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href=“https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47428548_Lost_in_thoughts_Neural_markers_of_low_alertness_during_mind_wandering”>are associated with focused attention and others are associated with mind-wandering and stress; Muse’s algorithm picks them apart in real time and offers up a different cue on the phone app depending on what your mind is doing.

When your thoughts are racing, you hear loud rainstorms. “That’s your cue to go, like, ‘Oh shit! I’m thinking about the grocery list again! Back to meditation!’” Ariel Garten, the co-founder of Muse, told me.

When your thoughts are calmer, you hear quieter weather. And when you manage to sustain a deep calm for a while, you hear the rewarding sound of birds chirping.

It’s a classic “Pavlovian-type reinforcement,” according to Garten, meant to encourage your brain to remember the feel of this tranquil mental state and return to it over and over. It’s also (for better or worse) an ego boost. When the Muse app shows you your stats at the end of a session, you might find yourself thinking: “I’m crushing this. I got five birds!”

Some scientific research indicates that neurofeedback can modestly improve attention and subjective well-being. But it’s important to note that this kind of tech can, at most, help people get to an “entry-level” state of meditation — what you might call, simply, concentration. Researchers do not claim to have figured out how to lead people into more advanced meditative states yet.

Stockly, who tried neurofeedback herself as part of her research for Spirit Tech, the book she co- wrote with Wildman, told me the technology holds promise as a way to shorten people’s meditation learning curve. “I could tell when my brain was doing the right thing because I would hear the sound that was supposed to be the positive feedback,” she said. She also told me neurofeedback is just the tip of the iceberg. “It could be understood as a starter technology on your way to something a little bit more invasive, like brain stimulation.”

If neurofeedback devices like Muse only aim to “read” what’s happening in your brain and give you cues that reflect it, then another technique, brain stimulation, aims to “write” to the brain — that is, to directly change what your neurons are up to.

Here’s the basic idea: Different states of consciousness manifest in your brain as different patterns of electrical activity, or neurological signatures. Researchers have already figured out what some of them look like. Now, they’re figuring out how to technologically stimulate your brain into those states. They’re experimenting with a few types of stimulation — electric, magnetic, light, and ultrasound — to target particular brain areas.

Shooting electricity into your skull might sound painful, but it can be very gentle. There are already a few neurostimulation devices on the market, like Zendo, which come in the form of small pads or patches that you apply to your forehead; they create a tingly sensation as they send low levels of electricity into your brain. They claim to make meditation easier and reduce stress.

The scientific evidence on their efficacy is mixed. Safety-wise, they’re not required to have FDA approval since they’re not marketed as medical devices, but they’re generally considered low-risk for short-term use given that a number of stimulation methods are already approved for clinical use in treating conditions like depression. However, we lack data on the long-term effects of using neurostimulation devices continually.

Meanwhile, some researchers are pursuing a much more ambitious goal than mere stress reduction. They’re exploring brain stimulation’s potential to act as a shortcut to enlightenment.

Evan Thompson, a University of British Columbia professor who specializes in Asian philosophical traditions, notes that it’s inaccurate to talk about “enlightenment” as if it’s one monolithic thing. Instead, we have to talk about specific enlightened states. “Enlightenment means different things to different teachers, schools, and historical periods,” he said. It can mean the elimination of all craving and attachment, for example, or the dissolution of the sense of a separate self.

The latter is particularly relevant to Shinzen Young and Jay Sanguinetti, co-directors of the Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness (SEMA) lab at the University of Arizona. They’ve found that beaming ultrasound pulses at a certain brain area, the basal ganglia, leads to a quieting of the ego — a less self-focused state of mind.

Young, a monk who’s been meditating for 50 years, let his neuroscientist colleague Sanguinetti administer the ultrasound pulses on him. Afterward, he said it accelerated and deepened his ability to enter a state of equanimity and selflessness. In fact, he said it triggered one of the most significant meditations he’s ever had. Twelve other advanced meditators later reported similar effects.

Of course, that’s not enough to get a sense of whether it’s truly safe and effective, especially for long- term use. There’s still a lot more safety and efficacy research to be done before brain stimulation using ultrasound will be available outside of specialized labs.

“It’s not a consumer device package in Best Buy,” Garten said. “It’s far, far, far from being that. Probably 20 or 30 more years.”

In the meantime, other researchers are exploring psychedelics, which are undergoing a renaissance these days as their therapeutic potential for treating conditions like depression becomes increasingly recognized.

