Finishing the Lojong series with applause--or maybe not?

 I think we humans are hard-wired to look for other people's approval, maybe especially those of us on social media. This is where the last slogan of Lojong, number 59, is interesting: it encourages us to "do not expect applause". 

Waiting for applause at the end of this variation at
Morlaix ballet camp 
Picture by Michel Le

The reason that social media is so addictive is that by posting something we can accumulate other people's approval in the form of likes and probably dopamine in a way that is much faster and easier than other ways of accumulating people's approval that require actions in the real world. 

There is obviously nothing wrong with seeking approval--it is actually quite adaptive and when it does not work, it is associated with mental disorders such as depression (where the reward and reward learning system are blunted) and addiction (where rewards other than the drug of addiction are blunted). Yet, if we rely only on other's approval for our happiness then we are in shady territory because we cannot control it. This is why I very much appreciate the Buddhist idea of focusing more on motivation than on outcome (including the outcome of approval): you can control your motivation but the outcome is mostly outside your control.  I think that's also what slogan 59 encourages us to do.

Maybe sitting meditation itself is an example of a practice not focused on doing, waiting for rewards, but rather on being. We are encouraged to actively notice how a certain way of being makes us feel, so slowly the being rather than doing becomes more rewarding. Once you have spent more time paying attention to your own internal landscape, it therefore also becomes easier to motivate yourself based on your intention and the process itself than the outcome. Nevertheless, it does require quite a lot of self-confidence to ignore other people's applause, but if you keep practising, bit by bit, your confidence grows, together with your stable happiness that comes from inside. A beautiful place to end this series! Maybe next time you are hoping for applause, you can ask yourself: "do I really need it?"

Exploring together-apart mind and reality in times of COVID-19

Last week I attended the European Mind and Life Summer Research Institute. I have been lucky enough to attend many such events over the course of my career, and it is safe to say they have shaped my career as a contemplative scientist. During these Summer Research Institutes, scientists and contemplatives get together to discuss about issues in the field of contemplative science, but also do a lot of contemplation themselves. Unsurprisingly, this year's edition took place online.

I was not sure how an online version of this event would work out, but I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of connection that I felt with the other attendees. This was achieved by some quite inventive meeting formats. Before the meeting itself, the faculty had recorded brief (20-30 min) lectures that you could watch and ask questions about. These questions were collected on a board that allowed for upvoting of your favorite questions. Participants who presented posters had submitted PDFs and 2-minute video presentations of their posters and all gotten a Slack channel to discuss these posters during the meeting. Every day of the meeting started with contemplative practices: a choice of meditation, and a choice between chi gong, yoga and juggling. I ended up mostly not following those but taking a ballet class instead. After that, the first session was a plenary meeting with the faculty in which they briefly recapped the essence of their talks, followed by a panel discussion, partly driven by the submitted questions. There was also a brief period in which we were put in breakout rooms to discuss possible questions to ask. I must confess that during most of these sessions I ended up instead just talking to the others about their fascinating work! In the afternoons, we then had breakout groups with the day's speakers in which we discussed a bit more deeply. Before that, we would often have a fun activity, for example answering a question with one word on mentimeter that then transformed into a word cloud. The afternoon ended by bringing everyone back together with reports from the breakout groups and more general discussion. As the week progressed, there were also more and more self-organized zoom meetings for discussions and chats. As usual, there was a much-needed silent meditation day in the middle of the week which also featured a teaching by Mingyur Rinpoche, who talked about his wandering retreat and meditation in general.

Now the contents of the meeting. We started the first day by talking about perception: how do we derive knowledge from the world? This questions was approached from neuroscientific, philosophical and contemplative directions. Michel Bitbol for example argued that our experience of the world is just the part we need, which is an optimal way to perceive the world, but we should remember that that is not reality. There were many discussions about how we continuously make up stories about the world, and then confuse them for reality. Yet even if science is just another story, Michel Bitbol argued that it is a very efficient way towards knowledge, for example in the case of a search for a COVID-19 vaccine.

The second day was dedicated to interoception and emotions. Holger Yeshe talked about how the Buddhist teachings give us tools to investigate where our suffering, and our negative emotions (which are the source of this suffering) come from. Micah Allen talked about interoception--the feeling of our body from the inside, and argued that many psychiatric disorders are accompanied by problems in interoception. There have been claims that meditation improves interoception, but the evidence for this is not unequivocal. He also argued that we need more replication in the field of meditation reserarch and called for a Many Labs experiment in this field. I fully agree, and I am working on a project to work towards that! On a more poetic note, Giovanna Colombetti argued that emotions are not a feeling of the body but a feeling through the body. A lot to think about!

