#109: The Science of Letting Go - Shawn Prest

35:54if you're having let's say a you said a stressful thought is that right yeah like a stressful thought versus maybe like a physical sensation might make it easier to describe yeah so something stressful is i guess we kind of have to get into why is it considered stressful so if usually something's stressful because it's taken as a threat to you Yes. And so something that's a threat to you, you're predicting that, and this is kind of the slightly curious way that active inference works, but you're predicting that you're safe, but there's this continuous evidence kind of coming in through your senses that there's a threat.

36:51And so you can't update your model of the world to accept being unsafe in some sense. So what you actually need to do if you can't update that model of the world is you would then need to act on the world in some way to actually make it feel safer, to be more in line with your prediction that it is safe. I don't know whether that fully answers what you're saying. Yeah, it does. And we'll probably start to get into letting go, which I think might answer the question better. But why would you... Yeah, actually, I think we'll come back to it because we'll probably... Letting go will describe, I think, what I'm trying to say.

37:48yeah and there's there's a lot there there's more to say and nuance and kind of caveat in what i just said as well but that that's typically how in predictive processing we think about threats and yeah stress yeah okay yeah awesome so most people think of letting go as a vague emotional release and you describe it as an endogenous decrease in precision. So first of all, how would you define letting go? And what does that look like in terms of the math in the brain? It's a good question. It's a big question.

38:34Let's see. So, yeah, letting go, I think, is actually a kind of central process behind or underlying meditation and also meditative development and progress over time. and yeah so to give kind of an example of one so when someone lets go then there's a kind of releasing of a kind of contraction or tensing in the mind and usually there's a kind of increased sense of not knowing that also comes with this and there's a sense of kind of an opening up, things become a bit less conceptual.

39:39You feel like you're a little bit more in the here and now, in the present moment. You feel more equanimous. So you feel kind of less reactive to stimuli. and usually you also feel better. And so this is when, if you successfully let go, then these are the kinds of things you will notice as a consequence. And you'll also notice that kind of things are a little bit less reified or like labely also. So, you know, going to this coffee cup, I might normally just kind of quickly be like coffee boom and so as I let go and do it now

40:41and what you find is this kind of brings more of the kind of features kind of the reflections on the glass the kind of coloring of the coffee in the glass the kind of lines of it and um yeah the kind of differences in contrast and these kinds of things all of these sort of lower level um features that utopia typically under normal circumstances group is glass of coffee start coming more actually into perception um and so when I talk about letting go, I'm talking about an experience with this phenomenology, basically, like with these experiential qualities. And so, yes, part of it is, yeah, the sense of feeling better.

41:40And this kind of there's a kind of sense of relief there. But there's a whole kind of basket of associated changes in our experience that happen when one successfully manages to let go. And from that perspective, you're letting go of the sort of higher level models, and you're getting closer to the low level sensory input. Is that correct?

42:13Yeah, yeah, in a sense, because and this is kind of the hierarchical organization in the brain, yeah, you have sensory input, and then you have kind of this very kind of basic lower level input that's not terribly informative on its own. So for example, in the visual system you have something like line detection and line orientation detection and then like much higher up then you start to have like recognition of objects in some sense and then you kind of have even higher still you kind of have this a modal or you call it viewpoint invariant objects where the object is not actually the visual thing per se or the sound of the object per se but it's a kind of mental thing that is informed by these different senses.

43:12Yeah. And basically the idea is when you inject a kind of uncertainty or a not knowing and my work is kind of showing how we can think of this in terms of active inference and precision when you inject this kind of not knowing then it kind of forces perceptual processing to kind of lower levels of this hierarchical model, degenerative model in the brain. so that's the that's the letting go the not knowing and from that the brain will then move into the lower levels and put increasing attention and focus on sensory input or getting closer as we move down the stair yes although the not the not knowing actually is a consequence of perception being lower.

44:12So if you don't, in a sense, if you don't have any more the certainty than you're looking at a glass, then what you're looking at is only the evidence that would normally point to the fact you're looking at a glass, if that makes sense. So you sort of abandon the level where you're perceiving things like glasses and you're sitting more in the perception where there's the not knowing of objects in a sense but you still have the perception of you know like lines and texture and some kind of form and maybe some yeah some differences in contrast in these kinds of things So it's like the not knowing is actually a consequence of perceiving lower in the way, at least I've been thinking about it.

