We Create Our Reality - Hacking Consciousness at Stanford University

[Music] Stanford University welcome back to hacking consciousness 10 today should be very exciting because we will have a life EEG demonstration by dr. Fred Travis who came all the way here it's quite a pleasure to have him here he's director of as you can see the brain consciousness and cognition Center in Fairfield Iowa nirisha University where he also got his master's and PhD and for the past twenty three years he's been studying brain waves he's been studying them so extensively that he's published over 70 papers on them and what he's found is that there's a pattern between what your frontal lobe coherence is and your performance in any field of activity whether it's sports whether it's business etc and I'm sure you all love to talk more about it so please welcome dr. Fred Travis thanks for coming thank you very much Michael I'd like to have a very interactive discussion so I'm going to ask people if you will if you come down maybe to the first six rows or so and that way when you ask a question I can hear it and other people can hear it so we kind to gather a lot of the discussion that's happened at earlier lectures specifically around higher states of consciousness and we'll be looking at this relative to how the brain develops how experience changes the brain and I'm putting it in the larger context if we create our reality and I'm suggesting this not in the New Age Grand eloquence way where they say it in hushed tones but in terms of the actual mechanics of the nerves of the veins just how your brain is actually functioning so I'm going to talk for 10 or 15 minutes and then going to open up for questions and talk again in questions so first how do we process whenever we see anything right now information comes in and it takes two paths it's called the low road in the high road the low road goes to the most primitive part of the brain the brainstem and there an automatic response what this does it's structures a mood in the mind it could be positive it could be negative it could be approach it could be avoidance when four o'clock came around and you said oh yeah hacking consciousness that brought some feeling in the mind should I go or should I go to the ocean and I forgot to the woods there was some feeling that came at the same time what happens is a high road is where you actually process the information that's what you actually see what's out here but notice what you see isn't really what's there what you see is a combination of this emotional tone plus what actually is there now this has very real consequences especially in in-group out-group type situations they looked at sports fans soccer and baseball these were New York Yankees and Red Sox fans they had him in a scanner they showed them a video and in the video someone got hurt now if it was a person that was on your team the part of your brain as you see that became active as a part of the brain which is empathy which is approach B behavior trying to help the situation experience what the other person is experiencing if it was someone on the other team the part of your brain that became active was your pleasure circuit and that structures the mood in the mind and that's when you have the feeling coming in and while you might say well this might be true for fanatic baseball players think of how you feel when you're going down 101 when everyone else is trying to get into the city and they're completely blocked up and you're going 65 think of how you feel you're happy you're good this has also real ramifications racial profiling they took policemen they showed them a video of a youth pulling something from his pocket and half the time it was an iPod half the time it was a gun and they asked the police officer to respond as quickly as possible because they have to and then they had one other variable and that was half the time as a youth of color half the time it was white youth when it was a youth of color as you see here eighty-five percent of the time the policeman saw a gun again this is low road high road and that's their reality that's what really was there 85% of the time if it was a white youth they saw an iPod so this is what we're doing we don't get a neutral picture of the world and take it into consciousness but we're actually creating it we're creating our reality and based on what we think is there is how we respond now before we go on to talk about the brain other questions on this now Michael did you tell everyone they have to ask one question before they get to leave yes sir I have no microphone very practical questions so let's go on because there's low road in high road it's not it's not built in it's not like a computer when we get a computer we open up the case we pull out the computer we push the on button and then it bangs on and away you go the brains not like that when you're born your brain is unassembled imagine buying a computer reaching into the box and pulling out a bag of components that's the baby's brain at Birth they don't see the world they don't hear the world is a is a sequence of sounds they don't see a head in the neck and the shoulders they don't see mama and daddy it's all disconnected sounds sights and what happens is the brain is developing specifically over the first 20 years of life what this is looking at is connections between the neurons the brain cells the x-axis here is this is time in years this is the y-axis is a number of connections between brain cells we see it goes up and between 0 and 3 it goes up so fast the child is making 24 million new connections every minute so when your baby is sitting there lying there you know what are they doing they're making 24 million connections every minute and that's how they're able to do what they're do in three years they get to control and move the body they get to parse the sounds into individual words I get to attach meaning to the words now why is this happening because of if the brain is the interface between inner and outer that's how we're understanding the world they have all these possible connections already made and then they remain high from about three to ten and then there's a process of pruning and this is happening in all parts of the brain and also in primates as well as humans and each of these grafts are these are years they start at age ten and we see a decrease this pruning process going on now you may think that's too bad you know how come we're losing connections you know is it something bad can we do something to keep connections does anyone here a gardener yeah what happens when you prune your bushes sir yeah yeah it's a little bit counterintuitive you're cutting off branches but what you're doing is you're cutting off the branches that are not very fruitful and that's allowing the intelligent and the nourishment of the plant to go to those areas that are strong this is what's happening in your brain it's very much like pruning analogy you're eliminating the connections you have not used during those first ten years now there's physical space there's also energy to allow the areas that you have used to get bigger what you're doing in this whole process between 10 and 20 is it so you're freeing the individual from the stone and if you have children I have three daughters and up to age 10 life is just bliss they like to walk with Daddy they hold Danny's hand at 10 they only hold my hand if none of their classmates are around it's 16 they don't even walk with me hey Dad I'm fine go ahead 20 feet behind and what is happening is as the connections are dropping off their sense of self is beginning