
It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness - pldpld
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/its-not-a-stream-of-consciousness.html
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satx
The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, trained as a physicist, welcomed, encouraged
Western science to validate Transcendental Meditation, a mechanical mantra
repetition technique, with the stress on lack of effort which is opposed to
mindfulness, concentration, self-observation, and other effortful techniques.

Electro-encephalographs of TM meditators, after just a few weeks of initiation
into TM technique, show the various brain waves frequencies spreading from
back to front, plus left-right hemispheric synchrony, and increasing in
amplitude. This behaviour was seen a few decades ago, and is even more
verified lately as detectors and signal processing advanced.

Was do the data mean? That's less "scientific", but clearly something is
happening, and subjective reports are that it's a very positive experience
with benefits that last outside of meditation.

Why does this behavior persist, is repeatable across many TM meditators, even
neophyte meditators? It suggests, verifies even, that the TM technique
recognizes inherent properties, abilities, behavior of the human brain.

Again, the benefits, if any, meditative sessions causing whole-brain wave
synchrony, coherence, and increased wave amplitude? You'll have to ask TM
meditators.

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justifier
off topic of the article but on topic to your comment..

of transcendental meditation jd salinger wrote a book called franny and
zooey(i) where the main character is obsessed with a little book about an
individual who seeks an answer to a question developed after reading a vague
reference in the bible to praying incessantly

it's biblical, but skeptical and the religious elements dissolve and are
really only symptomatic of the period, the book wishes to tell a story and the
infrastructure of christianity just happens to be the catalyst

the answer is sought in a pilgrimage around russia of the day, visiting the
highest religious sanctums to question the foremost of the holy hierarchies,
and the answer unfolds slowly to the pilgrim

the book in the story is a real 19th century anonymous work translated as the
way of the pilgrim(ii)

the book is beautiful, and i would definitely recommend it

it walks you through the stages of transcendental meditation and then has the
most beautiful final chapter

without the ending the story, for me, would have been a waste, but the last
interaction is just so beautiful in its paradoxical self invalidation

the process of having a simple question, seeking an answer and finding innate
complexity that leads to a simple solution that dissolves the complexity that
led to the realisation is something i recognise in many pursuits

(i)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franny_and_Zooey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franny_and_Zooey)

(ii)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Pilgrim](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Pilgrim)

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akyu
This seems like trying to understand how a car engine works by listening to
the pitch of the sound it makes. Sure you can deduce somethings, but you
aren't really going to understand the engine.

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agumonkey
This is how I feel about neuroscience. Like sending signals through a
processor to store heat maps. Some abstraction is missing.

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jonex
Hmm, interesting thought, how much would we learn about a computer by a
combination of stress testing and heat-mapping?

I'd say, quite much. I'm sure there would be no problem to figure out at least
a few layers of memory, the existence of a separate GPU, the fact that it has
a limited capability of concurrent computation and that most computation
occurs at a very minor part of the CPU etc. Then, if we also figured out that
the CPU is based on a lot of small transistors that'd probably give some
insight as well.

But this would obviously not be nearly enough to build our own computer with
capabilities similar to a modern computer. That'd require a lot more detailed
knowledge and advanced equipment

I'd say neuroscience is somewhere at the beginning of the mapping process,
certainly not nearly enough to construct our own brain, but still very
informative on the subject of how the brain functions.

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agumonkey
But it would allow confusion, describing CPUs as qualitatively different
because of quantitative variations (register count, size, bus width) even
though they're essentially the same (integrate, differentiate).

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asifjamil
The view of brain oscillations driving (or even partially modulating) neural
activity is further supported by research involving stimulating the brain
using Alternating Currents [1] I'm currently doing my PhD on this topic, and
it seems so far that targeting AC (with an entrained frequency) to various
motor-related neural networks can actually _enhance_ the motor skill and even
motor learning.

Brain oscillations are quite phenomenal, and the causal role of these
synchronisations still require further research.

[1]
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.021](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.05.021)

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hyperpape
This is fascinating stuff, but what it means for how we think about conscious
experience is quite open for discussion. We can't jump to either the
consclusion that our conscious experience is not a "stream" or that the brain
"fills in" the gaps.

It's been a long time since I've read about this stuff, but there's work by
Daniel Dennett
([http://cogprints.org/267/1/fillin.htm](http://cogprints.org/267/1/fillin.htm)),
and Alva Noe ([http://www.alvanoe.com/action-in-
perception/](http://www.alvanoe.com/action-in-perception/)) that's quite
relevant.

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nabla9
This is also the experience of experienced meditators in awareness type of
meditation (mindfulness, vipasssana, shikantaza, silent illumination).

If you keep the focus in current moment prolonged periods of time, it's
equivalent of "temporal zooming". Somewhere near 20-25 ms (40hz) is the "time
resolution limit". In the limit sensations – thoughts are also considered
sensations – come in as separate units and you experience the content of
consciousness as very fast "flickering". There are units in higher resolution
too, but they can be divided into these nuggets.

Concentrative type meditation (deep samadhi states, jahnas) is somewhat
different experience because it shuts down most sensations.

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dschiptsov
Shutting down attention to sensory input is a prerequisite for realization of
discrete nature of thoughts and what is between two thoughts.)

~~~
atom-morgan
> thoughts are also considered sensations – come in as separate units and you
> experience the content of consciousness as very fast "flickering".

I've also had very similar experiences in sensory deprivation tanks.

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dreen
So essentially we have an event loop, right.

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A_COMPUTER
This seems similar to Alfred North Whitehead's idea of pulses/buds of
perception, from the 1920's, sans the metaphysical aspect.

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cgio
The metaphor I use in my research is the anapnoe of consciousness from the
greek word for breathing.

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karmakaze
I'm likening the 'chucks' to be undergoing wavelet transforms.

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entelechy0
Just because a stream of water is composed of particles called water molecules
doesn't make it any less of a stream.

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Houshalter
It's more like if the stream was flowing in short bursts. One second a little
water would be flowing, and then the next it would stop, and then it would
flow again, and so on. As opposed to a continuous stream.

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gojomo
It's a flipbook!

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dschiptsov
It is "awareness" \- what newborn babies have (born with).

~~~
dschiptsov
To train a cluster of clusters of neural networks (which is the basis of
associative, verbal mind) some "primitive" machinery is required. This is what
we call "awareness" or pre-processing (pattern matching) of sensory input,
which is prior to the intellect, which is based on a language and related
mental concepts, which are socially and culturally conditioned and mostly
wrong.)

