Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

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Daniel M Ingram, modified 10 Years ago at 5/12/13 5:55 PM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/12/13 5:55 PM

Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 3268 Join Date: 4/20/09 Recent Posts
This is a great, quick, to-the-point TEDx talk by Dr Jud Brewer, a friend, researcher, and meditator at Yale.

I got to play around in his fMRI in 2011 as part of the research that was the background to that talk, and it was probably the most fun I had that whole year. Not sure what that says about my life, except that meditation geekery is awesome and hopefully will change the world.

Enjoy,

Daniel
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Bruno Loff, modified 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 3:07 PM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 3:07 PM

RE: Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 1094 Join Date: 8/30/09 Recent Posts
Very nice!
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PP, modified 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 6:47 PM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 6:47 PM

RE: Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 376 Join Date: 3/21/12 Recent Posts
Yep!!! Shinzen Young says that the future of meditation coaching will be Artificial Intelligence. I can see now how this can be possible, at least as a kick start.

May be it would be interesting to scan two yogis doing ping-pong noting, to see in the screen how the interact and sync.
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Daniel M Ingram, modified 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 9:19 PM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 9:19 PM

RE: Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 3268 Join Date: 4/20/09 Recent Posts
Imagine them trying to hear each other over the horrendous noise of the fMRIs! Even with your headphones and earplugs on: wow, they are loud!

Imagine trying to get two into the same room without the magnetic fields causing them to either crash into each other or fly apart!

Still, it is an interesting thought, and his new experiment, which I am going to get to play around in next week up at Yale, involves EEGs: much more portable, very quiet, and less dangerous!

I will let you all know how that goes.
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Simon T, modified 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 10:20 PM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/14/13 10:19 PM

RE: Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 383 Join Date: 9/13/11 Recent Posts
To what extend flow relate to the enlightenment state? Isn't flow a somewhat "absorbed" (concentrated?) state of mind, in the sense that someone get to narrow the field of attention? Many examples of flow are a situation where someone handle a task he trained himself very well at doing it mixed with an high adrenaline level. In the case of intellectual task, someone get fascinated by a subject and immerse into it. The feeling that time fly might seems better than boredom but how much aware have we been during that time?

From the wikipedia article on flow:


Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi identify the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow. [3]

intense and focused concentration on the present moment
merging of action and awareness
a loss of reflective self-consciousness
a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
a distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered
experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
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Daniel M Ingram, modified 10 Years ago at 5/15/13 12:26 AM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/15/13 12:26 AM

RE: Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 3268 Join Date: 4/20/09 Recent Posts
I actually had the same concern and called Jud to talk with him about that today but he hasn't called me back yet.

I see parallels and divergences between flow and realization.
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katy steger,thru11615 with thanks, modified 10 Years ago at 5/15/13 3:54 PM
Created 10 Years ago at 5/15/13 3:41 PM

RE: Great TEDx Talk by Jud Brewer on Meditation, fMRIs and Flow

Posts: 1740 Join Date: 10/1/11 Recent Posts
To what extend flow relate to the enlightenment state?
Yeah. If fMRIs keep up in this area I think there is going to be lots of room across traditions and secularists (?) to discuss states of being based on neurological profiles***.

Then there is a flow state that I think comes uniquely with speed/accelerated motion and personal control (holding onto bik for example): such as what he's describing in mountain biking, what Ayrton Senna described in racing, what people feel in doing an activity to the point they are not thinking about it, nor anything else. Their mind is synced with the activity.

And this flow is not necessarily correlated to mental states of complete equanimity (which has flowish properties but lacks personal agency in my view-- but may in fact be just like the holding on to a bike more as a "Wow, this". I'm considering this now...) or may look very different on increasingly refined neurological measures...

More to your point, of levels of enlightenment experience: are there common signatures there between occasionally-released persons and always-released persons and under what conditions is that tested (e.g, the startle response).

To look five or ten years out with more of this research, one could kind of look at a teacher's life, environmental conditions, quality of being, and then very precisely train neurologically in that tradition--- or under that teacher's neurological profile (and will neurological mimicry mean having the same experience? Doubt it, but I don't know.


[edited]

***This area is already known to be a limited in metric in terms of does a brain "on violence" have unique signatures, and thus far many non-violent people can be show to have similar neurological profiles to persons convicted of violent crime. So I am just containing the scope of some of my own thoughts above, here.

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