Can technology speed up enlightenment? Brainstorm

I'd like to mainstream enlightenment/realization. Technology could help a lot if it can speed up or shortcut traditional practices. I cofounded Palo Alto Neuroscience to develop such technologies and protocols for using them. Currently, we are focusing on EEG Neurofeedback, as it can assist with meditation progress, and is rapidly becoming a consumer technology. If/when there are all day wearable EEGs, those can be used for mindfulness training and more.

Aside from the purely science/tech/development issues, there's the crucial question of where contemplative technologies fit in as part of an overall path of spiritual development. There is so much wisdom on this forum regarding spiritual development. I'm humbly asking for your help in having a bit of a brainstorm in this thread to generate potential approaches to this. The aim is to make the fruits of contemplative practice accessible and effective for a much broader audience (the whole world eventually). Enlightenment is a team sport

I'll seed the discussion by sharing a few approaches that seem promising to me. Please fire away with any critiques, and of course totally novel ideas are very welcome.

1. Get EEG neurocorrelates of meditative states, such as the jhanas, and help novices master them more rapidly by using neurofeedback and/or neurostimulation (tDCS/TMS/ultrasound)


2. Use pointing techniques (e.g. (neo)advaita, dzogchen/mahamudra, Headless Way) while hooked up to an EEG to get that individual's particular EEG signature if/when they pop out of ego. Use that signature to make a personalized neurofeedback signal that can be implemented on a wearable EEG for throughout-the-day practice, or just a typical EEG for learning to sink deeply into that state during focused sessions. This would be following a glimpses-->access-->abiding type path


3. Go for the biggest shortcut by getting EEG data on people pre/post a major opening or path attainment. Pool the data, and try to analyze group differences to distill the difference in EEG that a typical brain undergoes during spiritual development. Use neurofeedback to try to directly entrain this activity, in the hopes that it will make one "accident prone" towards that attainment.

Thanks for any feeedback!

Metta,
Winslow

Hi Chris,
Thanks for engaging on the topic.

Chris Marti wrote: One more thought -- is the assumption being made by folks in your area of endeavor that awakening is purely a mechanical process? What I mean by that is that pretty much anyone can awaken assuming they push the right neural buttons, and that pushing the right neural buttons is a biofeedback process of some sort that can be accomplished sans interpretation, teacher/student interaction, and so on? If so it appears to me thereby to be a content-less exercise (I was going to say meaning-less but that would be pejorative), and thus meaning is not a part of awakening unless that meaning is assigned and/or interpreted through neural feedback?

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here, but I'll do my best to take a stab at it. We are mostly operating under the assumption that awakening is completely due to changes within the brain. This wouldn't imply that awakening is meaning-less or content-less though, so I don't think that addresses your question.

From certain cases I know of, it seems that awakening can occur prior to any contextualization or content change, which will occur as a result of awakening. Three cases that come to mind off the top of my head are Suzanne Segal, Kiran "mystic girl in the city", and Byron Katie, all of whom had sudden - you could call them "accidental" - awakenings without having made much meaning/context around their prior practice/progress (or lack thereof). That's not to say that some meaning/content isn't useful in the process, however. We are definitely open to working on that level. If I'm not really addressing your query properly, then could you please clarify a bit further?

I would assume that awakening can be accomplished without a direct student-teacher interaction. That doesn't mean that we won't be using teachers, however. I think they are likely to help quite a bit.

We are really at quite an early stage in figuring this out and testing approaches. We will try many promising things and see what is sticking, and iterate based on those results.

Re: offering devices - Indeed, this would be a great place to do some early testing. However, we aren't intending to make any hardware, as our initial plan is to offer it on our (very expensive) hardware as a service. The consumer EEG market is rapidly developing, however, and we expect consumer tech (e.g. at 32 or 64 channels) to be available at ~ $1-2k in a few years. When our algorithms and consumer tech are both ready, I will certainly reach out here for interested testers.

For members of this forum who would like to be involved in on-site alpha testing in Palo Alto, drop me an email with "Alpha Tester" in the subject to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We expect to commence early tests in the next 6 months.

Re: "In other words, how do we know that EEG is measuring anything related to meditative progress and is an effective way to assist a meditator, or do we?"