Thursday was dedicated to embodying knowledge. All too often, we think that knowledge is just in our heads, but dancers will know that you can also know and investigate through the body--a perspective that was also shown by Asaf Bachrach and Hsuan-Hsiu Hung. Asaf Bachrach showed an intriguing experiment in which people were moving in virtual reality, where he found that people felt very calm, and he noticed that when people moved slowly, they felt more together than when moving quickly. Despite the wisdom there is to be found in movement, Guiseppe Pagnoni argued that by keeping body and mind still during meditation practice, you can detect changes in the body-mind complex with much greater precision, which affords you to be less enslaved in your habits.

The last day was dedicated to artificial intelligence. Luisa Damiano argued that in addition to the empirical cycle of scientific research, we need the synthetic cycle in which we simulate the world and explore the world in-silico. Father Tiso discussed how artificial intelligence allows us to appreciate the sphere of interconnected minds through the internet (as was indeed happening there and then during the summer research institute!). Venerable Aileen Barry summed up the Ai day very beautifully by arguing that behind every AI there is a human, and a motivation, and we should watch this motivation.

Altogether, the ESRI was a very rich and beautiful exploration of what it means to know, and what it means to connect as humans--through technology. My head was spinning by the end, and there was as always too little time to explore this richness in ideas, but it was definitely a beautiful experience. And now it is time to take that wonder into my own retreat.

Your brain on ballet

A few months ago I attended the lecture-performance "Dancing and the Brain" at Nationale Opera and Ballet in Amsterdam. I thought it was really cool to discuss how dancing affects our brain, and join lecture with dance demonstrations. Inspired by the lecture, here is my version of dancing and the brain, with an emphasis on ballet, the form of dance with which I have most personal experience.

Cortical representations of hand and foot in Meier et al (2016)

To understand how dancing affects the brain, we need to start with discussing what dancing really is in general, and then how ballet differs from that. In general, dancing can be defined as a combination of movement, often with music, often in the service of artistic expression and conveying a certain aesthetic experience (but sometimes also a social action). As such, dancing inevitably is a training of motor coordination, which is requires coordination between many brain areas, including the parietal and premotor cortex (Cross et al., 2009). Each type of dance has a specific movement vocabulary, and when dancers watch their "own" type of dance, their ventral premotor cortex gets more active than when they watch other forms of dance (Pilgramm et al., 2010). This suggests that dancing helps to set up specific motor programs (for example, in ballet dancers it has been shown that the area of motor cortex associated with the foot has increased; Meier et al., 2016). Dance has also been shown to be associated with more sensitivity in the recognition of other's movements (Sevdalis & Keller, 2009).

In my home office

Now let's move on to the specific form of dance that is ballet. What is unique about ballet is that it consists of a very specific movement vocabulary that has changed little over the centuries. A strong emphasis is placed on the lines created by poses and movements. As such, I would expect that this is associated by a very strong sensitivity to small differences in the production and perceptions of these patterns of movement. A lot of this sensitivity is visual because ballet dancers perfect their movements largely with the help of mirrors. This is probably different in many other forms of dance that do not rely so strongly on mirrors. Moreover, because ballet involves the precise repetition of a relatively fixed movement vocabulary, this is associated with increased ability to memorize movement sequences (Smyth & Pendleton, 1994). This often happens by chunking a series of movements into bite-size pieces, which ballet dancers have been shown to be relatively good at Foley et al. 1991 . I am very curious whether this also transfer to better memory in general. I would not be surprised if ballet were a good training method for memory and cognitive control (see also van Vugt (2014) for similar ideas).

Apart from training memory and cognitive control, ballet is likely to be also excellent training for your attention. When you are in the studio, you need to focus on many pieces of information at the same time: the series of movements you are supposed to produce, the muscles you are supposed to be tensing and relaxing (while dancers have been training for years to automatize those patterns, they keep honing them every single day of their careers).

During an EEG experiment at the Night of Arts & Sciences, 2019

Apart from those technical aspects, ballet is most importantly an art, so the best part for a dancer usually comes when they can forget about the steps and totally inhabit the character or the mood that comes with the dance. They then typically forget everything around them and enter something like a flow state. I would not be surprised if ballet dancers are very good at imagination, but I have not found any studies that test that. I would predict this would lead to a strengthening of a set of brain areas called the default mode network, involving the posterior cingular cortex, medial prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe, which are all involved in creating stories in your mind, and disconnecting from outside distraction. While there have been

claims that ballet improves creative thinking, i am not so sure about that, and I think this is mostly true for those dancers who have specialized in improvisation (indeed, all the dancers in this study did, including some ballet dancers).

But ballet is not typically something you only do by yourself. In fact, one of the most beautiful things about ballet is when the corps the ballet moves in perfect synchrony, such as the entry of the shades in La Bayadere. To make this happen, dancers need to be highly aware of the dancers that are in front of them, to the side, and behind them. In fact, they are even told to breathe together. As such, I would strongly suspect that not only their bodies synchronize, but even their brains synchronize (here is a video where I talk about inter-brain synchrony in dancers.