to emerge now something else is happening that's the connections between the brain cells is called myelination this is an output fiber here and it actually gets wrapped in this fatty layer and what it does is it speeds up the flow of the action potential about 20 times so this is also going on it goes on at different rates in different brain areas the first part is the sensory system in the motor system so the child is born they don't they can't move their body they can't see the world the first thing that happens is they get to deal with the outside concrete world in about six months of age the brain has been reorganized so they can see the world the ears by two years have organized so you can hear sounds now before that time again the information goes slowly you may remember playing catch with their son or daughter when they're three or four they stand like this the ball hits their chest it bounces on the floor and then it closed their arms and you say keep your eye on the ball well they can actually compute the ball in space as well as your eye at that age but the connection leaves the brain that goes down the neck goes the spinal cord goes out to the arm it takes a long time because those connections are not myelinated similar things happening between the connections between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain they myelinate between age seven and age ten at that time the child can begin to think more quickly they can begin to have one specific idea left hemisphere relative to the larger idea right hemisphere the next area is the core of the brain is called a reticular activating system that helps the child keep their attention at a very set level if you go into a group of third graders their attention is just all over the place some people are hyper some people are really down in the fifth or sixth grade they're able to have attention at a more controlled level now the last parts of the brain to Milan aid are the connections between the rest of the brain in the front of the brain front of the brain is important I put CEO here that's not a neuroscience term it's chief executive officer that's what this part of your brain does it gets information from all other parts of the brain puts it together and sends it back out connections between the rest of the brain and this part of the brain starts and myelinated h-12 continue through age 25 now this is getting into the mass media here's a cartoon a scientific studies show that the decision-making parts of the human brain aren't fully developed until the age of 25 there's two teenagers they have their skateboard there this is the next slide in the cartoon so then we have an excuse for this we create our reality if your brain circuits are telling you one thing that's your reality and for teenagers the whole rest of their brain is completely developed they can see a situation they can come up with a plan it's their plan they're very passionate they want to do it the ability to see the big picture isn't there and that's why teenagers especially 14 15 year old boys had the stereotype of making rash decisions and just think of yourself at that age then around 18 or 19 they begin to settle down now they're into college but even between college freshman and senior there's a huge difference this is showing the changes between basically high school and college the changes are primarily with the front of the brain the ability to see the big picture the ability to compute consequences so we create our reality as your brain is changing so the reality what you think is there is constantly changing we're also creating the low road response we're actually programming the low road response but this is happening more through experience questions up to this point let's move to the second point neuroplasticity your brain is a river and not Iraq 70% of your brain connections change every day so you're going to leave here at 6 and the world's going to be a different place but actually the world's going to be the same place but we've considered some ideas here there'll be some discussion here there be different connections here what you'll be doing is how you see the world to be changing there's a how fairy tales end now they live happily ever after never happens with the brain from your first breath to your last breath everything you're doing is dynamically changing the brain and this is this is new well it's 15 years 20 years now but it's completely galvanized neuroscience because what this means is about your decisions you can decide your brain connections this is work done by Michael Moore's Enoch Michaels at UC San Francisco he's the one who's done most of the research that has really brought this to the fore what he did in this he took age of chimpanzees and he touched their fingertips and he looked to see how the brain was functioning how the brain was reacting we actually have a body map up here in your brain so when you touch your fingers your hand your arm you trace out this distorted figure up in your brain so there's a very hardwired known relationship between the brain and the fingers and the research all he did is he touched the fingertips with a vibrator for 20 minutes a day for about three months and then he asked now how does the brain respond when we touch the fingertips can you see what's happened yeah it's bigger now it's not as though it's growing you know after a while I just don't have any more room I can't take that next class so that is there were the brains growing but what's happening is we're allocating a hundred billion processors differently moment by moment depending on what we put our attention on so those of you who have been to the Ayurvedic consultants and they've taken your pulse and they've told you these incredible things but what's happened is they've been taking thousands and thousands of pulses and they've actually used more of their brain the process what's coming through their fingertips they are actually able to detect more information let me just show you how much the brain changes this is from a zebrafish this is the cell body here this is the output fiber these are the branches are the dendrites the input fibers in a dot you see here's a synapse that's where another cell is talking to this cell and they're going to show you consecutive one-minute frames and notice how this changes so it's how the dendrites are moving in space now it's zooming in notice how they're jumping jumping out notice how these dots are dramatically changing this is minute by minute so when you're sitting in class you're actually changing your brain functioning to take in the information and a good professor will repeat at two or three or four times and what that does it helps to make those connections more strong here's a real-life example these are law students who studied for their law exam versus those law students who did not do any extra work this is looking at myelination so myelination is the white matter it makes information go more quickly it's blue if it's higher and what we see is many connections with the frontal areas of the brain have grown just by adding additional focus so college is changing your brain there should be a little disclaimer when you sign up to come to Stanford and say this college education will change your brain because that's what it's doing and it's dependent on where your decisions go it's going to be art or computer science or management or literature or whatever you be doing let's just look at some other examples of experience changes the brain this is looking top-down back part of the brain this is where the visual system is and