There should be more research about spiritual awakening.
The median thing you hear from talk therapy patients isn’t “my entire phenomenal experience has been reorganized for the better.” Isn’t that what we should be spending a significant amount of our time studying?
A takeway from the
@MAPS
talk: many ppl will be "graduating" from MDMA or psilocybin therapy and IMO there don't seem to be solid long term integration programs in place. This is a big gap & looks to me like an opportunity for the wider psychedelic community to help these ppl
A very exciting weekend spent collecting pilot data with
@LabLazar
. We got several hours worth of fMRI of jhana meditation and attention tasks in the scanner (plus a few more speculative events that I won't mention until I see the data). Stay tuned for results!
What a delight to talk with
@OortCloudAtlas
about the relationship between psychedelics, neuroscience, and meditation in my life and practice! And, yes, for those who are curious, I do eventually explain what an Alembic is.
Stephen is doing something actually new in a zone that hasn't changed in literally thousands of years. This is sure to be an interesting experience for those curious about the jhanas
First Jhourney retreat designed for novices happening in Sept.
We’re engineers, not dharma teachers; if that excites you, we’d love to have you — spots are limited.
This retreat will focus on low-tech innovations; we’ll track success rates and layer on tech over time.
I got to have a super fun and in depth discussion with
@robertwrighter
on
@NonzeroPods
, including getting into the deep end of meditation and altered states. I'm happy to share it today!
Psychedelics, Meditation, and the Brain
I'm delighted to be launching
@BerkeleyAlembic
in early 2022 with
@erik_davis
and Michael Taft - we've been colaborating for years and are taking the next step to bring our vision into the world - with your help!
I'm very happy to announce that we're opening a new meditation center in the new year. It's in Berkeley, & is called "The Alembic.” Meditation in several traditions, yoga, movement, community and cultural events, and more. We’ll even be doing some neuroscience research there. 1/4
I've had fun collecting data before, but this week was next level. Thanks to
@nicberries
for helping make it all happen, and to all the meditators who came thru Alembic Labs this week - stay tuned for results!
Cessations have been a well-known phenomenon in meditation circles for a long time, and I'm delighted to be part of the team bringing them into the realm of academic discussion.
(I'm also delighted that Sasha let me include footnotes in this piece)
New paper out! It's always so cool to see a rare dataset applied in a new way. My original project investigated meditation via attention & prediction updating - cheers to Vaibhav for his insight that these meditators have spent an unusually long time in silence, too.
I looked at the data already collected by the awesome
@kathryndevaney
on super-experienced meditators who had sat through 100s of days of silence across their lifetime. The connectivity of DMN (center of imagination) and Language Network got more decoupled in meditators.
** Such ** great fun talking with
@robertwrighter
on
@NonzeroPods
! We discuss how to start or re-start a meditation practice, Bob's coffee + meditation hack, how practice can orient us to AI, a little bit about the neuroscience of enlightenment, and more
Do you have a solid jhana practice? Are you in the bay? Want us to slap an EEG on your head and see what your brain is up to?
Come see
@zerfas33
and me at the BYO Jhana Practice non-residental retreat at Alembic, next weekend!
Apply here:
@TylerAlterman
I have LOTS of thoughts on this. To start: IMO a core piece should be "You can just do things" - have them try a lot of things with minimal skin in the game to see what lights them up. I've done so much random nonsense that wasn't The Thing but helped me get closer to The Thing
Fantastic talk by Gül Dölen @
#horizonsny22
showing that the psychedelic-precipitated critical period reopening (IN MICE) scales with the duration of state alteration by the drug - ketamine is the shortest up to Ibogane without an end point they've found (>4 wks) [1/2]
Hey
@juliahartz
- I've been emailing Eventbrite multiple times per day every single day for the past 2 weeks to get the landing page for our meditation center
@BerkeleyAlembic
reinstated. 1st the support team told me the problem was fixed (it is not) & now they're ignorning me.
At
@BerkeleyAlembic
we just got gorgeous new artwork installed by
@gabrielschama
. Layers & layers of laser-cut, super-intricate plywood. Delicious. IRL is even more beautiful.
I'm getting a new experiement running, and I'd love to talk with someone who's a real expert at EEG study design - I'm still wrapping my K-Space wandering, voxel-clustering, fMRI-brain around what to do with all these wiggly lines. If this is you, let's chat!
Really excited to be a part of, as far as I know, the first ever panel about meditation at
@CNSmtg
! And yes, if you're wondering, I do meditate before all of my talks.
Very cool pre-pub findings presented by Gabby Agin-Liebes from
@UCSF
on psilocybin-assisted therapy for alchohol use disorder: qualitative analysis shows self-compassion as the key driver of the psilocybin effects.
#horizonsny22
So much fun talking with Tasshin about neuroscientific research, meditation, sangha, the Berkeley Alembic, awakening, my early days doing neurohistology (i.e. breaking lab equipment), current fMRI experiments, and more.