45:14Yeah, and from that sense, it's a relief in itself that we don't know. I guess in some ways gives back a bit of beauty and a bit more of a childlike approach to life and things become fresher and newer and exciting again and there's less assumptions yeah exactly and in a real sense we actually are kind of taking in more from the world in those moments as well yeah um yeah we're of drinking in the world a bit more. And you talk about this downward cascade which we've briefly touched upon and we've spoken about Shamil Shandaria, he talked about the reason, kind of the reason for this was just that the sensory input is just computationally explosive to create basically a whole world, at least my understanding, the whole world model from the amount of data that comes in.

46:22And that is why the generative model is useful. And I think that's the same as is used or similar to what is used in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Is that your understanding too, that it's just, it's simply an efficiency, it's kind of an efficiency approach from the brain? Yeah, like I guess there's different things we could potentially talk about being computationally intractable or that the brain needs to find efficient ways of doing. but kind of I think that and I'm not sure if this is the one Shamil was referencing or not but like

47:09basically we don't want a lot of chaotic kind of low-level patterns and like little shimmering impressions if we need to effectively be acting on the world at that moment in a way that keeps us alive. What we need is very clear, relevant, useful features of the world to sort of come forth to us that we can act on. So we need a sense of, oh yeah, that's a person. And that person, you know, is running at me with a knife. Like we need, you know that is that is food and I know what food represents for me and I want to go towards that

48:03and so like these kinds of things we need like a massively simplified world where there's only kind of the things that we can kind of do something with an act upon in a way that's useful for us. And so even what kind of gets qualified in a certain sense by the mind as an object are the things that are useful for us. And I think we see this, and you can kind of flip it around sometimes, but for example, normally when we're looking around in space, the things that are solid are the things that we're focusing on as objects and what we're not actually focusing on is the space between objects but you can kind of do a move where suddenly you start making the objects out of the spaces between the things that are solid it's just normally that's not a useful thing to do in most contexts so that's not what the brain is going to tend to do.

49:09And so all of this is sort of like the purpose of as you move up the hierarchy of extracting only these sort of simplified useful features of the world in which we can act upon. It's kind of like a survival necessity in the end. Yeah. When we need to act. But the thing is, we don't always need to be in this kind of like acting doing um upon the world kind of mode and i think that's yeah that's where we'll go with this yeah can you talk a bit more about the move that you discussed actually so you're you're saying to become aware of the space around objects is that for example yeah and that's an experience you know some people who have done a bunch of meditation may have already noticed that sometimes it just happens that naturally yeah after meditation or on retreat or something those kinds of things can be more salient that the space between objects is for some reason now you know what i'm noticing more rather than actually the objects themselves yes yeah it's like a de-weighting of the objects i guess like less mental tension or focus that's a very triggered word in these circles actually but um at least in my mind it's less it feels like less of a laser focus on say you and more of a peripheral focus where you emerge within it right yes because the in some sense the sense of me is related to the things that I deeply know help me survive or that might stop me from surviving.

51:07Yeah. And so when you move into a mode that's just more observing and it has kind of less, in a sense, relevance for you as an organism, then also kind of the sense of self fades somewhat or attenuates when that happens. And you've found a way to model like mental tension mathematically. So how does it look within the model when we're say like stuck or agitated or something like that? We'll start before when I was kind of talking about the phenomenology or the experiential qualities of letting go, how I mentioned this sort of contracting. And this can also be experienced as a kind of like pressure or mental tension kind of in the mind.

52:07That's the opposite of things feeling open and expansive. And usually this sort of tensing or contracting is unpleasant. And it's not also exactly the same thing, even though it's, how would I say it, kind of metaphorically similar, it's not the same thing as muscular tension. So for example, and I think I took this example from Shamil actually, it's like if you tighten your fist really hard and then you try to do as much letting go and opening up as possible in this area while your fist is still clenched. And so there is something that releases but it's not actually the muscles that are holding your fists together and so in this way we can kind of distinguish the kind of like physical although there there is there does appear to be some sort of like causal influences between those two so if you relax your body physically a lot then yes you will also find that you're generally with less contracting mentally as well yeah so they're not the same but they're related and influence each other yeah so you're saying when you hold your fist together but mentally you yeah so let go as much as possible yeah right while still maintaining your fist crunch exactly yeah i can see that being particularly useful yeah it's a cool little little thing so you created a computer simulation uh involving like facial recognition why choose face classification and what happened to your computer agent when it was forced to let go right yeah so basically this kind of computational modeling work I did the goal yeah is to show kind of computationally how how the letting go process may work and hook this into what we understand of the hierarchy and the brain and this.

