redgreenvines said:

Quote:

bradleycny said:This is off topic, but this thread is sort of all over the place and I wanted to ask your opinion about something since you seem to know about neuroscience. I have read about a study which shows that meditation builds up the cortex through widening blood vessels and increasing branching and connections: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8317

Do you venture that psychedelic usage does the same? I would think the effect is somewhat different since the mind is not necessarily practicing voluntary attention while under the influence.

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body building is the result of excercise
so too with brain building. I agree with your assessment that psychedelic and meditation will produce different changes, to different degrees.

meditation is founded upon excercise of attention; and some of the results of meditation involve change of mental state; some of these changes of mental state are like the layered states of dreams and psychedelics.

that is not to suggest the reverse is true. i.e. just because one of the possible results of meditation is simmilar to lsd, does not mean that other results will be simmilar, especially since the result we are talking about (growth of attention supportive tissue) is not dependent upon the mental state change (which in mediation is not a necessary result if it is done right, it is more of a side effect)

if that was unclear, just note that there is lots of difference between
coasting on a bike to get someplace, and
walking the same distance unaided.
more exercise.

What this does seem to help clarify, more than anything is that the prefrontal area of the brain is involved in meta-meta-processing i.e. that associative processes there are related to patterns and motifs arising from processing already occurring within the brain.

this is a layer above frontal cortex processing which is more like sifting through memory (i.e. the association or matching of motifs among sensation and vision (etc.) occuring right now in the moment, with those of experiences of the past now fixed in memory).

the frontal mental process is very reflexive to and dependent upon how much and what kind of sensory input is coming in, and how strong the existing mental associations to that are: Frontal processing is very much like the experience of watching a movie and having feelings...

the prefrontal mental process has more of a helmsman kind of orientation/role, and the main feed to it is not corporal sensation and corporal sensation related memory and motifs, but activity of the frontal mental process itself). Memory and motif in the prefrontal area relates to the stream of consciousness which is a meta layer to the stream of life, or bodyness.

Prefrontal processing is very much like the experience of watching yourself watching a movie and seeing the relation of feelings before they reflexively take hold (I never watch movies like this unless they are horrible...)

this bit of cerebral tissue (the prefrontal cortex) could be tagged "spiritual", and arguably anything of value in spiritual quests occurs here, and it occurs here repeatedly and grows, if it is excercised, thus becoming motif related to self awareness and conduct management.

people who are on "spiritual" quests may do some work or excercise in this area on psychedelics, but not everyone is like this, I would expect less than 5% of psychonauts fall into this group.

However all people on psychedelic will have some enhanced activity in the prefrontal area along with other enhanced activity. Many report OOBE sequences and various kinds of detatched processing or radical moments of integration and ephiphany without any previous meditation work. Epiphanies will include prefrontal activity with frontal and sensory areas as well and are very peak-ish.

So a minority would probably have simmilar tissue growth due to their work under the influence of lsd etc. In fact you could see a psychedelic drug's action in this process as analogous to anabolic steroids.

But what happens to users of anabolic steroids and growth hormones when they have no excercise program? (they get hugely fat right?!)

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