From 7c1537eba6d49dd149ad7395df9fcdd67e0e5a69 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2023 12:43:38 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Added daily report --- archive-covid-19/22 August, 2023.html | 198 +++++++ archive-daily-dose/22 August, 2023.html | 653 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ index.html | 4 +- 3 files changed, 853 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100644 archive-covid-19/22 August, 2023.html create mode 100644 archive-daily-dose/22 August, 2023.html diff --git a/archive-covid-19/22 August, 2023.html b/archive-covid-19/22 August, 2023.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..59042c3 --- /dev/null +++ b/archive-covid-19/22 August, 2023.html @@ -0,0 +1,198 @@ + + + + + + 22 August, 2023 + +Covid-19 Sentry + +

Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+“For 20 years, there were a lot of single-arm trials [without controls like placebo groups or randomization] showing MBSR, in its various forms, can actually help improve health outcomes,” said David Vago, a founding neuroscientist at the International Society for Contemplative Research. +

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+Now, as the research matures into controlled studies and meta-analyses, meditation is losing a bit of its luster. It’s beginning to look more like just another decently effective medical intervention. A 2021 systematic review of 44 meta-analyses found that mindfulness was mostly on par with cognitive behavioral therapy or antidepressants in terms of treatment effects (mindfulness was superior in a few categories, however, including treating depression and substance abuse). +

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+That’s still good news, but it’s hard to see how something that works about as well as Prozac or a therapist offers the “seeds of a necessary global renaissance in the making,” as Kabat-Zinn has written, let alone the end of suffering, as the Buddha taught. +

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+“So we’re left with this big question,” Vago said. “Is the goal of meditation to reduce our perceived stress or symptoms of anxiety? Are those the true goals of the practice? I would say not. But that’s how the medical model has been used to test the efficacy of meditation.” +

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+Everyone I spoke to agreed that there’s more to meditation than just another somewhat effective health intervention. But discovering what more, exactly, will require a different set of questions and tools than what delivered the current generation of mindfulness research. And the past few years have seen a proliferation of precisely that. +

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+The next generation of contemplative science is here +

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+Just as the mindfulness era began with the establishment of a university center, a contemplative science focused on psychological transformation is growing its own institutions. +

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+Sacchet is expanding the Meditation Research Program into a larger operation — the Center for the Science of Meditation — that aims to conduct gold-standard research on the deep end of meditation experiences. “These types of experiences are often described as transformative,” Sacchet explained, “that is, as laying the foundations for new ways of being, which may include updated understandings of meaning in life, and increased capacities for joy, happiness, and general well-being.” +

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+Laukkonen, who focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of meditation, said that ”we have new theoretical frameworks that can capture contemplative effects. That’s a huge shift because it’s really hard to appreciate states that don’t fit into your theoretical paradigm.” Adding to the new theories are new scientific tools and gizmos. “The analytical techniques are getting more sophisticated, which allows you to ask questions that you couldn’t ask before. All these things feed into each other.” +

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+He described how ongoing research is using machine learning models to decode and measure meditative “depth” or the “expertise” of one’s practice, opening a new frontier of understanding. Rather than simply studying the outcomes of mindfulness practice, they’re peering into the real-time processes. +

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+In a 2021 paper, Laukkonen and his colleague Heleen Slagter suggested that one way to think about the depth of meditation is the degree to which the mind is engaged in abstractions or conceptual thought. They describe meditation as a process of deconstructing engrained habits of mind “until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness.” +

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+On that basis, by training machine learning models on brain activity across a variety of tasks that involve conceptual thinking, Laukkonen hypothesizes that we could teach the algorithms to recognize the neural signatures of conceptual thought in general. Then, we could use those models to measure the degree of conceptual thought present in any brain state, such as during meditation. The rough idea is: the less conceptual thinking (or abstraction), the deeper the meditation. “That’s where the field is moving toward, trying to identify mechanisms or biomarkers for change and progress. We’re starting to map that out,” Vago said. +

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+Tibetan monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in traditional garb and Richard Davidson in a Western suit smile with their hands in prayer. Edward Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images +
+Tibetan monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, left, and Richard Davidson, who founded and chairs the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison +
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+Alongside new theories and technologies, ancient claims of unbelievable meditative states are being observed under the scrutiny of scientists in controlled settings for the first time. A few thousand years ago, the Mahāvedalla Sutta (a scripture of Theravada Buddhism) described one such state that advanced meditators could enter at will — nirodha samāpatti, or cessation attainment. Think of cessation, also scripturally described as the “non-occurrence of consciousness,” like voluntarily inducing the effects of general anesthesia. Consciousness switches off without a trace, while the basic homeostatic operations of the body — temperature, heartbeat, breathing — remain online. +

