danielmingram

Wall of text warning. I understand that on a surface level, the story they sell you is a good thing. Protecting kids, keeping them off websites they shouldn't be on, stopping predators - I don't think anyone is against all these things. But the fallacy here is that the implementation of all this monitoring means ANYONE could be implicated for ANYTHING the government deems a threat, now or later. It's akin to installing a camera and microphone in every room of your house that records everything 24/7 and is easily accessible by law enforcement at any time. Not just live feeds, but all the archives going back years as well. And on top of that there are intelligence agencies deploying AI tools to scan all the footage to detect any "problematic" behavior. Even if you're not breaking any laws, they are more than free to flag you for this stuff and start building a profile, false positives included. This is the system they are setting up on the internet. Let me give you an example: You want to log into Instagram but they require you to do an ID and face scan. So you do it. Now your friend is a bit of an edgy person and sends you a funny meme criticizing Israel. You find it silly, like the post. Instagram recognizes that and serves you some more edgy memes of this nature. Instagram's algorithm is constantly building a profile on you and flags that you like "Israel critic" content. Not illegal. Nothing to hide. Yet. Legislation is later passed that considers even memes of this nature to be racist and antisemitic, punishable by law with fines or worse. Law enforcement queries Meta for a list of all profiles deemed to fall into this category, Meta hands over your real name proven by your "age-verification check". Now you're on an intelligence agency watchlist. They have probable cause to monitor all your online activity and punish you for one misstep. Say the wrong thing, criticize or make fun of the wrong person, look at the wrong website - all fair game to them. Going back to the cameras in your home, it's like owning a firearm completely legally for years, the AI system flags this to the government. And then firearms are outlawed. You were already flagged so you are now monitored as someone who could pose a risk to the public because you followed all laws in the past. Stuff like this is already happening around the world. And don't kid yourself by thinking the government doesn't drool over the prospect of implementing the same kind of systems that Iran has where they imprison people for using the internet during a nation-wide shutdown. Governments want more control, all of them, for all of history.

@AlexKrusz 😂

"Jhana" feels too esoteric for American audiences. MEGAtation is the EXTREME rebrand that we need.

One of the hallmarks of public health denialism is the use of the word "mild" to characterize initial symptoms of a high fatality ratio pathogen.

We have now mapped the most robust whole-brain characterization of meditation to date. Our new paper in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, “The Functional Neuroimaging of Meditation: A Quantitative Whole-Brain Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review,” provides a systematic and rigorous whole-brain characterization of meditation and establishes a foundational reference for future research in this domain. Using quantitative whole-brain meta-analytic methods, we synthesized findings across the growing neuroimaging literature to move beyond individual experiments and identify the most reliable and reproducible brain activity common across meditation techniques as well as activity specific to different meditation techniques. From 34 studies and over 700 individuals, we assessed neuroimaging data during focused attention, open monitoring, mantra recitation, and loving-kindness meditation. We found that: – Across practices, meditation consistently recruits brain regions including the rolandic operculum, insula, superior temporal gyrus, supplementary motor area (SMA), and hippocampus. – Functional decoding further linked whole-brain activation patterns to self-monitoring, reappraisal, motivation, experience, and awareness states., highlighting meditation’s role in engaging domain-general cognitive processes that may develop through intentional training. Also, different meditation practices demonstrated dissociable neural signatures: – Focused attention meditation recruited brain regions implicated in attentional control and monitoring, including the insula, SMA, superior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus. – Open monitoring meditation engaged brain regions associated with salience, attentional awareness, and present-moment monitoring, including the insula, inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and superior frontal gyrus. – Mantra recitation was linked to distinct activation in the putamen/insula, regions associated with sustained attentional and psychomotor integration. – Loving-kindness meditation activated aspects of prefrontal, cingulate, and affect-related brain systems associated with compassion and socioemotional processing. Together, these findings provide robust evidence that meditation is not a single, unitary brain state, but rather a family of practices that engage overlapping yet distinct neural systems, which highlights the need for greater specificity in how meditation is studied and interpreted. Our new research informs the personalization of clinical applications that seek to use meditation as an intervention to promote psychological well-being. In addition, it establishes a baseline for future research studying meditative development and advanced meditation. It also identifies promising neural targets for targeted clinical neuromodulation protocols. Congratulations and gratitude to first author Caitlin Baten and our co-authors Arielle Keller @ArielleKeller and Chris Miller! The full preprint is included below ⤵️ May our work benefit many 🙏

Since we've decided to do this all again: 🔟 Ten things that can reduce the risk of catching an airborne pathogen:

@1goodtern P100 anyone? 😊

1 An ffp2+/n95+ mask (respirator) worn properly

This is the part people don’t understand. Those of us trying to avoid covid aren’t “afraid of a cold.” It’s the downstream heart problems, immune and cognitive dysfunction, cancers, etc. we don’t want.

