"How meditation deconstructs your mind" by Oshan Jarow in Vox is a fascinating overview of modern neuroscience and psychology research as applied to mindfulness practice. Key points:

• Four states of meditation, increasingly deep, are:
  • Focused attention — "... practices [that] help settle the mind ..."
  • Open-monitoring — "... practices [that] help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind ..."
  • Non-dual — "... practices [that] help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it ..."
  • Cessation — "... one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears ..."
• Predictive processing is a cognitive science theory that explains mind as a set of mental models of reality, updated based on sensory data:
  • "... we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. [The senses] feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world ... to match ... what might actually be going on ..."
  • Consciousness begins with priors — "... beliefs or expectations based on the past ..."
  • Meditation "deconstructs the predictive mind" — it "... progressively turn[s] down the volume on each layer of stacked priors, releasing the grip they ordinarily hold on awareness ..."
• Thus, the four states of meditation successively act as follows:
  • Focused attention "turn[s] down the volume" in the mind on everything except the object of attention
  • Open-monitoring "drop[s] into a more settled mind across the board"
  • Non-dual meditation "... aims at turning down even those deep priors that construct distinctions between subject and object altogether. ... no self/other, good/bad, here/there, now/later. All these dualities that underlie ordinary cognition basically melt into a big soup of the Now [and] universal oneness ..."
  • Cessation "... deconstructs the predictive mind ..." and temporarily turns off consciousness "from the inside"

Jarow describes these neuroscientific theories as "stories" — good stories, that suggest new testable hypotheses. He concludes by quoting Shamil Chandaria of Oxford University's Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing:

“Ultimately…all these stories are pointing to the moon. But [contemplative traditions] were pointing with their fingers. Now, we have laser pointers.” And as science progresses, “we’ll be able to work with what we’re finding out about the brain,” he added. “It’s actually about making progress, and by progress, I mean more useful stories.”

And maybe it's just bayesian knobs, all the way down?!

_{(cf Finding the Quiet (2009-12-05), Mantra - Beliefs Are Knobs, Not Switches (2017-07-03), Being You (2023-11-01), Little Book of Being (2024-12-03), ...) - ^z - 2025-01-09}