54:32So to kind of show this, the model has multiple levels, kind of like we've been talking about. And I chose to focus on the effects of letting go in the visual modality, basically. I did this mostly because I think it's actually easier for people to understand with the visual modality than if we're talking kind of about somatic sensations, let's say, in the body. It didn't have to be that way.

55:11But it's letting go affects all sensory modalities. So in a sense, it doesn't actually matter which one. And while some traditions don't have a lot of open-eyed meditation, there are lots of traditions. um zen just to give one example yeah that that do and so both formal meditation with your eyes open um is quite it isn't unheard of at all and is actually quite common in a number of traditions and then also when you think about um in meditation there becomes a point when one tries to like move their uh their practice off the cushion into more informal practice in daily life And this also involves letting go often with your eyes open, you know, while we're having this conversation right now or whatever it is.

56:04And so, yeah, those are kind of the reasons I chose to kind of do this model referencing the visual system. But I could have done the auditory system. I could have done, you know, one that was more about somatic representation. I just thought that this in a certain sense is easier to follow. Yeah, and so then the kind of setup is that, again, sort of mirroring what we understand about the visual system is you have at the lower level, you have kind of individual facial features. So you'd have the left eye, the right eye and the mouth. And then you'd have a higher level, which let's call it face type, and where a combination of features in certain places will inform this agent, sort of this synthetic meditator, in this case, that they're looking at a face.

57:15and if it's a happy face or a sad face. But to get this higher level understanding, they need to move their gaze around to the different features at the lower level, which is actually how the visual system works. We don't, we're usually not aware of the movement of our eyes, but our eyes are continuously and actively moving to different areas to get the evidence for the kinds of objects we're looking at. Yeah. And so, yeah, how then it works is this agent, this synthetic agent, will look around to the different regions of the face. And then it'll do this kind of lower level evidence accumulation on which facial feature it's looking at.

58:04And this will help inform at the higher level whether it's looking at the happy face or the sad face. And when it's sufficiently confident about which face type it's looking at, then it's going to select, yes, I'm looking at the happy face or yes, I'm looking at the sad face. And it's incentivized the way it's set up in the model to get this correct. And so it's not going to make a guess before it has some degree of certainty. So that's sort of the general task setup. And then with this task set up now it's like, okay, so what happens when we equip an agent doing this task with the ability to let go or not?

58:47That's sort of just the general kind of framing there. I don't know if. Yeah, that definitely helped. And from that, basically when the model felt bad, it would, to feel better, it would let go. Is that correct? Yes. So first, whether it's perceiving a happy face or a sad face is not related to how it itself is feeling. Yeah. So that's first kind of detail to keep in mind. Yeah. But yes, so remember when we talked about letting go, how when you do so, there's sort of a movement into like a sense of relief and more pleasant experience. Now, there's good computational reasons for this, I think, which are that when you have more abstract processing, your model of the world is more complex.

59:56So doing this higher level inference on these complex objects takes more, it's more computationally costly. And so it actually takes more effort. And so you'll find this fits in nicely when you go into simpler kind of ways of perception. They also take less effort. And so they feel better. and so basically the way in the the model that works is when the agent spends too much time engaging in only this kind of higher level effortful processing then it starts to feel progressively worse okay and yeah and so when it feels sufficiently bad it's like okay well now it's time time to meditate time to let go basically okay and and then when it does that this is what i have modeled as this um this decrease in precision so initially it is very certain about the kind of face type it's looking at but when it lets go it decreases precision so its confidence and whether it's looking at the happy phase or the sad phase decreases.