@WystanTBS @TVachaW @RogerThisdell Oh, yes, can’t ever recall using the term “constructed”, or thinking it might be helpful, so that might be Rob Burbea or someone like that, not sure, but definitely not coming from me.

@danielmingram @TVachaW @RogerThisdell Sure, from my faulty memory, paraphrased and compressed: no observer, no agent, clear seeing of the entire sensory manifold as an ongoing construction, thoroughly nondual.

Consciousness seems to have many properties that mirror the optics of light refraction; almost as if it is light itself, shining upon an otherwise dark universe. One of those features is the inevitable shadow it casts. No matter which conscious state/stage is inhabited, it always comes with its blind spots. Even seemingly full or complete consciousnesses reliably later reveal something unaccounted for, missed by its perception. Reality has this way of escaping every frame. Just partial perspectives upon partial perspectives, never capturing the whole. Another feature like light, is consciousness couldn't be known unless it has something to contact. There is no sense of consciousness without something to be aware of (be it a sight, sound, sensation etc.). Just as if you were to shine a light in a total vacuum there wouldn't be anything to reveal the light - the light itself would be invisible. When consciousness makes contact with something it reveals both the object and the consciousness. However, when consciousness is perfectly unimpeded, with no refractions of mind-matter to bounce off of, then awareness itself vanishes (a.k.a. cessation).

@WystanTBS @TVachaW @RogerThisdell It is a start, at least

@WystanTBS @TVachaW @RogerThisdell Perhaps remind readers how you interpret my definition, with all the criteria you can remember…

@TVachaW @RogerThisdell While I'm dumping hot takes on Theravadin doctrine, I'm pretty sold at this point that what @danielmingram defines as 4th path is stream-entry by sutta standards, and that the dropping of the fetter of sakkaya-ditthi refers to that non-regressing transition.

Click on the tweet below. Read the study. It's not brain surgery. It's brain decline:

From my friend Luca: Dear Daniel, I wanted to share an upcoming event that may interest your community: The Future of Meditation '26, an interdisciplinary symposium on Wednesday, May 13th at The Foundry in Cambridge (9:00 AM – 4:00 PM). Speakers are joining from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Janki Foundation, and others. The day covers meditation across science, tradition, ethics, and public life with panels, workshops, lunch, and a reception. Anyone with a .edu email gets in for $25. Full details and registration at meditationartifacts.org/fom26. Poster attached. Please share with anyone who might enjoy it.

I've circled the part of the graph that most people call 'Covid'.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this the greatest piece of prediction market content created to date.

😂 Reality doing The Onion’s job: huffpost.com/entry/democrat…

Following up on the announcement of our recent Neuron article, here we offer a deeper look at what this work means for the future of meditation research and for science more broadly. Meditation research is at an inflection point. The field’s focus is expanding rapidly beyond mindfulness to incorporate advanced meditation—states, stages, and endpoints that emerge with increasing mastery, including potentially long-lasting psychological transformations. In our recently published article in Neuron, “The Neuroscience of Advanced Meditation: The Promise of Third Wave Meditation Research,” Jonathan Lieberman @jon__lieberman and I review recent neuroscientific progress, outline key priorities for future research, and consider a selection of broad scientific and societal implications. Third wave meditation research is generating breakthrough findings: -- Advanced concentrative absorption meditation (ACAM) engages distinct neural patterns across cortical, subcortical, brainstem, and cerebellar regions, correlating with reported phenomenology -- Advanced investigative insight meditation (AIIM) stages are linked to shifts in the brain from self-referential processing toward perceptually grounded awareness -- Cessation events (temporary losses of consciousness) involve distinctive neural dynamics that are only now entering the realm of empirical inquiry The implications extend far beyond neuroscience: from transformative therapeutic potential and consciousness science to psychedelics, AI alignment, morality, and fundamental questions of suffering, happiness, and meaning that contemplative traditions have engaged for millennia. Which of these emerging directions, therapeutics, consciousness science, psychedelics, AI, or human flourishing, do you find most compelling? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Full paper in the comments below ⤵️ May this work benefit many 🙏

