Mindblowing insight I had

[Carl-Richard]

I had an insight when reading about memory consolidation and PTSD treatment methods, and how it relates to the progression of one's meditation ability and the decrease in self-referential thoughts.

It has been established that memories exist in a fragile state during recall in a process called "reconsolidation", which means that memories that are being recalled are always prone to being changed or even erased. This has been used to treat people with PTSD by giving them a drug that blocks the stress response (not MDMA in this case, but the mechanism is much the same) and having them recall their traumatic experience. When they recall their memory without experiencing the stressful emotional component, the memory will be reconsolidated in this new emotional context, effectively changing it, which has been shown to reduce the severity of their flashbacks.

Now, what does this have to do with meditation? Well, I've meditated for probably 1000 hours and I've been able to notice a progression over time and how it unfolds. What I'm claiming is that the process of recycling thoughts in meditation is similar to the stress-blocking drug treatment for PTSD. This is because you're essentially doing a technique that induces a calm state while continuously experiencing the same thoughts over and over and eventually changing the emotional relationship to each thought.

"But meditation doesn't make me calm at all?". Well, naturally the source of calm goes hand-in-hand with low self-referential thoughts (psychological calm), but even if the number of thoughts were to stay the same, the technique is also inherently calming on a physiological level (be it focusing on the breath, releasing bodily tensions etc.). The technique usually works to decrease thoughts in the moment, but the question is how exactly does it do this more successfully over time? More specifically, are there any potential mechanistic explanations other than the simplistic "practice makes perfect"? This is my claim.

How exactly does it work? Well, when you're in this calm state, you will have some thoughts entering your mind (obviously). These thoughts are synonymous with a spontaneous recall of a certain memory, and this memory will have to be reconsolidated in this calmer setting. Even if you feel like you don't have a calm mind, your thoughts will always be accompanied by an underlying sense of physiological calm, and the accompanying emotion will therefore be dampened or recontextualized to at least a tiny degree. It might not be true in every moment, but on average, this effect will make itself prominent and starts having an impact over time. 

When you do this consistently (over days, weeks, months and years), you can start to see how this can radically change how your mind processes memories, thoughts, emotions etc. What also happens as the thoughts start to feel less threatening, you'll be more able to grapple with the actual problems behind why they even feel threatening in the first place, and eventually the thoughts will have no reason to come back. This "fixing" aspect is in many ways completely automatic (sometimes the excess emotional load is the only problem), but it might also involve taking actions in the external world or just seeing things from a new perspective.

For sure, the thoughts themselves can still cause you to feel a certain way, but as your practice deepens, you'll attain the ability to simply witness the thoughts without reacting to them the same way, and the reconsolidation effect will at this point start to increase exponentially. You'll notice how being mentally calm, clear and present are all synonymous with eachother, and how a silent mind and a healthy body are two sides of the same coin.

This I believe is at least one mechanism behind how self-referential thoughts seem to decrease as you keep meditating (or at least one way to conceptualize it). Meditation is essentially a type of long-format self-therapy. This can also serve as motivation for people who feel they're struggling with an unruly mind and believe they're not seeing any results. According to this theory, just the mere action of consistently putting yourself in a state free of mental distractions, that is just marginally calmer compared to your normal state, will slowly but surely give you the upper hand given consistent daily practice.

Edited March 22, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

(Bumping and changing the title to increase the value in the market of attention ).

[PureRogueQ]

I was thinking about it too,  to make it possible you would have to be able to change event in positive light , actually believing that this event was not bad, you just misinterpreted it, there must be reason for it.

For sure you need to be at least at peace when you do it, or it will not work.

Not sure if emotions alone will be enough to make huge impact, as there is lot of thought story, but you never know, that is why testing things is important. 

Another thing is that memory is huge network and I see problem of making this as  permanent change that can't be undone in some bad event,

would really have to think trough this problem, is it really possible to erase bad memory to the point where you can't recall that it was bad under any circumstance.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2021 by PureRogueQ

[LastThursday]

Interesting observation.