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+The scripture says meditators can predetermine a length of time to “go under” merely by setting an intended duration, like an internally fashioned alarm clock. That duration is said to be able to stretch up to seven days, provided their body can last that long. After setting the intention, they settle into meditation, and the light of consciousness switches off. When it returns, meditators were said to emerge crisp and refreshed, with elevated senses of clarity and vitality (decidedly unlike the woozy return from anesthesia). +

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+Laukkonen, Sacchet, and their colleagues met someone who claimed they could enter cessation on command and was willing to do so in a lab. While they’re still processing the data, a preliminary publication of their findings suggests nirodha samāpatti — at least for 90-minute stretches — may not be as outlandish as it sounds. +

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+In a recent but separate pilot study conducted by Sacchet, he found that right before an advanced meditator has micro-cessations — referred to in the ancient texts as “nirodha” without the samāpatti — the alpha band of brain activity (the major rhythm of brain activity in typical, waking adults) begins winding down. It’s at its lowest immediately following the nirodha, which only lasts maybe a second or two. Then alpha activity begins climbing again, returning to normal levels in less than a minute. +

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+The preliminary data on the full nirodha samāpatti found the same pattern. Leading up to cessation, alpha activity began dropping. It bottomed out during cessation and rose again afterward. While these patterns aren’t enough to confirm the full account of cessation, they do look like a plausible neural correlate for temporarily extinguishing consciousness. +

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+Being able to train one’s mind to manually switch off consciousness for some predetermined period does not weave seamlessly into conventional understandings of human psychology. Maybe, like bears, there is some evolutionary value in short periods of mental hibernation. Or maybe, buried in the deeper folds of consciousness, there are capabilities unrelated to survival that can help improve well-being anyway. +

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+If the ordinary egoic sense of consciousness evolved for environments where a constant hum of fight or flight mentality helped keep us alive, advanced meditation may offer a way of reprogramming some of these inherited tendencies that no longer serve us in our comparatively new evolutionary environments, like discarding clothes that no longer fit. The same goes for psychedelics. +

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+Advanced meditation for everyone? +

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+“My hope is that ultimately, this work will contribute to bringing advanced meditation out of the monastery,” Sacchet said, describing its “incredible promise for moving beyond addressing mental health issues, toward helping people thrive.” +

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+To do that, meditation probably needs to reach more than a sliver of humanity, which could be a problem: Many people do not like to meditate. One infamous study found that many participants would rather administer electric shocks to themselves than sit quietly doing nothing for 15 minutes. And 15 minutes is on the low end of meditation periods, even for basic mindfulness. Although unusual states can arise at any point in one’s practice, it’s common for those endeavoring toward the deep end to spend an hour a day or more in meditation. Some devote entire lifetimes. Multiple, even, if you’re into reincarnation. Who’s got time for that? +

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+But if American culture is obsessed with anything, it’s optimization. Can we get the same or more outputs from fewer inputs? Can we automate any part of the process? Research labs and venture capitalists alike are already exploring whether the more transformative fruits of contemplative practice may be had quicker, easier, and more efficiently than through decades of patient meditation. +

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+One label for this optimization effort is “spirit tech,” a mixed bag consisting mainly of brain stimulation, neurofeedback, and psychedelics. This isn’t new, precisely — mantras, monasteries, and robes are forms of spirit tech that have been used for generations. But today’s emerging options seem closer than ever to making a meaningful dent in the barriers that have kept the masses from experiencing advanced meditative states for themselves. +

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+A young woman sitting at a table in a home with her hands in prayer position while she wears virtual reality goggles. Getty Images +
+A young woman meditating with the aid of virtual reality goggles. +
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+One of the spirit tech frontiers is transcranial ultrasound stimulation, a method Jay Sanguinetti, an assistant professor, and Shinzen Young, a celebrated meditation teacher, are working on as co-directors of the SEMA Lab (Science Enhanced Mindful Awareness) at the University of Arizona. In prior research, they showed that targeted bursts of ultrasound can alter brain connectivity. Now, they’re exploring whether sonicating — the fun word for targeting ultrasound waves — a brain into configurations known to correlate with deeper states of meditation can accelerate the process. +