this is what's active when your or I are reading a book but what happens if you're blind if no information is going from your eyes to the back part of your brain does it just sit there no this is a blind person reading Braille this is a part of the brain that they use notice the part of the brain that we use for vision they're using for touch this is the plasticity of the human brain by the way it takes about a year for this to happen they've looked at people who have lost their sight and they've seen how long has it taken them to take information in through their fingertips and it takes about a year but it happens the brain is a river and not Iraq we're creating our reality with each experience we're creating different circuits which are then determining how we see the next point in time now this also has the other side of the coin and that is stress stress affects brain functioning they the way that they operationalize stress is how many times have you heard guns being shot someone being beaten beaten up getting stabbed etc from never tooth more than three times and then they put them into four quartiles and you see the more stress that a person has been under the lower is their measured IQ also the lower is their reading what's also found is under stress the frontal areas of the brain get physically smaller just living in a big city versus rural living has its effect urban was 100,000 people or more rural was 10,000 or less so mood disorders anxiety the amygdala the amygdala is our survival signal so if you're fighting traffic if you're fighting time if there's noise the amygdala is just permanently high and this leads to a long time brain changes in the brain now just before I finish this part on neural plasticity I want to just distinguish stress from challenge because some of you might be feeling I need stress to get going you know I don't unless I have that pressure I don't really start to do anything think what you're talking about is challenge under challenge what happens is the core of the brain the brainstem activates the whole brain under challenge the sensory systems are firing more quickly the CEO of the brain passes information through more quickly we know the feeling of challenge we have lots of creative ideas lots of mental energy lots of physical energy what happens when the challenge gets too high and we say it's too much the brain actually down shifts and there's a stress response the CEO is turned off the amygdala the fear center is turned on we have a sympathetic fight-or-flight response and now you've gone from lots of creative ideas to no creative solutions at all from lots of mental and physical energy to just no energy at all so the challenge for today's world is to raise this challenge stress line and this is something which I think meditation contributes towards to allow us to take on more challenge without it becoming stress questions yes sir myelination yeah how can it happen quickly it's it is myelination but it's also the connections between brain cells the number and when we looked at the zebrafish and you saw the branches moving in the actual dots coming and going that's more of what they see for the 70% of the brain changing the myelination is fat and it needs it in your diet so if you're doing if if you're malnourished what happens is that part of the part of the brain breaks down and it leads to cognitive problems because information starts going more slowly yes ma'am [Music] only the output fiber the axon and what it's the way it works is when the axon isn't coated with fat the action potential creates a change sequential each point on the axon it takes a long time when it's myelinated of course that keeps water-soluble things away so the changes only happen between the myelin nodes and so it actually it jumps from point to point and that speeds up the whole process yes ma'am please developing mere 20 is there any scientific research which says which explains why you're allowed to drive at 16 and something that connected to how their love not to brain development but notice you can't rent a car until you're 25 the actuaries looked at incidents of accidents and founds that when it asymptotes off they often most states now have graduated driving laws and also as parents you want to institute things like first your kid drives for a year with nobody else in the car because the frontal lobes primarily are taking care of distraction and there was a video on YouTube of these teenagers driving and there was a camera in the back they went through red lights they ran stop signs and they're just talking having a grand old time so first thing is not to have the distractions and then to people in cars and so on because what you're watching remember experience changes the brain you want them to develop the driving habits and unfortunately only way to do it is by driving but you have to make sure they're in there's a safe structured situation so that if they do make a mistake it's not too terrible and this understanding of the brain is coming into especially into law situations not that someone who's a teenager should not be blamable for what they do but they're more adaptable the brain is still changing and so rehabilitation actually helped and so that should be more in line of what you sentence the person - that's good other questions yes sir I don't believe not to brain not my amazing sympathy even parasympathetic which well sympathetic parasympathetic when you get out into the periphery so then the myelin is can or cannot be there but definitely the brain it's there the thing about the sympathetic nervous system is it leaves the brain and it goes out just outside the spinal cord and there's groups of neurons that called ganglia and these are not myelinated but then where they go to the target organ that is myelinated it's actually a different type of myelin that's called the Schwann cell the fat that myelination is a way for the body to speed up to optimize its functioning at birth you don't have it because that would deprive the mother of all the fat that is in her and so that's why kids like to eat butter and we told our girls don't eat the butter right from the plate and say we're taking so they did take it they put it on their plate and then they eat it and they crave these omegas because they're their body is adding so much fat so much Milan to the all parts of the body there's another question yes crystal yes and it's so yes it has been shown I don't know about any programs I did go to the FBI for three consecutive years for conferences to see how spiritual experiences could help reduce the toxic effects of their day-to-day experience because experience changes the brain and of what you see is crime and abuse and negativity that's what's being structured in your brain it's like being fed a constant stream of nightly news and you think that's the reality of the world I mean it isn't so there's a realization of this amongst law enforcement because they have bulletproof vests and it keeps the bullets from coming in but the toxic effects on the person's spirit needs to be dealt with as well other questions yes sir identity restructure 70% every day great question how do you maintain a consistent sense of identity the way it's done is through knot structure above function so you in what I mean by that is you're having continual activation primarily from the brainstem up to the cortex and back to the excuse me the thalamus up to the cortex back to the thalamus and that can be maintained even if some individual cells are dropping out here we have the thalamus and there's two parallel roads that go through the