You can do this process on steroids (not actual steroids). The way is to strongly associate a physical sensation to a calm meditative state. For example say get into deep meditation and touch your left earlobe. Do this for several sessions. After a while you'll get the Pavlovian response to touching your left earlobe - it will immediately put you into a calm meditative state. Hypnotists use this technique all the time, to "induce" you quickly.

Next, you induce the state by touching your earlobe and keeping it there, and immediately start mentally reliving the traumatic memory. This will reprogram the emotional response to the memory, as you mentioned about reconsolidation. Don't hold the earlobe for too long however or it could get associated with the traumatic memory. Each time through this exercise should greatly and permanently change the emotional response to the memory.

The anchors (i.e. earlobe touching) can be physical, words, sounds, smells or visualisation or combination of those. Often it's best that someone else anchors the state, which leaves you free to concentrate on just the trauma. The anchored states can be any positive or afirming emotion: confidence, calmness, excitement, emptiness etc.

[Carl-Richard]

@LastThursday Ah that's so cool! So essentially it's classical conditioning combined with reconsolidation. I have always played around with mental tricks like this in some form or another. For example, when I struggled with substance addiction, I would reprogram my initial response to addictive thoughts (which I would describe as anguish and hopelessness) with optimism and motivation. I took the mental pain as a sign of mental progress, much like the pain from lifting weights is a sign of physical progress. I like the quote "pain is weakness leaving your body" 

In this case, the mechanism is classical conditioning (one thought being associated with another), but meditation was a significant part of me being able to catch these thoughts and not let them overwhelm me so I could actually employ the technique. Addiction is especially tricky because it's like a personality in the way that it expresses itself consistently across different situations. It's actually very fitting to call it demonic possession, because it's a very intelligent personality with sneaky manipulation tactics, clever arguments, rationalizations and emotional harassment.

The addictive thoughts will be associated with a vast collection of different outlets, and it takes time to eliminate them all. When you're no longer maintaining the rewarding stimuli through these outlets, the "addiction network" is progressively weakened, but this requires a lot of determination, clever techniques, luck and ideally a transcendent goal as a driving force (in my case meditation itself). I say luck because I also found a particular strain of spirituality which said "drugs no-no!" (although I always knew it was interfering with my meditation) . There are of course parallells between substance addiction and addiction to thoughts/experiences/sensations in general, which is why so many people find it so hard to keep a consistent spiritual practice.

[Nahm]

@Carl-Richard

Great stuff. ?? 

[Guest EmptyVase]

That was a very insightful read, thank you for sharing. We really are an amazing drug factory, huh? 

[Carl-Richard]

26 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@Carl-Richard

Great stuff. ?? 

 

12 minutes ago, EmptyVase said:

That was a very insightful read, thank you for sharing. We really are an amazing drug factory, huh? 

Thank you!  For sure.

Edited March 22, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[allislove]

?, great read, thank you 

"Meditate. Live purely. Be quiet. Do your work with mastery. Like the moon, come out from behind the clouds! Shine." Buddha

[PureRogueQ]

14 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

@LastThursday Ah that's so cool! So essentially it's classical conditioning combined with reconsolidation. I have always played around with mental tricks like this in some form or another. For example, when I struggled with substance addiction, I would reprogram my initial response to addictive thoughts (which I would describe as anguish and hopelessness) with optimism and motivation. I took the mental pain as a sign of mental progress, much like the pain from lifting weights is a sign of physical progress. I like the quote "pain is weakness leaving your body" 

In this case, the mechanism is classical conditioning (one thought being associated with another), but meditation was a significant part of me being able to catch these thoughts and not let them overwhelm me so I could actually employ the technique. Addiction is especially tricky because it's like a personality in the way that it expresses itself consistently across different situations. It's actually very fitting to call it demonic possession, because it's a very intelligent personality with sneaky manipulation tactics, clever arguments, rationalizations and emotional harassment.