A final unique aspect of ballet is the extreme balance expertise required, Women even balance on the tips of their toes! Recent research has shown that dancers are better at balancing than non-dancers (Burzynska et al., 2017). Such balancing expertise was associated with changes in dancers' hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus (thought to be crucial for orientation in space), insula (thought to be important for feeling sensations inside your body)Dordevic et al., 2018).

Brain areas larger in ballet dancers than in controls (from Dordevic et al., 2018)

, and cingulate motor cortex (

In summary, dance, and in particular ballet, is great for lots of things. Indeed, I found that in the last few weeks, when I was stuck at home due to the covid-19 situation, ballet was really my outlet and saving grace. The good news is that dance in general, and ballet in specific is nowadays also used in interventions for diseases such as Parkinsons (read more here). It has also been found that people who have been dancing their whole life tend to suffer less from dementia and age-related cognitive decline (Verghese et al., 2003). So, keep dancing!

Plunging in the deep of consciousness at the European Neurophenomenology, Contemplative, and Embodied Cognition Network meeting

Last week I attended the European Neurophenomenology, Contemplative, and Embodied Cognition Network meeting at Schloss Buchenau in Germany. This year we explored similarities and differences between the practices of meditation, hypnosis, trance and psychedelics. I must confess that up to that point I had always been quite skeptical of hypnosis, trance and psychedelics, feeling that they are kind of "out there" and I did not quite want to touch them. At the meeting, we got to explore some of these methods (trance and hypnosis) ourselves, and my ideas changed quite a bit. In fact these methods are not as strange as they sometimes appear, and certain forms of meditation also share some features with these other practices. And importantly, they can really benefit people!

Picture by Ute Brandes. Some of the results of the trance

In general, in many forms of meditation you bring your attention to an object of interest, and you monitor metacognitively where your attention goes, and whether it is still on the object. In some forms of meditation, you drop the object, and instead just monitor with kind attention where your awareness is. In some other forms of meditation, the object is more dynamic, for example it is a thread of philosophical thinking. In yet other forms of meditation, you visualize an entire environment and you incorporate all sensory impressions in this visualisation. For example, you may visualize a buddha, and then whatever sounds you are hearing may be reinterpreted as a mantra. This kind of practice actually shares quite some similarities with hypnosis in which you also construct a different narrative about the environment, and reinterpret thoughts and sense stimuli in this sense. Quite a powerful example of this was a video by Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville who showed how suggestion was used to alleviate pain during an operation. A patient who received large blows on their nose as part of nose surgery was led to interpret this as the shocks involved in skiing a mountain. And amazingly, this allowed them to undergo the operation with only local aneasthetics and substantial comfort.

Picture by Ute Brandes. Me giving my presentation

Similarly, in some practices of meditation you just allow your mind to accept whatever thoughts and emotions occur. When the faculty of monitoring disappears completely, and you just pursue whatever thoughts and emotions arise, then this becomes similar to the trance state (at least in my experience). During the meeting we were led into a trance state by listening to some very powerful deep drum sounds interspersed with animal sounds and more. We were encouraged to simply follow our impulses and to drop our cognitive control. To facilitate the latter and go with the flow, we were encouraged to make whatever sounds arose in our minds. In the beginning I think all of us felt a bit timid, but as we led go more, we entered this pure flow of experience. I myself felt quite compelled to move, and while I normally am a ballet dancer, now for the first time floorwork movements just manifested from my body automatically. To ensure people weren't harming themselves or others, an experienced team was watching over the trance and guided people gently as needed. After the end of one trance state, we were also invited to turn our experience into a painting. It was quite amazing to see what pieces of art came out! I wonder what the connections are between this state of effortless awareness where monitoring is almost completely abandoned and states of meditation practices that involve a nondual flow of awareness as well.

The meeting ended with trying to formulate a vision for a joint paper outlining some of these similarities and differences between the practices we discussed and experienced. While the communities of scientists studying these practices has traditionally been quite separated, I think it could really benefit from cross-talk to learn from each other's methods, roadblocks and more. For example, meditation research has a strong tradition of using pain to study the effects of the practice, but this has not been much considered in psychedelics. Hypnosis has a strong tradition of examining how people's suggestibility affects the results, and this could potentially be informative in studies of meditation as well. I could also imagine that comparative studies between the practices could be very helpful, because they engage, as I sketched above, to some extent similar mechanisms, but to some extent also different ones.

Picture by Steven Laureys. Group picture.

Picture by Ute Brandes. One of the many discussions.

Real German houses!

review of the Society for Neuroscience conference

A few weeks ago I went to the big Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego. This yearly conference usually draws around 30,000 neuroscientists. I was quite actively live-tweeting the conference, so for an impression of the current research on brain oscillations, decision making and mind-wandering, check out my storify: https://storify.com/mvugt/society-for-neuroscience-2016-review