town and talked about low road and high road these are two other roads and that is the information comes in from outside and that gives us content so that's me that's the power point that goes up to the brain and this is one level of how the brain is changing its the actual ongoing experience is changing that but there's also wakefulness coming up through the spinal cord up to the thalamus and what comes from outside goes to a specific nuclei what comes from down below goes to it's distributed throughout the hotel illness and what this does is it creates loops with the cortex but this is maintaining wakefulness so these two things are coming together content and wakefulness the wakefulness is your sense of self and that wakefulness is it's a distributed functioning of throughout the thalamus to all parts of the cortex which is just maintaining being awake you know how you feel at 9:00 or 10:00 or 11:00 you just find that you're less able to at night you're less able to deal with the world that's because the wakefulness circuits are slowing down even though the content circuit is remaining the same so what is changing as we're growing up is the character of these wakefulness circuits are changing from a five year old to a ten year old to 15 to a 20 and as that is happening your sense of self is becoming deeper and deeper and that's actually the next point that we're speaking about is just growth of higher states of consciousness growth of higher sense of self other that was a very good question other questions let's go to higher states of consciousness the point I'd like to make is their inherent in the human nervous system you don't have to bring anything from the outside in all you need are the proper experiences to build the circuits to support and let's take a step back when we were growing up from sensorimotor when we were kids from three or four to five or 10 language is an important tool for developing abstract thinking Vygotsky ties development very much into language that we internalize the culture and the way we internalize a culture is through language and what it's doing is it's creating a symbolic form that frees us from the object but now what happens is we're identified with we're caught in the symbolic form we're caught in our thoughts our categories we're caught in our paradigms and so to continue to grow we need something which will transcend that Charles Alexander a very systemic thinker tied Piaget stages of cognitive development with different levels of functioning but what we have is when the child is 2 or 3 or 4 their sense of self is very much in terms of their senses and that's where their primary locus of functioning is everything is in terms of objects and if you're if you're taking care of a two or three-year-old and they're unhappy you give them something new and their unhappiness disappears because whatever is on the screen is is where their awareness is and this is correlating with just the increasing of connections and then between 3 and 7 the next level is pre operational pre operational the child doesn't really yet have operational thinking but what they have is the beginning of it and they beacon can begin to take a symbol and realize a symbol has real reality to it as well you give a child and at this age a box with a present and they look at the present throw it out and play with the box because the box they can conceive it as being many different things this is this period this is a time of having maximum number of connections now as the right and left part of the brain begin to myelin 8 we see the emergence of the next Piaget stage concrete operations now you can think about external objects and you realize that objects maintain their identity as they change shape to get from sensory motor to here you need language you need to be able have the symbol for an object as they continue to grow prefrontal connections we come up with PJ's formal operations and former operations you can think about thinking and for Piaget this is the highest form of human development highest form of adult development I mean it really leaves a lot out and I mean what's happening in former operations is you get stuck in your ideas and you get academics very angry at each other because of their ideas you get wars because of ideas we're stuck in thoughts we're stuck in concept we're stuck in our symbolic representation so what Charlotte then Alexander says is we need to transcend language this is this quote I'll let you read it to continue development to allow the self to continue to expand you need to transcend thought you need to transcend concepts that's why he talked about Transcendental Meditation I like to just talk about different meditations to see why he might have said this meditations fit into at least three categories focus attention open monitoring automatic self-transcending focus attention is as it sounds it's voluntary focusing on a specific object open monitoring is nonreactive monitoring or dispassionate observation of the content of experience from moment to moment and focus attention you keep one thing in the lens of experience and hope in monitoring you just allow everything that passed through experience these two have been delineated by Anton Lutz to describe meditations in the Buddhist tradition Jonathan Sharon I added this third category automatic self transcending and this is any meditation that transcends the steps of meditation meditations in the first two category keep you involved in thinking automatic self transcending you start with thinking and you just go to being wakefulness you transcend thought transcend content so once we had these descriptions we asked what does neural psychology say happens in the brain in terms of EEG when you're focusing this is what you see is called gamma goes up and down 20 to 50 times a second when you're just following internal processing you'll see theta - this is it here primarily in the front of the brain when the attention is turned within and you're just awake alert this is a brainwave you see this is time here this is a second it's called alpha one goes up and down eight to ten times per second and notice it's over the whole brain as the mind is settling down to the state of just wakefulness without thought so we see the brain is settling down to a state which is seen over the whole brain so then we asked what are the meditations that report gamma and may include Zen compassion compassion Chi Kong theta is mindfulness Kriya yoga alpha-1 Transcendental Meditation also a 45-year case study of a chi kong master it's an interesting collection here when this person first started his Chi Kong practice it was gamma because it's a controlled process of moving energy through the body after 45 years once he started the practice he reported this alpha one EEG and it's bringing out how automaticity can be gained automaticity is something psychology has talked about for 30 45 years any controlled process can become automatic with lots of practice an automatic just means that it goes by itself doesn't take additional resources so we see where this Chi Kong master going through a very focused controlled process over and over was able to achieve this value of automatic self-transcending to go beyond thought Transcendental Meditation it's built into the process so it happens very quickly in the first week or so so then we asked what's happening in neural imaging so we look to add this is concentration meditation top-down PET scan large areas of the brain are active because you're using lots of resources this is a mindfulness meditation compared to math brain is looking that way