@visakanv
Today: submitting a proposal to do a jhana meditation fMRI study
This month: starting a big project that gets me closer to my goal of opening a spirituality research & retreat center
This year: cultivating balance; tending my own garden while maintaining efficacy in the world
Jhourney's looking for some volunteers in the Bay Area interested in being our first guinea pigs next week for our earliest attempts at jhana-accelerating biofeedback.
Will require ~4 hours. We'll pull out everything we've got to try and teach you the jhanas.
She goes on to highlight how we know from neuroscience (in birds) that *social deprivation* reopens critical periods. Gül proposes that spiritual traditions that have silent retreats could be leveraging this deprivation effect. This was def one of the best talks today! [2/2]
Started my Thanksgiving day shedding tears of gratitude in our Vast Sky Mind practice discussion section. I'm so extraordinarily grateful for meditation, and to the timeless community of beings tending the flame and sharing the gifts of their practice with the world 🌌🙇♀️
We are looking for a part time director of operations to help our community grow and thrive. Check out details and application instructions, and please share with other interested folks! Details here:
ANNOUNCING: Alembic is hiring. Join us as our very first event coordinator and help make this whole thing happen. Details and application instructions are on our website.
I can't express what an incredible honor it is to host the WVC at
@BerkeleyAlembic
. I'm so grateful to every single one of these women for the work they've done to make my own road easier. Hope to see some of you here:
ANNOUNCING: A metta dance party, with
@tasshinfogleman
!
This event brings together loving-kindness meditation (or mettā) and dance. We will generate as much love as possible, and have tons of fun doing it! Guided metta followed by dance. Details & reg:
This is a companion piece to the academic article that
@RubenLaukkonen
& team released earlier this year, and is hopefully more accessable to a wide audience, academic & non-academic alike. I want to thank
@dave_vago
for comments on this, too!
This has been my private twitter account since 2008.
Today I'm switching to public because I believe everyone should watch this guided meditation & discussion from Eve Ekman, PhD (of the
@GreaterGoodSC
) recorded with
@SFDC_Folsom
a few weeks ago.
If I met you at
@tpotvibecamp
and you're interested in helping with / totally running the
@BerkeleyAlembic
twitter account please comment here or send me a DM!
Hey
@juliahartz
- I've been emailing Eventbrite multiple times per day every single day for the past 2 weeks to get the landing page for our meditation center
@BerkeleyAlembic
reinstated. 1st the support team told me the problem was fixed (it is not) & now they're ignorning me.
@FromPhDtoLife
I used to use like 4 different complementary tools but now I've moved my entire brain into
@RoamResearch
- can't say enough good things about it, it's improved everything I do
M4 is now accepting abstracts for the poster session!
M4 is a scientific conference bringing together an interdisciplinary group of individuals to inspire mindfulness research using advanced cognitive neuroscience tools and technology.
Poster submission deadline is July 31st
Explaining the Alembic Labs Meetup (coming soon!) to
@markhalko
:
Me: "So it's less like a journal club and more like Science by the Pint ... but wihout the beer. Have you been to one of those?"
Mark: "Our lives are very different and I think you know that"
That retreat is really something special, glad you're enjoying it over there. The recommendation comes from
@OortCloudAtlas
by proxy - he's got all of us working our way through it over here too 📚🌌🕹️
Listening to Rob Burbea's Jhana retreat talks, and just.. wow. He speaks with such awe and poetic beauty about the Jhanas. Thanks
@kathryndevaney
and
@original_chills
for encouraging the listen.
Welcome to twitter & thanks for putting me over 1K followers,
@LotusUndergrnd
! I'm looking forward to having your whimsical and incisive Buddhist wisdom on this platform ☂️💎🌈
@TomerUllman
Ha! There's a saying that floats around in meditation world: "You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour."
Just returned from the Respond Retreat at the Maple Monastic Academy. Magical place and community. Deep dialogos with community leaders and creators of ecologies of practices. So much good work done towards building a viable community of communities. Thank you!
"How will the world know what's happening in your clinic?"
@Prof_HeidiAllen
urges ketamine clinics and other psychedelic therapists to collect and share data with the research community. Couldn't agree more!
#horizonsny22
"Impossible is a mantra and a mindset. If we change our attitude we change what's possible... the power of our mind is to create a reality that is different than the reality that we are experiencing today" -Christina Figueres on climate & stubborn optimism at
@mindandlife
#SRI
Oh hey! I'll be teaching remote tonight via zoom, and in-person next week in the new SFDC space on 24th.
If you know the history of the SF Dharma Collective, you can imagine this is a pretty big moment for me - I'm looking forward to seeing you there.
