much of a less skilfully done version of Richard Linklater’s 2001 animated movie "Waking Life". The parallels are too many to ignore: the same loosely-related episodic format of someone discussing philosophy with the protagonist/narrator; the same incorporation of striking background settings and jazzy music to lend an atmospheric air to the monologues; the same toeing the line between genuine hopefulness and sarcastic postmodern cynicism; even the same walking/strolling visual motif. Despite the inarguable validity of the Plato quote, the parallel between the movie titles—Waking Life versus Examined Life—is so close as to imply subconscious (if not conscious) appropriation.

Aside from the facts that the newer film is not animated and the philosophers are real people, the main dissimilarity is the fact that unlike Waking Life, Examined Life has no overarching storyline to bring it all together. In the end, it’s just a bunch of talking heads with separate agendas, one talking about environmentalism, another about disabilities, another about gender, and so on, and neither they nor the director make any attempt to connect the disparate issues and bring them into a coherent whole. It’s a movie with no message, no direction, no conscious intent, which leaves one with the lingering question: is the unexamined movie worth seeing?

Despite that shortcoming, each scene did have value within its own context, and I came away with what, to me, were three interesting thoughts.

The first is the most obvious, and the ultimate reason for philosophy’s existence and importance. Most people look outside themselves for some source to define their ethics, whether that be the Biblical God or a political ideology or whatever. But in an era when most intellectuals have denied the existence of a supreme being, that raises the question of whether we should try to live an ethical life, and where our ethics should come from. The obvious answer is to look within: you are acting ethically when your actions are aligned with your values, and it’s the examination of those values that provides us with direction. And lest anyone think that ethics are outmoded in a largely secular culture, I point out that our ethics and our values are what guide every decision we make. Our ethics may look somewhat different than those of modern or historical Christians, but that does not mean that we do not live by certain ethical precepts.

Another interesting point was made by Cornel West. He said that courage—courage to think for ourselves, the courage to express our love, and the courage to manifest our beliefs in this selfish world—is the most critical attribute for a modern philosopher. I found that very interesting, and very apropos to my Buddhist studies. It’s something I hope to share with my dharma friends in the near future.

My final thought makes a connection between philosophy and superstition, between this movie and a number of upcoming local events. When faced with life or death or natural disasters, humans try to assign meaning to the event: it is God’s will, or the evolutionary imperative, or the material dialectic. Finding meaning and patterns of cause and effect are what human brains are wired to do; even when there is clearly no meaning, we create theories, like the Polynesian islander whose cargo cult tells him that huge silver birds magically bestow chocolate and cigarettes upon his people. Our ideas about the unanswerable, unknowable facts of life, death, and natural disasters are no more than superstitions created by a brain that evolved to find meaning in every event it observes.

I made this connection after reading a bit about a handful of very interesting and related author talks that are coming up. Tomorrow, cognitive neuroscientist Bruce M. Hood will be speaking about his book "SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable", which explores this very topic. A week later, Gary Marcus discusses his book "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind", which asserts that our brains are the result of a random evolutionary process that piled new systems on top of old ones, resulting in an imperfect and inconsistent facility. Finally, a week after that, Alva Noë talks about his "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness".

It’s quite a month for thinkers!

Here’s the assertion: your brain wants a rough balance of activity and rest.

If your brain has to work really hard most of the time, it has a tendency to seek out quietude when it can. If you’ve ever worked in a high stress position, you know how precious “down time” can be. On the other hand, if your brain doesn’t get enough exercise, perhaps it becomes restless. Once you reach a certain level of boredom, you start looking around for things to occupy your mind.

Let’s start with that latter state. I’m going to kick around the idea that “creativity” (in general) may be a symptom of your brain looking for things to occupy it. If you have the spare mental energy to noodle on things and wonder about this or that, you’re more likely to produce stuff we’d call “creative” than if your brain is overwhelmed and working hard all day. No?

The reason why I say this is because I think that the converse explains some things I’ve seen in myself. When I’m slammed at work and putting in twelve-hour days, the last thing I can imagine is sitting down and writing a story or designing a web site, even when I happen to find myself with ample time on my hands. But those are exactly the things that motivate and excite me when I’m not challenged at work and there are few demands on my limited attention.

Is “creativity” a symptom of your brain searching for something interesting to do? Does intense, focused work sap your brain of the desire or the impetus to create? I’m curious about others’ experience.

I’ve struggled in recent years to justify my self-perception that I’m a creative person. I rarely find time these days to write fiction, take pictures, or design web pages, and when I do… I keep finding myself stymied by a complete lack of creative energy or inspiration.

Should I attribute that to creative burnout from a very stressful career? Or is it just that I have become less creative with age? Or should I resign myself to the idea that I’ve never been a very creative person, since even my prior successes were mostly derivative in nature?

Whatever the cause, these days my brain seems to be less willing to jump into creative pursuits, but very attracted to just turning off the internal discourse and letting my mind just rest.

“The test of a man is how well he is able to feel about what he thinks. The test of a woman is how well she is able to think about what she feels.”

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Another evening of fun with the smart machine...