this is the part of the brain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus it's your attention switcher and so if you're moving your attention from experience to experience that's the part of the brain that you would use Transcendental Meditation what we find is an interesting pattern where the front of the brain the CEO of the brain the part of the brain that's putting everything together there's increased blood flow the core of the brain the brain stem that's breath rate heart rate activation primitive response blood flow is lower we talk about this experience is restful alertness this is the rest for the mind in the body this is the alertness and again experience changes the brain so the value of whatever meditation you're doing is bringing that state into daily activity okay this blue means red means increase blue means decrease here they showed the increase with this yellow color here it's red is again high it's the opposite and blue is low so it's it's confusing isn't it I didn't notice that before this is usually what they do with pet this is typically what they do with the MRI to understand these different meditations meditations and focus attention and open monitoring teach you to construct mental tools to better cope with life be a meaning mindful so you have some space between you and whatever experience you're in so you're able to have some perspective on it it's almost like you're being used to being taught how to use a knife in a different way your mind's like a tool meditation is an automatic self transcending rather than teaching you how to use a knife in a different way you stop using the knife and you're sharpening it and then when you take the sharp knife back to activity everything is improved everything is enhanced and I think that's why in this set of mile did a meta-analysis of 23 psychological variables and just the effect size the x-axis here is effect size what's the magnitude of the effect was just much greater from transcending during TM versus other meditations I'm going to stop and take questions and then just go a little bit more deeply into this experience of pure consciousness as it relates to higher states yes yeah more statements about constructing mental tools versus changing mental state I see yeah yeah so coping with content meaning he's using a cognitive tool to deal with a specific situation and so it may be in compassion meditation where you develop a very positive strong experience of inner compassion so that's there when you're dealing with outer activity that's versus changing mental state is you're actually changing what is the field upon which the content is falling what is the the state upon which ongoing experience is falling it's very much as we were talking about these different sensory motor and so on what is a sense of self upon which the experience is falling and depending and that will depend upon how you see the world how you respond to the world good yes ma'am has it always been that way during our evolution and for ten years while our brains were still it's a very very real question I don't know the answer to it has it always been that way I think it has they this whole change of increase in decrease in connections and seen in primates as well as in humans and so it seems like it's what this nervous system is built to do to allow us to shape it to fit into whatever the situation is that we're in and why did why does it take that long full full common sense to come to the brain and maybe that it allowed people to try things that an adult would would never try that's foolish you don't want to do that teenager tries it and it might work so it may have been Nature's Way to continue to allow change and new thinking to come into the process yes wisdom like I know I've heard CEOs say you know we don't know what the hell you you're 60 is this wisdom yes what what what I'm going to be showing you is thickness of the brain if it's blue or purple it's very thick if it's red it's very thin and it's going to be over starts at age seven and what you're seeing here is these are all sensory areas what you see here is this is where you create a concrete picture of the world now the brain is looking at you notice how the frontal areas remain thick throughout life so this is 27 37 47 57 67 77 87 so this is temporal area this is details of experience that's very thin suggesting that that's not being used much in processing this is touch this is cross-modal matching this is where you take the outside information and create a picture but notice the input to that is is diminished this is the CEO so what is happening is as you get older when you look at the world you're seeing it less and less as an objective fragmented isolated picture what you're seeing it more and more is in terms of its symbolic content you see it more in terms of the flow whether this happened 10 years ago this happened 30 years ago you have that whole picture of time and you can see how each event is part of the whole and so I think that's why this this idea of wisdom comes out is because how you're experiencing the world has fundamentally changed good other questions let's continue to go down the road of higher states so the process of transcending to understand it we need to understand that the brain the mind is as a vertical dimension surface level is conscious thoughts at the depth is where we have intuition creative ideas what we're doing with Transcendental Meditation is taking a specific thought experience it's earlier in earlier levels of development what's happening is the content is becoming less primary in the underlying field of consciousness we call per consciousness of becoming more primary the underlying field of wakefulness which is putting things together is becoming more the major content of experience I asked students to write their descriptions of these experiences and I asked them their deepest experiences during TM practice and I told them I didn't want to hear jargon I wanted to hear what it felt like what is it like to eat a strawberry you know tell me what it feels like then we did something called content analysis content analysis you take phrases and you see what's the idea that they encode and then you see how many times those phrases are used and these are the three phrases we saw most this experience is characterized by the absence of time space and body sense absence of time absence of space absence of body sense now these three matrices is what gives meaning to waking the experience we're having right now is time it's early evening it's in this space and Jordan Hall and there's some body sense you're experiencing it from where you're sitting now notice this experience of trans central consciousness the very framework of waking state has disappeared let's just see the relationship of this experience of pure consciousness with waking sleeping and dreaming uses 2x2 grid sense of self yes or no content yes or no what would be this one here where there's no sense of self no thoughts sleep very good you know you've had a good night's sleep and you've lost awareness unconscious how about here sense of self and thoughts waking yeah that's what we're in right now yes you hope there's content coming in but there's you who is experienced and reflecting on it like to suggest that this is dreaming well you have these vivid dream images typically the self is completely lost you're just identified with that that leaves this SEL sense of self but no thoughts now if you ask any psychologists there say that's not possible that's what William James said he says I don't see an abiding sense of self all I see