I can't give ironclad evidence that that's the case. However the following evidence is pretty suggestive:

• EEG of meditators varies in characteristic ways based on experience - Peak frequency goes down, and midline theta goes up with experience. And these studies have been done with very low resolution EEG that's incapable of localizing sources in the 3D brain. Our hw is much more sophisticated, and can do that well.
• EEG during meditation is different. E.g. The jhana study of Leigh Brasington's as subject: downloads.hindawi.com/journals/np/2013/653572.pdf ; Jud Brewer's work on EEG in the Posterior Cingulate quieting during meditation.
• EEG Neurofeedback has some evidence that it can help with obtaining meditative states. E.g. Jud Brewer has also verified that his target works as neurofeedback to help people into meditative states, up to a point. Experts such as Daniel Ingram and Dan Brown have played with his system and verified its correlation with their subjective experience. James Hardt (founder of Biocybernaut) uses certain types of alpha training to put people into meditative states. I've used similar forms of alpha training, and it certainly helps me get to access concentration and lower jhanas more quickly.

Now of course we aim to study and induce awakening, not meditation. But to the extent that EEG characterizes meditative states, then it's plausible (and there's some evidence) that EEG neurofeedback can help people get into those states. To the extent that getting into certain meditative states can facilitate awakening, then EEG neurofeedback would be helping with that as well.

However, we don't want to confine our approach to the "meditation assistance" type. Going outside of that is largely uncharted territory, and we simply don't know what will be possible. There are many reasons to be optimistic, IMO, but other approaches remain totally unexplored and unproven. It's high time to investigate them.

I'm totally convinced that tech can help put people into states, and even help with obtaining skill and mastery over state changes. This would be useful in and of itself.

An open question for me is whether tech can help in any more direct way with insight/awakening per se. Say hypothetically that we had someone hooked up to an EEG when they had a sudden awakening. That would give us the before and after, for comparison, but also give us whatever is happening in the brain in the moment of awakening. It's not obvious to me whether or how that data might be used to lead another person directly to their own awakening (without any content / contextualization). We would certainly try it out though, if we had that data

Such data could also be combined with content. For example, the brain activity just prior to the aha moment could be used as a target state, and then exposure to insight-instigating techniques (e.g. direct pointing, self-inquiry, koans, teacher interaction, etc.) could be used in the hopes of creating a similar pop. An open question I would like to investigate is whether neuroplasticity-enhancing factors (e.g. BDNF, brain stims like tDCS, TMS, PEMF, etc) might also lower the activation energy required for a pop, increasing the odds.

Chris Marti wrote: But please consider the extent to which you might be making assumptions that are misleading.

It's extremely important for any potential pitfalls in our approach to be pointed out. Thank you, and anyone else for doing so.

Chris Marti wrote: I can't say that there is really any kind of correlation, let alone causation, between certain meditative states and awakening. The fact that there are so many viable spiritual practices that lead to awakening is illustrative, I think. They are not all meditation based. Self-inquiry is but one example. Psychedlics and trances are another.

We certainly aren't committed to a meditation-assistance path. That's just the most obvious way that neurofeedback technology could facilitate progress.

But also, the existence of other paths to awakening wouldn't imply that meditation doesn't correlate and isn't useful for awakening. Just that it's not necessary. There are many people who point to meditation as crucial for their awakening.

Chris Marti wrote: If you read through the meditation diaries of various awakened folks here and on the DhO you will find that what works for one person may not work for another, and another, and another, and while there are many similarities there are just as many differences. And meaning, as I mentioned earlier, seems to be a big part of the process - it does not appear to me to be a simple matter of anatomy and biology -- brain wiring. And that's all coming from me, a pretty dedicated scientific materialist!

Then we should make sure that our tech-assisted path includes practices and/or teacher interactions designed to facilitate meaning. Just to be clear, we certainly aren't projecting that we will be able to take any person off the street, put them into our black box, and produce an awakened version of that person in x amount of time. At first, we would simply hope to be able to help in some meaningful and quantifiable way with outcomes. It could be by helping some people (e.g. those for whom meditation development is an important ingredient) a lot, and others not at all, or by helping nearly everyone just a bit. The point at this stage is to start trying things that plausibly seem like they could help, and then to do proper science, take data, and statistically see which are in fact helping. And then iterate on the results. I have no idea how far this could proceed at this time, but I'm optimistic enough to find out.

Hi Chris,
I'm looking for critiques and opinions on any of the suggested approaches I made in the first post as well as novel ideas on how to combine tech with more traditional spiritual methods and paths. Basically brainstorming and stone-throwing