Speeding up your brain until it breaks (Part 2)

What happens if you speed up your brain's refresh rate?

(Continued from the previous post: Is enlightenment real?)

I actually ended up reading through all of Daniel Ingram’s book before I interviewed him. Something about the topic was really compelling to me.

The meditation practice he used mainly, was called “noting.” With noting, when you sit down to meditate you don’t just focus on the breath or any one thing - you just make note of anything that enters your conscious awareness. So, you may start simple by only nothing the breath: “breathing in,” “breathing out.” But then you’ll move onto everything happening in the body - an itch on your nose, a pain in your back, a pain in your knee: “itching,” “hurting,” “hurting.” Now if you hear something, smell something or hear something in your mind or see something in your mind - you don’t get specific like “smelling baked bread,” “hearing raindrops,” “remembering face of train station attendant,” it’s just: “smelling,” “hearing,” “seeing.” And so on and so on with everything. So if you have the intention to scratch your knee or the intention to get up from your cushion, you’ll just note: “intending.” As you progress, you don’t actually have to use your inner narrator to say “hearing,” “smelling,” et cetera, you just notice the activity. So you go from the slower noting to the faster noticing.

Daniel says that a novice should be able to notice even up to 10 things a second. That’s not quite as fast as it sounds. He gives the example of tapping really fast with two fingers on your desk. You can probably get 6 taps a second with ease. He says in his book: “Skilled technical meditators (which make up only a small proportion of those who cross this) may sit easily for hours dissecting their reality into fine and fast sensations and vibrations, perhaps even up to forty per second or more, with an extremely high level of precision and consistency.”

So as you get better at this mental Dance Dance Revolution, things start to …happen. He describes on page 191 of his the various Insight stages you’ll progress through.

1. Mind and Body
2. Cause and Effect
3. The Three Characteristics
4. The Arising and Passing Away
5. Dissolution, Entrance to the Dark Night
6. Fear
7. Misery
8. Disgust
9. Desire for Deliverance
10. Re-observation
11. Equanimity
12. Conformity
13. Change of Lineage
14. Path
15. Fruition

Some sound quite intense and psychedelic-y. For stage 4, The Arising and Passing Away, he writes: “One time, my entire body and world seemed to explode like a fireworks display in a powerful lucid dream with my whole sensate world zipping around like fragmented sparks through space for a while until things settled down.” It sounds like it’s quite different each time for each person: “ Some will notice the slow variant of the A&P and may plunge down into the very depths of the mind as though plunging deeply underwater to where they can perceive individual frames of reality arise and pass with breathtaking clarity, as though in slow motion.”

That sounds pretty sweet, but apparently after stage 4, there are six stages that are all just kind of… terrible. Stages 5,6,7,8,9 and 10 are what Daniel calls “The Dark Night of the Soul” or “Knowledges of Suffering.” This is a very long section, but at one point he says that the two basic challenges with the Dark Night are an emotional one and a perceptual one.

The emotional one, he says: “is that our most disturbing and difficult psychological issues tend to come bubbling up to the surface with an intensity that we may have never known before.” The perceptual challenge is that we start to see that the felt sense of a permanent “me,” or “self,” is just an illusion. In the way there is a bundle of mental activity indicating a gummy bear is being seen on the desk, the concept and feeling of a self experiencing that is simply another piece of activity that follows immediately afterwards. (i.e. mental activity one - “a gummy bear is seen,” mental activity two - “I saw it”)

Daniel runs a nonprofit called the Emergence Benefactors which seems to be focused around making disturbing phenomenon that occur during meditation better known to the scientific and medical community so that one day health practitioners won’t just be like “Yea not sure why you’re depressed and anxious, here’s some pills,” but rather be able to say “You mentioned you’ve been into meditation and this sounds like emergent phenomenon. Let me refer you to a psychiatrist who is familiar with the insight stages and may be able to help you through this.”