is changing streams of consciousness changing content psychologists net solace we're saying how can you be aware of yourself if you're not aware of some aspect of your individuality the fact that you're thinking or experiencing and so on well meditation practice gives this experience transcendental consciousness and notice it's qualitatively different than the other four also we looked at brain waves this is a more full representation again the x-axis is time each line is a different part of the brain this is a second this is the Alpha activity goes up one two three four five six seven eight nine times that's that eight to 10 Hertz outfit notice it's over the whole brain what we're going to do now is Lewis you can come up okay now I'll record them so you can actually see them later yeah about a month ago it's a two-stage three to two or a month ago so what we'll do is we'll look under the hood and we'll look at the reasons brain waves from is just sitting her eyes are open and then we'll have her start TM practice and then we look more globally about what scene so these first two lines is electrical activity coming from this sensor in the sensor this one's a ground this line here is looking at something called coherence remember when you're looking at all the electrical activity attended to be going up and down together mathematically you can calculate the rise in the fall of each wave and you ask how is that related and that gives us coherence so coherence is I have to look at the people coherence goes down here is zero up here to one and notice it's highly variable and this is a healthy brain what is happening is when 50 people are looking at you you're seeing them you're processing them some friends some stranger's colors memories all these things are going on and we're seeing that coherence is just going up and down and up and down these are a blinks here you can blink your eyes Louise now this isn't actually coming from the brain it's the eye muscles the eyelids when they go up they're shear off some electrons and it makes that shape and this is this is very fast so here's a second you see this is going up about twenty or thirty times per second this is a typical brainwave when the brains awake and you're processing the world yeah predominately gamma-gamma be going up 22:50 so when you get it pretty much like a solid line that's gamma sure you close your eyes and keep your mind active it's okay you can open your eyes it's good so notice even with the eyes closed this is continuing to happen because when your eyes are closed you're still thinking you're gonna record this so we have it you're still thinking you're still classic saying what is it going to look like etc so now we'll have Lewis close our eyes Louise and she'll start her TM practice thank you very so now you can stop meditating sit easily for a minute and then open your eyes good thank you so notice during when the TM practice when she it went up and then it still oscillates but it went up to the top and stay for a length of time it went down it went down there she started thinking about different things that went back up to the top again what you're seeing is the brain is very easily moving into a state at state of restful alertness it's different brain waves which are being activated there thank you very much any questions for Louise what it is is whenever there's an eye blink it stops calculating the coherence because you notice the coherence is one between them so that's what happens so this is it's waiting for the that's right I asked her to look at the crowd comes you look at the crowd and then it can actually calculate the EPG that was great there we go yes now the reason we'll help you take the sensors off thank you is it possible to see a summary of the of what you just reported I don't have the ability to do that but I do have some data which we can give an example of what it would look like excellent so what we were doing with Louise is just looking at these two sensors here and that was just for demo for actually research we use thirty-two sensors and this is looking at brain waves during TM practice a dot is where you record brainwaves there's a line between dots if those parts of the brain are working together 70 percent or more you notice with TM there's very little coherence in the gamma and beta region because it's not a process of effort or control the coherence is in this alpha one is primarily in the front of the brain but also extending over the whole brain and the reason you wanted to add that is to bring it into activity this experience I suggest is and you've heard before is a fourth state of consciousness what's the criteria of a higher state it should be subjective distinct from waking sleeping and dreaming and we saw that yes that this sense of self no thoughts it's a state which is unlike what you would see in waking sleeping and dreaming it's not a altered state of waking it's a completely different subjective experience greater breath or sense of self the self is less in terms of outside activity and your experience and your social fame more in terms of inner wakefulness and it's physiologically distinct every scene but by going back and forth and back and forth we should be able to integrate trans mental consciousness with the other states and that would look like we could turn this into a cube and turn it on its corner it would look like this let me do that again that's so much fun and this is called the fifth state Cosmic Consciousness now that state of pure consciousness of inner silence which is just there for a few moments during meditation is there 24/7 it's completely underlying waking sleeping and dreaming and let's see how that grows this is looking at EEG of some of meditating for four months so this would be Louise or someone meditating for eight years in each case TM is on the left eyes open is on the right in each case it's the front center back of the brain again this is time each line is a different part of the brain notice how the EEG patterns during TM are very similar this is eight years this is four months this is bringing out that idea of how we transcend with TM is effortless we use a natural tendency of the mind remember we talked about automaticity the automaticity is built-in but look at the eyes open here's our gamma EEG the person's thinking here's someone eyes open eight-years tian you see what's happened four months eight years what do you notice for months eight years how do you get it when you're at the soda fountain having us ice cream sundae and talking about this talk how would you describe this what's happened yes ma'am this is TM eyes are closed transcending that going down the bubble diagram this is eyes open inactivity reading books talking with people setec TM states and eyes open states are more similar than person whose yeah good observation this is experience changes the brain this is neuroplasticity you move the brain back and forth you go to that state of pure consciousness to develop those brain circuits so that it can become part of your daily life and notice the Alpha activity in the back and the center in the front is there where the person is waking while the person is in class that's when you need that state that's when you need that breath of awareness that inner silence that restful alertness and that gives you the basis for being most successful and what you're doing now for the scientists in the group this is individual data this is the group data so these are less than one year eight years solid line his eyes open cross hatch bars is TN this is cross sectional data so we look longitudinally