Many psychedelics, such as magic mushrooms and mescaline, are naturally occurring. But scientists are now busy creating synthetic versions of drugs, like pharmahuasca (synthetic ayahuasca), so the chemical components can be precisely predicted and customized. These drugs don’t just “read” what’s happening in the brain; like neurostimulation, they “write” to it directly.

Scientists have found that psychedelics can produce mystical experiences that lead to lasting changes in tolerance and openness. One study found that regular users of ayahuasca, for example, score higher than nonusers on measures of self-transcendence. Pharmahuasca has produced very similar effects, though research suggests some of the emotional benefits of traditional ayahuasca rituals may be lost when the drug is consumed outside its ceremonial context, perhaps because the intentions of the users are different.

Although some mental health professionals already use synthetic psychedelics in their clinical practices to treat patients, don’t expect to see such substances becoming legally available for self-directed use as spirit tech in the US anytime soon. Currently, Americans who want to legally try a drug like ayahuasca (natural or synthetic) have to be members of specific religious communities such as the Native American Church, or else travel to South America. That said, Wildman and Stockly report that there is an active underground market for synthetic psychedelics like pharmahuasca.

Are tech- induced spiritual experiences “authentic”? That’s the wrong question.

When people first hear about technoboosts for enlightenment, there’s a tendency to think that using technology to induce spiritual experiences is a totally new phenomenon — and that therefore a tech-induced experience is not “authentic” spirituality.

Thompson says both those premises are wrong. For one thing, people have been using tech to induce altered states of consciousness for millennia. We may not be used to thinking of tools like prayer wheels, mandalas, rosaries, or rhythmic drumming in shamanic dances as spiritual technologies, but that’s exactly what they are.

Plus, Thompson told me, “I think authenticity is a very misleading concept.”

Photo collage of a Muse headband, a brain, stacked rocks, and a radio wave. Courtesy of Muse Headbands; Christina Animashaun/Vox

Historically, there’s no consensus, even within a single religious tradition, about how to tell a genuine spiritual epiphany from a counterfeit.

Some believe a spiritual experience must be spontaneous to be authentic. Others believe just the opposite — that an authentic experience comes about only after someone spends lots of time and effort developing a practice.

As Stockly and Wildman write in Spirit Tech, “Some people sense that it just can’t be right that spiritual wisdom and experiences that are incredibly hard-won are just suddenly conferred on any old doofus without the exertion of effort, discipline, and commitment.”

Likewise, some groups say a spiritual experience is trustworthy if it supports their preexisting, canonical beliefs, and untrustworthy if it produces heterodox beliefs. But others say an experience is authentic precisely if it transcends convention — just think of how Jesus taught something new and different from the Judaism of his time.

Stockly, Wildman, and Thompson all told me they think it makes less sense to look at the causes or content of an experience than to look at its consequences. Another way to put this is: Don’t ask whether an experience is authentic; ask whether it’s beneficial. Does it make you more cruel, haughty, and self-centered? Or more compassionate, humble, and other-focused?

A related concern about some technoboosts is that perhaps they only lead to temporary changes — altered states, but not altered traits. If their consequences fade away within hours or days, how much good does that really do?

“It is possible just to have experiences that are something like transitory highs,” Wildman told me. But they can incentivize you to develop a continuous practice. “These incredibly powerful experiences can completely change your willingness to take on something like that.”

Stockly noted that technoboosts like neurofeedback and brain stimulation are not meant to be one-and-done. Instead, we should think of them as training wheels for the brain. “The idea is that it really is targeting the desired part of the brain in such a way that with repeated use, it will actually change the brain,” she said. “It will help to create those new neural pathways.”

Thompson, for his part, worries that such technoboosts might be counterproductive rather than beneficial — if, for example, the way the technology mediates the experience of meditation reinforces the ego tendencies that meditation is meant to alleviate. This is his concern about all the gamification the Muse app displays, from telling you when you’ve achieved a streak of consecutive days to rewarding you with bird chirps when you’ve stayed calm long enough.

“It builds up a sense of a performative, successful self,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh look, I’ve meditated a hundred days in a row now!’ It’s not only distraction, it actually reinforces precisely the thing that you’re trying to get beyond.”