1:01:15And then because it's decreased, just due to the kind of way the active inference framework is set up, it's sort of required to go down and require and try to get more certainty by doing inference or sampling at these lower levels, at the level of the individual features. And so it's, yeah, it's lack of confidence sort of drives it to doing this lower level perception again. That's the kind of downward shift. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And if for any of the listeners that might be having a stressful day, an anxious day, how would they, how would they themselves do this move, this downward shift? it's a good question and that is the sort of one of kind of the key questions of meditative practice i think and that's kind of

1:02:19And this is only my understanding here, but I think what a lot of different meditation techniques are ultimately trying to achieve is letting go. It's just there's a variety of different ways in which you can actually bring it about. And you don't necessarily know which one is going to work for which person at which moment. And so, you know, what you might do to get this kind of release of this contraction and this tension and letting go, you know, It might be trying to equanimously perceive the changing nature of phenomena as they happen moment by moment in experience, which is sort of in Buddhism you talk about as the first characteristic of impermanence.

1:03:13or it might be that you look at a different one or you just try to very deeply accept everything as it is and that this kind of deep acceptance kind of will bring about letting go.

1:03:37And it might be that if you just try to stop efforting that once your mind kind of knows how to do that,

1:03:50you might just be able to directly stop efforting and this might cause you to let go. And so you can think of kind of letting go as kind of a key kind of mechanism or process underlying these different techniques, basically. um and and i think that's yeah that's still obviously an area where we need to do a lot of research and investigation but but i think it's quite a crucial one for anyone that that hasn't maybe done something longer like a retreat what what would be what would be the difference between just a daily practice versus perhaps the ability to let go post-retreat? Or what is it that happens then?

1:04:44Are you just becoming more skilled? Or is there some other mechanics at play? There's probably like any kind of answer to that is a very long and big answer, I think. so I'll just have to kind of pick and choose little bits. Yeah. It is an excellent question, though. I mean, in some kind of way, I think people, on average, and obviously experience isn't linear in this way over a retreat. There's lots of ups and downs, and they're going to be difficult territory. But quite often people find it easier to let go after a retreat than they did before. So, you know, for their retreat, they might have sat down and started trying to drop what was happening for them.

1:05:36And this was a very slow process and didn't work very well. And those thoughts of what happened yesterday were kind of difficult to get them to quieten down.

1:05:47But they might find that by the end of a retreat, they actually, they can actually just very kind of quickly let go of everything that's happening and enter a state that's reasonably deep, reasonably quickly. And so, and then sometime this kind of thing is, ends up being kind of like locked in after that is they retain this ability and sometimes it fades. and there's a whole kind of other question on on that and and what the difference there is and why but uh yeah yeah absolutely that's a whole podcast in itself totally a future podcast you talk about how meditation is opening the sensory gates and i i read your reference to jed brewer's work on addiction in particular if you're smoking a cigarette and you attend to the taste or the feel of the cigarette what's happening there how are we updating our old beliefs yeah so you can think of it similarly so the basic kind of idea here it's a sort of like mindfulness approach to um i should say smoking cessation is that when you feel the urge to smoke then you and if you and what you try to do is you just try and actually pay attention to what it feels like to have that urge to smoke so what is that what is that craving for a cigarette like what does that actually feel like and try to get more um try to get clearer in your experience on what that feels like.

1:07:44And so it turns out that when you try and do this, that that is actually what helps make that craving go away.

1:07:58And how you might think about this in relation to what we're talking about is it's a little bit similar to say, if instead with the model we've talked about, we said to the agent, well, just focus, see if you can just focus on these lower level features rather than actually what kind of face you're looking at. See if you can just focus on, you know, what are the different parts of the face, just look at the different parts and, you know, or look at the sort of texture, this is kind of generally, but look at the texture of the skin, look at how the light reflects. And so when you do this, you move the brain into more sort of information gathering and you take it away from acting on the world.

1:08:52Because acting is very much in the end a kind of like higher level phenomena. It's something that happens to make happen what we desire and want. And so when we lean more into finding out more information in a very experiential embodied way, rather than trying to act in a way that changes our experience,

1:09:23that we actually don't feel the grip of needing to change our experience that much either. yeah and this would have huge implications for people with um ptsd anxiety and so forth how would how would they use um these models to help update these kind of outdated and unhelpful yeah like bodily sensations and right so first I don't want to I'm wearing a podcast I don't want to um prescribe that anyone doing anything who you know in those circumstances without consulting a professional individually

1:10:17and I think in part that's the case so one thing that often happens is if people have a lot of traumatic experience then this actually can often lead to them having a lot of trouble letting go because they actually don't want to experience again the kinds of things that were so brutally hard for them at some point in the past. And in general, this is just finding, like suddenly exposing oneself to these things again and not being kind of prepared for it is not necessarily a good idea. And so I think that actually perhaps even some people that run into problems with letting go in meditation, you know, might be served well by leaning into things like therapy and other ways of exploring and slowly and gradually in a kind of controlled way, becoming more in touch with the kind of more direct experience.