we had people coming to Marshall University of Management and we looked at their EEG this is actually ice close and during a task and then we looked at them at 2 6 and 12 months they learned TM here they've been meditating for 2 months 6 months 12 months and then we had them do a task each time and this is what we found TM EEG coherence went up during TM compared to eyes closed but notice it's 6 and 12 months it's at the same high level what continues to grow is during the day just because transcending isn't involving individual attention effort ability it's using the natural tendency of the mind and once we are able to allow nature to take its course it's going to give to the same effect the benefit is being seen in activity so let's look at the experience of cosmic consciousness when you have inner unboundedness all the time this is the experience of someone during sleep I'll let you read it this person is a high school teacher at the high school associated with em um they able to come up this very concrete picture of soda and fizzing on the soda activity it's like fizzing on the soda there's activity there so there's something to be experienced when he goes to sleep the fizzing just settles down the soda remains that underlying basis that continuum that he talks about is just there the whole time these are what the brain waves look like this is sleep brain waves these are people having this experience of inner wakefulness this is a second here this is Delta activity it's the brain waves when the body is repairing itself notice what we have here is there's a lot of these large brain waves but also this looks more ragged just going up and down and indeed you can see there's this alpha activity riding on this Delta activity here's a delta wave one cycle per second then there's a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 in alpha wave so you question earlier what's happening here the Delta is actually produced in the cortex itself and layers 2 3 & 5 and that's where sleep is repairing itself the Alpha is just a constant communication between the core of the brain and the cortex it's that level of wakefulness which is now self-sustaining these are group data on not meditating there's a group of short-term TM practitioners and those people reporting cosmic consciousness and this is looking at how much of this alpha activity that we see here is there during sleep notice that it's already growing in the people who have been meditating an average of 4 years growth towards cosmic consciousness is not a 0 1 but it's a gradual unfolding it's like a flower opening up and it opens up based on experience the experiences you have during meditation during the day this is someone's description of their experience of and during the day and we looked at what the brainwave is like we gave them tasks 17 people not practicing any meditation 17 practicing TM not reporting higher states 17 people reporting Cosmic Consciousness and the differences we found were in the front of the brain and it was coherence across all broadband across all frequency bands so the frequency of transcending was there was the frequency of thinking and acting overall there was much more alpha activity alpha is more of a self referral frequency faster brain waves are more object referral and how their brain actually started to respond in a task was different the blue is the nam meditating the yellows of people reporting higher states you notice it's a mirror image a simple task is you know what you have to do is the same response each time the choice task is you get some information but you have to wait for the second piece of information we see the people reporting higher states are more balanced they're not starting to respond until actually they have sufficient information so we added those up and these differentiated the groups quite significantly this idea of brain integration we call it because it involves coherence and these other measures high brain integration correlates with positive things more reasoning is higher emotional stability and so on the way to understand this is this is a correlation coefficient if you square it it's the amount of variance that this predicts of the other so if your square point six six it comes out to be about 40% so 40% of the change in more reasoning could be predicted by their level of brain integration again the brain is the interface between inner and outer and as the brain is is a more integrated platform it's able to give a much broader integrated picture of the world so I have two more slides this is taking this question out of meditation and into the world what is brain integration really mean well we thought what it really means is that you're in contact with your inner self so you should be in contact with inner resources so you should be more successful so we looked at athletes these are 66 athletes 33 a world class they finished in the top 10 for 3 consecutive years in Olympic Games world games compared to control athletes and they had higher levels of brain integration this isn't a meditation study this is more human success human performance study managers same thing top level managers 18 years CEO the company had grown higher levels of brain integration we're on a roll we said let's look at classical musician so he looked at professional and amatuer classical musicians and they both have high levels of brain integration and we looked into the literature and it's found that as a child if you learn music your brain patterns are different as an adult because experience changes the brain you not only focus on numbers and words but you're focusing on sounds music integrating your sound with other sounds also this division it was a flawed design because an amateur musician is not a less effective a less developed musician they just don't make their money for music now I put short-term in long term TM here not to suggest that if you practice TM you're going to be a great musician great manager and a great athlete but do you suggest that experience changes the brain transcending thought is developing a specific style of brain function that's going to help you be more successful wherever you turn your attention a z-score is the mean divided by standard deviation so it's taking a number and putting it in standard deviation units yeah exactly and we do that because coherence power and cnv are different units so to be able to put them together you change into z-scores so Cosmic Consciousness is also this is a fifth state of consciousness subjectively it's distinct from other states that experience to the transcendent is now there along with waking sleeping and dreaming if I was greater breath or sense of self the self is now completely outside of change outside of time physiologically distinct like conclusion higher states appears to be the natural extension of development that's been going on since birth we landed in this world and we have this body we can't even control it the first thing we do is we control matter we control the body we're able to see objects and then we start transcending and then we can have some desire what we would like it to be and then we transcend a little bit more and we can think about the world outside of ourselves we transcend a little bit more and we can think about thoughts this process if you get the necessary experience continues until CC well now who you are the self of who you are or something which is full unchanging outside of time and space is full while all of activity is just going on by itself thank you very much that's my email if you have any questions any questions yes sir those