Kati Devaney is the guest teacher for tonight's HYBRID Bay Area Pragmatic Dharma Sangha at 7:30pm
Class meets both in our space, 2929 24th Street, and online
⠀⠀
Join the sangha in discussion of
#meditation
and the interplay between
#dharma
and
#psychology
In 2022, I'm moving my neuroscience research program to UC Berkeley, where I'll continue using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of meditation expertise. Going forward, I'll be able to communicate "hot off the press" research findings directly to the Alembic community.
Thanks for the writeup
@berkeleyside
!
With a shoutout to the WVC this weekend, a hat tip to
@GabrielSchama
for his amazing art, and a great pic of Chandra Easton leading a kirtan, we love how this article points at the Alembic practice community. -Kati
Due to its marginalized and misunderstood status, salvia divinorum has long been for many of us just a head shop curiosity, with little more guidance surrounding it than “smoke this, it’s crazy.” But this sacred plant opens up powerful and deeply subtle dimensions.
@SteMartiniani
My thesis (fMRI of meditators paying attention) was spurred by an insight I had in my early 20s that what I was calling "me" was the aggregated total of everything I'd ever paid attention to.
These two quotes were the closest I could get to capturing that insight.
I'm teaching in-person tonight at
@DharmaClctive
!
From 7:30 - 9pm we'll have a ~40 minute sit followed by discussion and Q & A, and then we'll go for tacos As Is Tradition. Hope to see you there.
@cekaur
@TylerAlterman
@Meaningness
@_awbery_
That's a pic I took of the fMRI scanner I was using when I was living in Delhi. In the states imaging suites are very sterile, medical looking environments. This was a private imaging center in Delhi that was donating scan time to our project (sight restoration in kids)
By popular demand, streaming tickets for
@erik_davis
' upcoming series: Zen, American-Style are now available. With a streaming ticket, you'll receive an Ultra Secret Private Link to watch live or re-watch in your preferred zone, time or otherwise.
@MillerLabMIT
Leslie was an incredible mentor for me. Amongst many other stories: I accepted a PhD offer from Brown, but had the opportunity to conduct research in Belgium instead. I didn't know what to do & she told me "life happens, they'll understand." She changed my whole career.
@RCarhartHarris
@MAPS
Even better! I'm sure everything we've learned about sangha and other community models could really help these folks as they re-acclimate
Our work underlines the importance of careful control group selection in meditation research and adds to a growing literature that long-term meditation practice can contribute to mental wellness via effective suppressive control over the ruminative DMN, both on & off the cushion.
BUT their brains looked different - the meditators activated the Dorsal Attention Network and suppressed the Default Mode Network more than the non-meditators both while they were paying attention *and* at rest
@uberstuber
Ha! If you're serious I really want to get it to guide a meditation. I have a bunch of transcripts of meditations from
@DharmaClctive
that we can work from - DM me if you want to play around with that.
We got an overwhelming response! We'll return to this Twitter thread and DM's when looking for more volunteers in the future.
Thanks for supporting the cause :)
Katherine's journey through medical institutions, meditation halls, psychedelic ceremonies and crematoria is not for the faint of heart ♥️ - we'll see you there.
@connerdelights
@uberstuber
@stephen_zerfas
There haven't been any PET studies of jhana, which is what we'd need to really get at the question of neurotransmitters directly. The Hagerty fMRI study saw nucleus accumbus activity, which implicates dopamine release. Leigh speculates on all of that here:
Just published in
#PeerJ
- Lightness induction enhancements and limitations at low frequency modulations across a variety of stimulus contexts
#neuroscience
#ophthalmology
My
#CNS2020
poster is a wrap! The virtual session has pros and cons and I missed the in-person interactions. I did however, get to realize a long wished for conference ability and attended a talk without leaving my poster.
Maya's a delightful colleague and Western Mass is one of my favorite places on earth - highly recommend this lab for anyone looking for a lab manager position!
🚨Job Alert🚨
I'm hiring a lab manager for the Minds in Development Lab at Smith College!
We'll be doing fun science focused on how the environment shapes brain development in young children! In gorgeous Western MA!
RT widely please! DM or email with qs
@TylerAlterman
@iamapostol
In my experience, it's nested and iterative. Taking action in the world brings up psychological material that the inner work never would have reached. The inner work opens new vistas in the world. Happening all the time at different scales & arc lengths.
I happen to know that there's ONE spot left in this retreat. A unique combo of three days of meditaiton followed by three days of relating. I know these folks and it's sure to be an interesting time
When I started studying meditation,
@ProfSomers
& I weren't sure if we'd get funding or participants, but we tried anyway (it worked!). Relatedly,
#CNS2020
now has a "Meditation Research" chat because I was pretty sure I didn't have admin permissions but tried anyway (it worked!)
@CorriveauNick
If by "subjects" you mean "voxels" then yes. Otherwise... Reminds me of a reviewer who told us, on a task based comparative vision study with human n = 12, macaque n = 2, to run 8 more macaques. Sure. I'll get back to you in 7 years.