1:11:28And you don't necessarily want to do it all at once. And it can be quite rough if you do. So, so yeah, I guess that's sort of what I say there. But I guess also having said that, it's like, there's a high price to being cut off from our more direct experience. And so it's not, and it tends to obscure things like a sense of meaning, a sense of connection, a sense of being there really in that moment. And so at the same time, it's not like it is desirable to find the way to come more into contact with this low lower level sensory experience and to learn how to let go. It's just if you've had something very difficult happen in your past, then you need to exercise a lot of care and you might need some like you know skilled assistance with that.

1:12:34So you mentioned two different routes to deconstruction of the mind the jhana route and the insight route so computationally speaking what's the difference between these two paths and probably actually we should we talk briefly on jhanas but define the insight route as well. They're kind of two I guess modes through which one can let go into ultimately with enough meditation practice and do a kind of cessation of consciousness which is sometimes called a fruition mm-hmm and so the kind of one that's talked about in the suttas is going through the jhanas and sometimes this process is called unbinding and you kind of you you focus on some aspect of experience at a certain point in your practice and then if you're focusing on the right thing then at some point there's this kind of fascinating phenomena where there's a kind of like feedback loop like a self-propagating feedback loop that occurs and then actually those sensations you are focusing on you kind of start to expand until your experience is sort of like you become absorbed in those sensations.

1:14:03And then once you've established this in the first jhana, then you can do this again with a kind of subtler, more pleasant sensation, and you can move into the second jhana and so on. And each time you do this, there is kind of a letting go and things become more pleasant. but it's experientially in this quite like uniform way where experience is kind of painted all with the I don't know how to say it like the same the same sensational film or that that's not a good way of saying it but something like that it's like um and so the the insight yeah the insight there's a sort of other way of doing this and this is more from kind of more modern traditions like the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition and Burmese Buddhism.

1:15:03In particular they emphasize this more and here they kind of say well you don't actually need to enter into jhanas to do this you can go just through experience being very flexy and changing it doesn't need to have this kind of all-encompassing absorption quality but that what you will still notice as you move towards cessation is that there is release, there is letting go and and that there's and that furthermore and this is i think saida upandita talked about this initially is there is a kind of correlation of some of the qualities in this more like flexi variable kind of insight process of letting go to cessation um there is some kind of resemblance at the same time there's something in common that those have with the genre root um so there's a there's a kind of correspondence there.

1:16:15And so it's important that when I'm talking about this I'm talking about it quite linear linearly and this can be the case when someone has already gone through this process before and it's become accomplished at it. I'm not saying that this is you know the first time you go through the insight stages that it's all just going to be getting better and better and better and better than you're in cessation. There's lots of evidence that's not the case, that it's quite non-linear, that there's a bunch of difficult territory that you move through at a certain point. And it's maybe necessary to some extent, but how difficult it is, there's a lot of questions around this.

1:17:03But in any case, when one has already managed to do this sort of deconstructive process to cessation. Um, and then one can enact it in a given meditation session. That's kind of the, the context in which I'm talking about it here, just to be clear. Yeah. Um, otherwise we got to spend a lot of time talking about ins and outs. Yeah, definitely. And for anyone that wants to dive into the genre or genres a little bit further, they can check out the conversation with the Shemil Chandai. Nice. So at the end of the hierarchy there's this cessation the blinking out of experience which some people would compare to like a micro deep sleep and there is a break or a space in your awareness and would you would you say this is a system crash a system reboot an upgrade and why would we want why would we want to blink out Yeah, I mean, the association itself has no experience.

1:18:17So it in and of itself doesn't necessarily have any value.