details of practice are yes the question is about the details of practice of Tim process it does involve a sound a mantra the mantras that we use in TM don't have meaning and we just use their sound value and what you learn is how to appreciate that sound at earlier levels now it's not something that can be taught by words or instructions like do this do that do this put your feet on the floor feel the chair against your back you can't do that because that's keeping the mind engaged and localized processes so what you do when you learn TM it's it's almost like I taught my girls how to ride a bike I didn't give my girls that PowerPoint lecture we went down to the field they got in the bike I took this seat in the shoulder the handlebars that really fast and they got the feel of it this is how you learn Transcendental Meditation it's always from a trained teacher they give you an instruction you have an innocent experience and give you another instruction another innocent experience just like riding on the bike you get a feel of what it's like to let the mind settle down why will the mind settle down because this level of pure consciousness is free of boundaries it's creative its dynamic its what the mind wants once it knows it's there it goes there by itself so that's the process of learning it my own experience it's it's just great it gives a buffer a different place to live the world rather than lost and change in activity what's going on outside there's something inside which is very stable so things happen on the outside but they're changing you might make money you might lose money you might get an a on a paper you might get a C on the paper these things are always changing but something inside is not changing and that becomes a very stable basis and what it does is it remember the challenge stress threshold the only way you feel you can't make it is if you feel that yourself is going to be threatened by the outcome when you realize that who you are is this feel that's outside of time and space there's nothing that can give you that feeling that feeling of worry or anxiety yes you may be more or less successful but the self is always going to be there it's always going to be full so what that does it changes life from having serious obstacles to just a series of challenges it's almost you go into the day thinking what's going to happen today because you know you can deal with it you know that you have the ability to come up with a creative solution you have the mental energy the physical energy and the whole process is life flowing through time anyways and this is just what you're experiencing now so you get a whole different orientation I finally got a whole different orientation to what what it means to to be alive other questions is it possible for us to acquire the EEG system that you have as a way to test our ability to TM successfully or not very good will this to channel thank you the question was can the two channel EEG machine that we used here is it available yes you can buy it it's it's third-party can you use it to address your growth through TM practice then I don't think it will work and the reason is is because what's occurring is over the whole brain and what you have is an electrical field over the whole brain okay where is this there you go what we have is this electrical field over the whole brain if you have two sensors here you're not really seeing the dynamics of what's happening and so to actually look at change over time you need more sensors yeah bottom line to see eyes closed TM we can say oh yeah so this was happening during eyes open this happened eyes closed this happened TM we see that yes there's something different there and that was just to give you a sensory experience it yes there's something different but to really plot growth sixteen channels get other questions yes sir I have not I have been involved in two conferences with 19 other meditation researchers across the gambit chi kong zen mindfulness contemplative compassion meditation and we're beginning to talk beginning to pull results I haven't looked systematically at other meditations I just use what's in the literature good and behind yes was a yellow line down at the bottom during during wakefulness increases for the 12-month period but I'm wondering what happened meditation and visit they intersect and so you see the this quality of coherence is seen you know somewhere down the line that's Cosmic Consciousness and that's when you have inner stability enter wholeness along with outer activity at the same time so have we gotten longer than a year no it was hard enough to do this between six and twelve months is summer vacation yes we haven't done other research simply because we don't have enough people that are in those in those categories and the research that I showed you here the 17 people reporting higher states three or four of them I also asked them to describe themselves and three or four of them seem to be having experiences of the next state refined cosmic consciousness where the one lady said she knew the chair nosov a chair just she was so intimate with the objects around her and another woman said that she looks out and see this beautiful divine intelligence reflected back at her through the trees and the sky and the birds and it's herself seems to be a very rich description of unity consciousness where everything is seemed to be a fluctuation as underlying wholeness so there was a few people but there weren't enough to actually document them this was done in 2000 we're now redoing this we have 42 people now and with that the experiences are becoming richer we might be able to separate them out would you other questions one more minute he's gonna have the last question yes ma'am rest of the person's life are you talking about these peak experiences that a tiny excellent question TC is comes and goes it's a peak experiences when Maslow was talking about peak experiences he was looking at people spontaneously having this state because what is this state it's just the state of the mind just a state of the source of thought and it can happen it's there it's there right now it's there right now and that's why you can hear me and and you have all these ideas you have wakefulness it's coming from that field but if our brain doesn't have the ability to maintain unbounded silence and focus activity if you can't maintain that range we tend to just get whatever is a focus activity level but what can happen spontaneously the thoughts the vales can part and we experience pure consciousness and so on so yes this is momentary and it comes and goes but cosmic consciousness is something which is permanent now this is 24/7 and it's an interesting point because if experience changes the brain could you lose that you know could something happen to the brain and so the question you are asking originally now what is supporting and unbounded inner experience I'd like to think that it wouldn't happen simply because you'd be making right decisions and so you would be always having those experiences to strengthen the circuits of higher states I'm going to end now because I believe we ended six and so you've been a very attentive audience I'm happy to be here to answer any further questions thank you very much for more please visit us at stanford.edu

Channel: Raja Felix Kaegi

Views: 194,899

Rating: 4.8553972 out of 5

Keywords: Fred Travis, Hacking Consciousness, Stanford University, Maharishi, Transcendental Meditation, consciousness, brain, Mind

Id: UlxGBZifk6k

Length: 79min 47sec (4787 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 03 2014