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+Standing at the precipice of democratizing access to sudden bursts of deep meditation experiences is exciting. The less glamorous risks that might come with a shortcut to the depths of contemplative practice, not as much. While very rare, these can range from anxiety spikes to psychotic breaks. Young told a meditation student about “falling into the Pit of the Void,” one of the ways Buddhist tradition describes how intense experiences can go wrong. Until the professor of psychiatry Willoughby Britton’s research on adverse meditation experiences, or “dark nights of the soul” (later rebranded as the varieties of contemplative experience study), there was little clinical support for those suffering from negative meditation experiences. +

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+Even now, Daniel Ingram, a former emergency room physician and author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, cautioned, “there’s basically a long, slow trainwreck happening between people getting into these experiences and the clinical mainstream just not understanding them.” +

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+Notably, in a promotional video for their research, Young narrates: “If you’ll pardon my French, we are scared shitless of this technology.” And yet, as in the world of AI, they’re building it anyway. The hope is that they’re able to do so in a more prudent manner than others — profit-seeking companies, especially — who are eager to rush their brain-zapping technology to market before carefully assessing the risks. +

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+Vago told me that support systems help to navigate these experiences. Once you zap — or sonicate — someone into a brain state associated with deep-end meditation, enlightenment doesn’t simply lock into place. He said that “psychedelics and brain stimulation technology will get us there fast, but you have to know what to do with it. If you don’t have the proper setup, and you didn’t do any meditation to stabilize the mind, you could have adverse effects that leave you feeling dissociated and lonely. It takes scaffolding.” +

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+There are also questions of efficacy. Even if you can quickly techno-boost someone into a sudden burst of enlightenment-like states, are they really experiencing the same thing as someone who patiently meditated for years to get there? Should meditators seek to enter some predefined brain state by any means possible, or does the path you take make a difference? +

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+“If you get people into these states, then you give them the impression that that is the goal state. Then they come into their meditation practice with a complete misunderstanding of what the purpose is according to any of the classical instructions, and they spend their meditation trying to get into a state, which prevents all of the interesting and useful transformations from happening. So it’s a paradox,” as Laukkonen put it. +

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+In his view (held by many others I spoke with), contemplative traditions do not describe meditation as a practice for getting into funky states of mind; these are side effects. Instead, meditation is about deep transformations in the ordinary ways that consciousness operates, developing altered traits rather than merely altered states, as others in the field have put it. Still, maybe certain altered states are more conducive to finding and stabilizing altered traits than others. +

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+Contemplative traditions have embraced paradox as a central element of their teachings. Optimizing around a paradox, however, is tricky business. You might wind up reinforcing the very construct of the self that meditation aims to deconstruct. Laukkonen still approved of research into spirit tech from a basic scientific perspective. But, he added: “It’s really about freedom and liberation. And what is liberating about chasing different states of consciousness, and not enjoying the one that you have?” +

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+Contemplative science needs scalable bureaucracy +

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+Whether the widening field of contemplative science will drum up an American desire for freedom and liberation, who knows? “What people want,” said Ingram, “is a long, happy, good life most of the time. The problem is that we don’t actually know what leads to that.” We’ve done large, multigenerational studies on heart disease, and deep, epidemiological inquiries into diet and nutrition. But major spiritual experiences that leave people forever transformed, that pull up suffering from its roots in deep psychological habits? We don’t have much peer-reviewed research on those. +

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+As contemplative scientists are now diving in, Ingram hopes that public health officials will follow. Alongside deeper scientific knowledge that could help scale interest in advanced meditation, supporting those already having these experiences requires better clinical support. Ingram, Sacchet, and Vago are all members of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC), a network of scholars and practitioners aiming to foster deeper dialogue between clinical care, public health, and the deep end of human experience. Their vision is deeply bureaucratic, that unholy road into the heart of modern institutions. They want new diagnostic codes, updated medical textbooks, more informed public health guidelines, and insurance reimbursement procedures. +

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+More broadly, Ingram emphasized that spreading the knowledge contemplative scientists may glean from studying advanced meditation will require better packaging. We have ideas like biological taxonomies and genetics that provide a shared basis for cross-cultural understanding and exploration of universally relevant fields. “We need that for the deep end of spiritual experience,” he said. “What works as well in Riyadh, as Rome, as Rio, as rural Alabama? What’s the functional, scalable essence?” +

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+It’s possible that what matters most in the murky terrain of advanced meditation will forever elude scientific measurement, mass uptake, and bureaucratic integration, at least to some degree. But the growing field of contemplative science is poking around to see where the boundaries may lie. As the best spiritual teachers all emphasize, rather than taking anyone’s word for it, we should find out for ourselves. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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