Garten told me that this was a design question she “struggled with a lot.” But ultimately, she thinks you need some gamification to motivate the user to keep coming back, at least at first. And even though the birds may be distracting and ego-inflating initially, she thinks they can gradually teach the user an important lesson: equanimity. Get too excited about the appearance of a bird, and it vanishes immediately, because your excited brain state means you’ve lost the calm that hastened its arrival. In this way, you learn not to get overly invested in any outcome.

That hasn’t been my experience with Muse yet. So far, for me, the birds feel like they’re harming rather than helping my practice. But I’ve been meditating for about five years. Conceivably, for a beginner, the motivational benefits of gamification, together with Muse’s ability to show the novice meditator when they’re “doing it right,” could outweigh the costs.

There’s a less obvious risk we need to bear in mind. Instead of only asking, “What if the tech doesn’t work as advertised?” we also need to ask, “What if it does?”

On the one hand, that would be exciting. In 2005, the Dalai Lama was asked what he thinks about the possibility of tech leading to spiritual awakenings. He said: “If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implementation of an electrode — without impairing intelligence and the critical mind — I would be the first patient.”

But most of us do not have the Dalai Lama’s training. Sudden, intense epiphanies that powerful new technology like brain stimulation aims to provoke may not have the positive effects you might expect. Normally, people build up to those epiphanies over years of practice or on long meditation retreats; the gradualness of the learning curve and the presence of mentors can help a person integrate an epiphany into their self-understanding. Spirit tech wants to offer a shortcut — to gin up epiphanies on-demand and à la carte — and the effects could be jarring.

As Sanguinetti says in Spirit Tech, “If you’re a father and you have two children, what does it mean to change you [with brain stimulation]? Because you still need to be able to take care of your children and be motivated to do that. So we don’t want to make you happy-detached, we want to make you happy-embodied and a happy, better human being in your society and the specific sociocultural context that you’re in.”

In traditional spiritual communities, the spirit tech isn’t just the meditation you do or the mushroom you ingest. There are mentors and traditions that shape how you make meaning out of a peak experience and integrate it into your humdrum life — these are technology, too. Similarly, we may need a cadre of trained people who can guide us through the process of implementing powerful new tools like brain stimulation.

Absent such a framework, Thompson remains unconvinced of the potential of such technologies.

“It strikes me as more consumerist, capitalist appropriation of meditation as a kind of narcissistic personal experience,” he said. “It’s about my enlightenment attained through techno-enhancement. Call that enlightenment if you want, but enlightenment in a richer sense is about a profound transformation not of yourself just as an isolated individual but of your relationship to other human beings in the world. It’s social.”

Reporting for this article was supported by Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a journalism and research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

A 39-page justification published along with the memo outlines in further detail the conditions migrants faced in detention in Mexico, including the risk of sexual assault and kidnapping in the encampments where they stayed, as well as unsanitary and unstable housing conditions, limited access to health care and legal counsel, and insufficient food while they waited for the US to make a decision about their asylum hearings.

The right to seek asylum is protected under international law, and has been since the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948.

Ultimately, the Biden administration argues the policy has far too many issues for it to be salvaged: Not only does it require significant resources that could be directed elsewhere, according to the DHS memo, but MPP also failed to achieve reduction in crimes like human trafficking and drug smuggling, put people in serious danger, and doesn’t address the root causes that lead to people seeking asylum.

Additionally, the memo says, any program fixes would require the cooperation of Mexico and further diplomatic negotiations — time and energy that could be better spent on other issues. And other strict immigration policies were enacted at the same time as MPP, making it difficult to assess any deterrent effect the policy may have achieved.

The initial decision to end MPP has been tangled up in the courts

In addition to laying out policy issues with MPP, Mayorkas’s memo responds to an August decision by a federal district court in Texas to block the DHS’s original June 1 memo ending the policy. That memo follows a February executive order from Biden, which asked DHS to complete a thorough review of the program’s costs and benefits and recommend whether it should stay in place as is, continue with modifications, or end altogether.

The new directive tries to address the shortcomings of the administration’s June 1 effort to end the MPP program, which was blocked by District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, on the grounds that DHS didn’t follow proper administrative procedure when issuing the memo.

Kacsmaryk also argued — incorrectly — that the US has only two options to deal with migrants: either deport them to “a contiguous territory,” in this case Mexico, or detain them in the US. Since there’s insufficient detention space in the US to house all of these migrants “subject to mandatory detention,” Kacsmaryk reasoned, the only option for DHS would be to return migrants coming from other Central and South American countries — and some from even further away — to Mexico.

However, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser explained at the time, the US does indeed have a third option when processing asylum seekers: It can offer them parole, the ability to stay in the US while their asylum claims or other efforts to gain legal status move through the immigration system. This system has been used, for example, to reunite Cubans and Haitians with family in the US, and for Afghan nationals fleeing the country after the Taliban’s takeover.

Despite that, the Supreme Court allowed Kacsmaryk’s decision to stand — for now — in an August order denying the Biden administration’s request for a stay during the appeal process.

As of this month, litigation in the case is still ongoing: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to hear arguments on Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by the states of Texas and Missouri against the federal government, asking for MPP to be reinstated. According to the Associated Press, the US is expected to request that the case be sent back down to Kacsmaryk.

“As long as the injunction is in place, we are bound to comply with it. But as we’ve said, we are vigorously fighting it, vigorously appealing it, and so with this new memo we will seek to either have a Fifth Circuit vacate the district court ruling or for the district court to do so itself,” a DHS official told reporters on a call Thursday.

Some elements of Biden’s immigration policy are still stuck in the Trump era

While the decision to terminate MPP is undoubtedly a step toward implementing the more humane immigration policy Biden campaigned on, other elements of Biden’s policy at the southern border still look more like those of the Trump administration.

Specifically, Title 42 — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directive that allows the deportation of migrants due to public health concerns — remains in place, even as the US prepares to welcome back foreign tourists starting November 8.

The result, according to Vox’s Nicole Narea, is “a growing gulf between the progressive immigration values President Joe Biden professes and the enforcement policies he’s implementing at the border,” one which has led to “confusion among immigration officials, uncertainty for migrants, and questions about whether the president has a coherent strategy on immigration at all.”

Under Title 42, which the Trump administration put in place in March 2020, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden administration has justified deporting thousands of Haitian immigrants, even as Haiti has been consumed by political crisis, violence, natural disasters, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

In September, Biden’s special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, resigned in protest over the deportations, and another official — State Department legal adviser Harold Koh — did likewise earlier this month.

“I believe this Administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return (“refouler”) individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” Koh wrote in an October memo obtained by Politico. “Lawful, more humane alternatives plainly exist, and there are approaching opportunities in the near future to substitute those alternatives in place of the current, badly flawed policy.”

According to US Customs and Border Protection, Title 42 was used to expel more than a million migrants between October 2020 and September this year, denying them a hearing with an immigration judge.

As Narea points out, the Biden administration is caught in a bind trying to please critics from both the left and the right — to the detriment of migrants.

She writes:

[Biden] has pursued policies designed to uplift immigrants who have put down roots in the US, many of whom have been able to attract public sympathy. But the migrants most Americans will never see are now the subject of his harshest enforcement initiatives. This approach has left Biden with a border policy not so different from the one he once decried.

Even when it comes to MPP, it’s unclear to what extent Biden will succeed in reversing Trump-era policies. Despite the administration’s latest effort, it may be forced to reinstate MPP at least temporarily, as it’s unclear how the courts will respond to DHS’s Friday memo.

The administration has been negotiating with the Mexican government to restore the policy per the district court’s August order, according to BuzzFeed, and it has issued contracts to build new encampments to hold migrants at the border.

In October, dozens of legal groups working with asylum seekers signed a letter refusing to work with the administration to enact the policy, saying that to do so would be to be “complicit in a program that facilitates the rape, torture, death, and family separations of people seeking protection by committing to provide legal services.”

In their letter to the administration, the 73 “legal services providers, law school clinics, and law firms” asked the government to “take immediate steps” to end Title 42 and resume shutting down the MPP program while processing the cases still covered under that directive.

“We stand ready to offer legal services to asylum seekers, were your administration to follow US and international law,” the letter concludes. “But there is no protection in the Migrant Protection Protocols.”

The misdemeanor charge comes after an independent report commissioned by James’s office was released in August, detailing multiple allegations of sexual harassment by Cuomo and a hostile work environment in which dissent was not tolerated and speaking up about alleged abuse could result in retaliation.

Cuomo has denied the allegations against him and offered a number of justifications, including that what he considered friendly actions were simply out of step with the political moment. His attorney, Rita Glavin, said in a statement on Friday that Cuomo never assaulted anyone and claimed that the Albany County sheriff, Craig Apple, had acted with political intent.