1:18:27but it's sort of like what we're interested in is how one ends up there and what one goes through and getting there and how experience changes in getting there and then how things happen when one, like right afterwards, when experience comes back online. And so, and I think those are really interesting questions and say, and tell us something really meaningful about the mind that I think contemplative science is only kind of now maybe a little bit in the last few years actually starting to tackle. And it, because there is something of if meditators can effectively slowly turn down the knob on consciousness until it turning off, and then it kind of comes back, then what does this tell us about how the mind constructs reality?

1:19:27And I think there's something, yeah, really useful there. and so yeah when after a cessation there's often reported as sort of like rebooting process where you see kind of in a sense these like perceptions start from this sort of like lower level perception of sensations, but things are quite ineffable. They're not, yeah, intelligible in a conceptual way exactly. And then you slowly more and more of that conceptual richness kind of comes back online.

1:20:13Although quite often, there's also this sort of like effect of you do stay kind of more in the present moment for some period of time, even after things are mostly back online afterwards than you were beforehand. And so there's a lot of kind of insight to be found in the construction of reality through observing this kind of rebooting process. And the kind of Buddhist argument would be that when you have this first happen and you have a kind of path moment, then after that, your degree of suffering kind of at baseline has decreased. If you have the right kind of cessation, because there are some talks about other things that are not that, that might look similar superficially.

1:21:14And so one might not care if one has a cessation per se, but you might care about having baseline reduced suffering after having had one for the first time. Right. So essentially another way of saying it would be that your models are potentially going to have significant updates or changes. Before a cessation even happens, as one's learning how to meditate more, you start off with, I don't know, seeing, experiencing your own body and the feeling of your own body as something that doesn't change very much. It seems quite steady and stable over time. time, how you visually perceive things seems that way at all.

1:22:08If you're not changing the stimuli you're looking at, you have a sense that nothing's really changing. As you progress in practice, you start to notice there's more kind of flux and movement when you're in certain states, and you start to see, even feel your own body in sort of different ways where things don't feel as sort of these large gross sensations and you start having these more like subtle kind of sensations that seem to be kind of moving and happening and changing more often and so all of this process I think is kind of you are learning or perhaps rediscovering something about reality in this process where you're seeing, oh yeah, things are not as fixed, as non-changing as I thought they were.

1:23:16And the more you see this at these sort of lower levels, then because these lower levels again they provide evidence for the higher levels then this causes your kind of understanding of the world to update and and so over time you are accumulating more and more evidence that the world is or reality is in a slightly different way than you thought it was and this kind of point I make in yeah in the master's thesis opening sensory gates but it's like at some point what it seems like is that there's this kind of our existing model of reality that kind of things are more permanent and things are unchanging and there's less flux there's that and we develop this new one where in meditation we're noticing that things are different and eventually this new model the evidence for it becomes so strong that what I propose is that what might be happening in things like awakening is actually we're kind of pruning the old model because it's no longer as good as explaining reality as the new one and so when that happens your sort of whole perceptual shift system kind of even not meditating kind of shifts shifts to perceiving things in this more fluxy kind of moving impermanent way so you're kind of turning down the volume of of me and turning up the volume of reality to put it in a metaphor?

1:25:05The first part's maybe not even a metaphor because we know like the sort of from contemplative science, we know that long-term meditators actually seem to have less higher level activation, even at rest, even not meditating. They have less higher level activation. and that higher level activation is typically associated with kind of self-related processing and so that sort of seems to provide evidence basically for what you're saying that's in relation to the default mode network yeah yeah yeah exactly activity being lower down means that we are kind of taking in more information from the world and we're sort of in a way more responsive to it we have a bit of a closer a better fit with what's actually happening and so there's a certain kind of like agility that we can kind of see there where just start updating when things change we're more sensitive to those changes and we also kind of know that things are not going to exactly stay as they were yeah and there's an okayness with that yeah which again is due to decrease this i think this decreased higher level stuff in the studies with reduced default mode network activity is that that does it look because i remember in the psychedelic studies what they found there was like increased perceptual experience but decrease in the default mode network and decreasing brain activity and then different regions and there was increased connectivity between regions that as well usually communicate is that the same because i find that it's always really interesting.

1:27:10Yeah, it almost looks like the brain becomes more like a natural system, like there's less centralization, like I'm kind of corresponding it with blockchain or something. But yeah, I mean, I think there is less, I guess you could say constraining of the system from the top.