There are nearly half-a-million pieces of research into the health impacts of COVID. They are not hidden. You can simply Google them. Or you can check out this searchable database. Search for terms like "children" or "working memory". ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coron…

What if sleep and advanced meditation reveal that consciousness is not something we simply have or lose, but something that can be trained, refined, reorganized, and perhaps even momentarily suspended? Mainstream science has often treated wakefulness as the default home of consciousness, with sleep and meditation studied in relative isolation. But some of the most important clues to the structure and limits of conscious experience may lie exactly at their intersection. I’m excited to share our new preprinted manuscript, "Advanced Meditation, Sleep, and Consciousness Science: An Emerging Frontier." In this work, Clarita Bonamino, Clara Hausen, and I explore a perspective that integrates advanced meditation, sleep, and consciousness science together. We argue that these fields of research provide a promising and still underexplored frontier for understanding human experience. 🧠🧘‍♀️💫🔬 In this work, we synthesize findings across contemplative science, sleep science, and consciousness research, and suggest several particularly important implications: --Consciousness is not well captured by simple binary models of "on" versus "off," but instead appears graded, dynamic, and trainable across waking and sleeping states. --Advanced meditation offers a rare, cultivable way to systematically modulate consciousness, including deep absorption states, self-transcendent modes of awareness, and even reported cessations of consciousness. --Sleep reveals that awareness, embodiment, responsiveness, and experiential content can dissociate and recombine in surprising ways, including in lucid dreaming, dreamless sleep, and sleep-wake transitions. --These domains suggest that reduced phenomenal complexity may help illuminate the minimal requirements for consciousness itself. Why does this matter? If consciousness can persist, transform, thin out, or even appear to dissolve across advanced meditation and sleep, then some of our dominant assumptions in cognitive science may be too narrow. More broadly, this is part of what I see as the third wave of meditation research: moving beyond basic mindfulness and symptom reduction toward rigorous investigation of advanced meditation, meditative development, and altered states of consciousness. Research in these domains may yield findings with implications for mental health, well-being, and our understanding of what it means to be conscious at all. My deepest gratitude to first author Clarita Bonamino @BonaminoClarita, co-author Clara Hausen, and all those helping to pioneer this emerging frontier. I would also like to extend gratitude to the advanced practitioners and contemplative traditions whose disciplined inquiry makes this science possible. I warmly welcome reflections from neuroscientists, clinicians, philosophers, sleep researchers, and contemplative practitioners. How should science study consciousness when it becomes increasingly subtle, minimal, or discontinuous? The full preprint is included in the comments below ⤵️ May this work benefit many 🙏

The scariest finding in this paper: the subjects couldn't tell it was happening. UPenn ran this study on 48 healthy adults. One group slept 8 hours. Another slept 6. Another slept 4. For 14 straight days. They tested cognitive performance every 2 hours from 7:30am to 11:30pm. The 6-hour group's reaction times, working memory, and sustained attention deteriorated on a near-linear curve. By day 14 they were performing at the same level as someone who hadn't slept at all in 48 hours. The 4-hour group hit that threshold by day 6. Here's the part that should unsettle everyone who thinks they "do fine" on 6 hours: the subjects' self-reported sleepiness flatlined after the first few days. Their brains kept getting worse. Their perception of how impaired they were stopped updating. The cognitive decline was invisible to the person experiencing it. The researchers found a hard threshold. Any wakefulness beyond 15.84 hours in a day produces cumulative neurobiological cost. That cost compounds every single day you exceed it and does not reset with a weekend of sleeping in. About 35% of American adults sleep less than 7 hours a night. 40% of those get 6 hours or less. In 1942 that number was 11%. We built an entire professional culture around a sleep schedule that this paper says is functionally equivalent to pulling consecutive all-nighters. "I'm fine on 6 hours" is the most common response to sleep research. The first thing chronic sleep debt destroys is your ability to notice chronic sleep debt.