Confusion over the timing of the complaint gave Glavin some fuel; according to Apple, his office filed the complaint on Thursday morning, not expecting that it would result in a summons being issued the same day.

As a result, the complaint became public on Thursday before Apple could notify Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who didn’t know about the complaint until it was leaked to New York Focus.

Soares said in a statement that he was “surprised to learn today that a criminal complaint was filed in Albany City Court by the Albany County Sheriff’s Office against Andrew Cuomo.” Soares’s office has been pursuing its own investigation into the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo.

According to the Albany Times-Union, a summons wasn’t expected until next week, after the sheriff’s office had conferred with Soares and Commisso about moving forward with the case. Commisso’s attorney, Brian Premo, said that she too “was surprised by the turn of events but she has been and will remain a resolute cooperating victim in pursuit of blind justice.”

Apple told the Wall Street Journal that his office routinely files such paperwork without consulting with prosecutors first, and a spokesperson for the New York state court system, Lucian Chalfen, defended Albany City Court Judge Holly Trexler, telling the WSJ she “handled the filing of the misdemeanor complaint properly.”

Cuomo has repeatedly been accused of harassment and misconduct

In addition to allegations against Cuomo by Commisso and 10 other women, the August report painted an alarming picture of pervasive sexual harassment and retaliation by Cuomo and his aides.

It detailed accusations ranging from Cuomo asking for help finding a girlfriend and saying that he, in his early 60s, would date a woman as young as 22, to unwanted physical contact, like the kind Commisso described when she came forward publicly in August.

The report was effectively the final straw for an already-embattled Cuomo, who was by August facing multiple distinct scandals, including allegations that his administration had deliberately covered up the number of nursing home residents who died of Covid-19 during the pandemic. His public support plummeted, and top aide Melissa DeRosa resigned after the attorney general’s report detailed her role in retaliation against at least one accuser.

Sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo began surfacing last year after former aide Lindsey Boylan accused Cuomo of sexually harassing her “for years” and of retaliating against her by releasing confidential personnel files; additional accusations earlier this year added momentum to calls for Cuomo to resign.

Ultimately, Cuomo, facing an accelerating impeachment push backed by state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and the chamber’s Democratic majority, announced he was stepping down just one week after the attorney general’s report was released on August 3.

Despite Cuomo’s resignation, Heastie said in August that the Assembly would continue investigating both the sexual harassment accusations and allegations that the Cuomo administration had deliberately lied about the number of nursing home deaths in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thursday’s criminal complaint is just the latest development in Cuomo’s rapid downfall, and it underscores that the allegations that ended his governorship could still become actionable claims, with real legal teeth.

Cuomo still claims he’s the victim of a political witch hunt

As with previous sexual misconduct allegations, Cuomo’s attorney, Glavin, has argued that the allegations in Thursday’s criminal complaint are false and politically motivated.

“Governor Cuomo has never assaulted anyone, and Sheriff Apple’s motives here are patently improper. Sheriff Apple didn’t even tell the district attorney what he was doing,” Glavin said in a statement. “This is not professional law enforcement; this is politics.”

Specifically, Cuomo’s team has seized on the initial confusion surrounding the charging announcement, which coincided closely with the announcement of James’s gubernatorial campaign, as evidence of political maneuvering on her part. Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi also took aim at Apple, saying the charges were an “abuse of power” in Apple’s “rouge [sic] investigation.”

James announced her gubernatorial campaign on Friday, just one day after the criminal complaint against Cuomo was filed. She will challenge sitting New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, the former lieutenant governor who took over from Cuomo following his resignation, in the Democratic primary, and other candidates may jump into the Democratic race as well.

James and Cuomo had previously been allies; he endorsed her during her successful 2018 run for attorney general. More recently, however, Cuomo and his team have begun to spin James’s probe into the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo as an abuse of power in pursuit of the governor’s mansion.

Cuomo has tweeted repeatedly in the days since the complaint was made public, with statements by Glavin and Azzopardi both claiming there is no evidence to support the criminal charges.

But multiple district attorney’s offices in New York, as well as the state Assembly, have been collecting evidence against Cuomo, and Apple has repeatedly said that the mistimed filing of the complaint doesn’t have any bearing on the seriousness of the charges or the strength of the case. Apple also revealed that he and his team had conducted witness interviews and reviewed copious documents related to the case.

“The case is a solid case, our victim is cooperative, and we’re moving forward,” Apple said.

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