1:27:40You could say something like that. I'm not sure exactly what the psychedelic studies are, but you do see also in meditation increased connectivity between a bunch of areas. The story is a little bit more complicated there because you also have some increased or decreased connectivity connectivity in certain places too um and so like i don't we maybe don't have like the full i think we need to do more work to figure out what's happening there but um yeah there may be a story of also they're kind of new ways that we can come to identify patterns that we weren't previously able to once we have a kind of more flexible system that isn't always stuck in this sort of more top-down way of processing the world and perceiving it.

1:28:41You hear often we talk about equanimity and stillness and I think for anyone that hasn't experienced equanimity, equanimity is not a very exciting word, at least it wasn't for me. No, it doesn't really mean it, it didn't mean anything to me before it sounds somewhat neutral and I can only really relate because equanimity I guess can be also described as peace and there's been varying like levels of experiences one of which where I just felt like a very large bomb could go off next to me and I would be unmoved by that and from that perspective the need for something else was gone or at least it was imperceptible to me um like how close are we how would you reframe equanimity first actually and how close are we to get in like some sort of um like mathematical algorithm or score where we can measure equanimity the term is tricky because people use it in different ways um Some people talk about equanimity as kind of a state one attains.

1:30:02And there's kind of, though, I think in this sort of like not reactive way that I like to think about it. and I think there's a lot to this, is that if you think of it like we're perceiving something, right? And what we're perceiving, that thing is still there. It's not changing. However, our actual perception of what's there is changing. And so in this sense, I don't actually think that equanimity is per se perceiving things the way they really are. I think equanimity is perceiving things in a different way. And it's a different way that can often feel better. and it can inform us of something in a way that maybe perceiving with less equanimity can't inform us of that same thing.

1:31:16But it's really perceiving with equanimity, I think, is a kind of perceiving differently. And I think it's a perceiving differently that's associated with generally lower level perception as we've been talking about. And so I think there's a way of computationally talking about equanimity where it has to do with how much are we perceiving in these kind of lower level ways? How much are we perceiving in these sort of higher level have to do something about the situation kind of ways? And so I think at some point, probably we can do something like the neuro correlates of what more or less equanimous experience are.

1:32:11Obviously, we're a ways from getting there. But I think at least if you think of equanimity in this way, that it's really like changing based on where in the hierarchy we're perceiving, then I think we have kind of tractable directions we can move in to try and precisely understand it. I don't think it needs to be this sort of like kind of mysterious kind of notion per se. What's next for your research? I've got a couple things I'm working on as I'm trying to finish the PhD. So I'll have one that's kind of looking at developing a better computational understanding of effective valence. And sort of using some of these understandings from looking at computational mechanisms of meditation to try and understand what's happening with valence more broadly.

1:33:12in a computational way. And also with some collaborators, hopefully not too long, we're going to have a paper out on the self and a kind of active inference, sort of using active inference as a framework mostly to talk about sort of different things people mean when they refer to the self. because I think there's a lot of confusion there. And yeah, you get people saying, well, you couldn't do this without a self. You'd be useless. And of course, you know, if you take sort of the, you know, the meditative project, at least of Buddhism, you take it seriously that there is some kind of self. There is something that can potentially disappear fully.

1:34:10and you can still remain a functional human being in the world. So we're going to look at sort of trying to see if we can, in a very sort of clear way, sort of pull apart two separate notions of the self there.

1:34:27And yeah, I guess those are the main things for now. Once my head moves out of the PhD to elsewhere, there'll be more stuff. I mean, in general, like I'm interested in, I do want to, ultimately, I want a full scientific understanding of awakening. That is what I'm interested in. And so you can't do that in a single project, but I intend to be picking at that from different angles for the foreseeable future. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, that's incredible. And it's very exciting. and yeah, we'd love to have you back on at some point. It's been great to chat. Awesome, thanks Josh. This has been a really fun one.

1:35:14Thank you so much for listening to the episode. If you enjoyed it, please, if you could give us a like, a subscribe and hit the notification bell, that would really help us out. Or just share this episode with a friend, share the course with a friend. Anything would go such a long way. Thank you so much and I hope to see you soon.

1:35:36Thank you.