The addictive thoughts will be associated with a vast collection of different outlets, and it takes time to eliminate them all. When you're no longer maintaining the rewarding stimuli through these outlets, the "addiction network" is progressively weakened, but this requires a lot of determination, clever techniques, luck and ideally a transcendent goal as a driving force (in my case meditation itself). I say luck because I also found a particular strain of spirituality which said "drugs no-no!" (although I always knew it was interfering with my meditation) . There are of course parallells between substance addiction and addiction to thoughts/experiences/sensations in general, which is why so many people find it so hard to keep a consistent spiritual practice.

I had some interesting findings in a way related to this, it is more to do with present moment then past memory healing, but maybe can be used for it too, about why and how mental tricks work and why it seems so counterintuitive to change our experience because they often seem to not want to go our way, which is actually just misunderstanding, missteps on our own part.

I hope to gather at least basic explanation in few days and see if you can use it. 

 

Edited March 23, 2021 by PureRogueQ

[LastThursday]

16 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

So essentially it's classical conditioning combined with reconsolidation.

Exactly. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is essentially this. 

All thought and memory is neutral, but emotions get tied to those memories as a case of conditioning. Often, the conditioning is constantly reinforced by sheer mental repetition. The bell rings, and the emotions kick in. It's stimulus/response. It's a tragedy that people are unable to disengage stimulus (memory, thought) from response (traumatic emotion). NLP tries to do this with via a process of interference, one stimulus, two responses. The premise being that the nervous system or subconscious will prefer a strongly positive stimulus over a negative one. It's different than other therapies in that it doesn't reinforce the original conditioning by constantly replaying the memory (i.e. talking therapies), it's not lost in content and interpretation.

[artcastle]

Insightful. Thank you.

[Carl-Richard]

On 22.3.2021 at 11:47 PM, allislove said:

?, great read, thank you 

"Meditate. Live purely. Be quiet. Do your work with mastery. Like the moon, come out from behind the clouds! Shine." Buddha

❤️

 

On 23.3.2021 at 10:34 AM, PureRogueQ said:

I hope to gather at least basic explanation in few days and see if you can use it. 

Nice  

 

On 23.3.2021 at 1:10 PM, LastThursday said:

Exactly. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is essentially this. 

All thought and memory is neutral, but emotions get tied to those memories as a case of conditioning. Often, the conditioning is constantly reinforced by sheer mental repetition. The bell rings, and the emotions kick in. It's stimulus/response. It's a tragedy that people are unable to disengage stimulus (memory, thought) from response (traumatic emotion). NLP tries to do this with via a process of interference, one stimulus, two responses. The premise being that the nervous system or subconscious will prefer a strongly positive stimulus over a negative one. It's different than other therapies in that it doesn't reinforce the original conditioning by constantly replaying the memory (i.e. talking therapies), it's not lost in content and interpretation.

Who would've thought that reductionistic behaviorist concepts like stimulus/response could be used for something this holistic 

 

On 23.3.2021 at 2:20 PM, artcastle said:

Insightful. Thank you.

Back at ya 

[LastThursday]

12 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Who would've thought that reductionistic behaviorist concepts like stimulus/response could be used for something this holistic 

Indeed, isn't that the definition of holistic? 

[Carl-Richard]

Sleep expert talks about one of the benefits of sleep as an "emotional first aid" and uses exactly the same theory as I've done here: memory reconsolidation and stress-reduction. The level of noradrenaline in the brain drops to zero during dreams, which allows you to reexperience and reconsolidate memories from the waking state in a softer emotional context.

(the stress-reducing drug I was referring to earlier also works on the adrenergic system; Tom mentions MDMA as well):

10:38 - 17:10

 

[Inva]

@Carl-Richard

On 21/03/2021 at 8:27 AM, Carl-Richard said:

Meditation is essentially a type of long-format self-therapy. 

exactly what I was just saying to someone keep it up!  

[Surfingthewave]

@Carl-Richard Great post, thank you. 

Meditation is therapy indeed but you need the balls to sit on the cushion everyday. 

I wonder if meditation brought about this insight? 

? 

[Carl-Richard]

7 hours ago, Surfingthewave said:

I wonder if meditation brought about this insight? 

? 

Just reading and God ?