Let’s pause for a minute and acknowledge that the idea that meditation could be so powerful that you can experience some kind of fireworks hallucination and also have an existential crisis due to your brain is perceiving reality too fast might sound kinda wonky. I still remember my friend telling me he thought that meditation was more powerful than psychedelics after he did a 10 day vipassana retreat. (Not that he meant you would have crazier hallucinations, but that the experience would be more impactful) I had done a very large dose of psilocybin mushrooms and that was probably the most profound experience of my life at the time. (See Dr. Roland Griffith’s talk on this if you’re skeptical:

) I knew my friend had experience with psychedelics as well so I was really surprised that he would say that meditation could be more powerful.

Something about this concept of speeding up your perception of reality bringing about intense experiences was compelling to me. Namely, if you could speed your perception up so fast that you could see the space between the mental activity comprising an experience and the different piece of mental activity saying “that’s me experiencing that,” then maybe something would happen. Maybe it would produce a “Dark Night” existential crisis, but whatever, I still wanted to find out. 

Also the idea that you can speed up your perception made sense to me considering I had a tiny bit of experience with this. When I was in high school I played this game called Dance Dance Revolution. If you went to an arcade in the late 2000’s, you’ve probably seen it before. There’s a metallic platform with four directional arrows as the controller and on screen are a bunch of arrows flying up from the bottom of the screen in time with music. You’re supposed to step on the corresponding directional arrow on the pad when the arrow appears on screen. I played plenty of that but nothing really got so fast that I couldn’t see it. The main issue was coordination and how fast I could move my legs. 

At some point my friends and I started playing Stepmania - which was the same thing as DDR except you use your fingers and the arrow keys on the keyboard. You get significantly less exercise but then you get to play faster songs - songs that were too fast to do on your feet. At first, there were some songs where I couldn’t really even see the arrows. (Not that they were literally invisible, but too fast to discern the direction of more than a couple at a time.) Pretty quickly I got to where I could see them, then got to where I could move my fingers fast enough to barely pass the song, and then I got to a point where I could hit all the notes and a get a “full combo.” Professional athletes and gamers do this to a far greater extent all the time, but it just stood out to me because I distinctly remember thinking in High School "if only I could see faster, I'd be way better at this game..."

I decided my meditation goal would be to just try and experience that fourth stage Daniel was talking about: The Arising and Passing Away. If I could experience something fantastical like that, then maybe there was some truth to this roadmap and maybe enlightenment actually was a real thing.

(To be continued)

Edit: One of my Patreon patrons had a good question regarding all this notion of "speeding up the brain." I will admit, it sounds kinda dubious at first glance. Let me flesh that a bit out here: 

William Hamilton writes in his book Saints and Psychopaths about "Perceptual Thresholds," he claims "By focusing the mind in a profound examination of the present moment, processes of the mind which were not accessible to normal consciousness become conscious." Seems like a pretty radical claim.

However, in that same book he mentions research done by Dr. Daniel Brown and Dr. Jack Engler of Harvard University. They were investigating the style of practice I'm talking about here - vipassana meditation. (Mahasi Sayadaw style "noting" is one form of vipassana)

They used a tachistoscope, which could flash images at rates of thousandths of a second to see if these people could actually see things faster. Their aim was to see how slow they needed to flash images before the subject could perceive them as two separate images. The smallest gap of time between the two images is the individual's perceptual threshold. (For example if I flash a picture of a person and then a banana on frame 1 and then frame 2 on a 240hz monitor it would look like the images were merged as one image. If I did it on frame 1 and then frame 20 you would probably easily see that they were two different images one after the other)

Brown's research found that 3 months of vipassana meditation, the subjects had significantly lower perceptual thresholds. People were seeing 100%, 500% and even 1500% changes in their perceptual threshold.

This sounds a lot similar to the odd skill Daniel Ingram supposedly acquired. (That's discussed here )