Meditation and Binaural Beats

[IgnorantGod]

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I think more physiological, actual chemical changes in the body. There are some text on this breathing pattern make the blood alkaline and that one increases acidity, regardless if it's real enough it's talked about and there are neurotransmitters. Many talk about releasing DMT and inducing ecstasies is common and well documented. When I don't madidate for a long period I always get lots of muscles spasms and twitches when I start and then they become less over time. The twitches are dramatic, you can see the muscle jumping around.

I was partly refering to physiological change, albeit more centralized around a conscious state that 'allows' to trigger such.

If I may elaborate a bit on the last statement of my previous post, the line of thought is to somehow 'force' the brain into a dream state, neurologically speaking. There seems to be increasing evidences of differences of the nervous system between the 'awake' state and the 'dream' state.

Here's a 2011 paper I came across in order to support this : Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology

In the section "Phenomenology of dreams and their relation to brain activity", they start by noting the similarities between the wake state and the REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) :

"These phenomenological similarities are reflected in neurophysiological similarities between waking and dreaming. For historical and methodological reasons, most electroencephalogram (EEG) and neuroimaging studies have contrasted brain activity during quiet wakefulness with that observed during REM sleep, when subjects are most likely to report dreams[15–20]. At least superficially, the EEG looks remarkably similar in active waking and REM sleep. [...]"

However, they also mention the differences of the conscious experience between both states :

"Despite these remarkable similarities, what makes dream consciousness so fascinating are the ways in which it differs from our waking experience. Some of these phenomenological differences are accompanied by consistent neurophysiological differences."

*Italic their


Those are then elaborated in the following sub-sections. I'll only refer to the first two of these in this post, which are about reduction in voluntary control and volition, followed by reduction in self-awareness and altered reflective thought. They note that other studies suggest the implication of the right inferior parietal cortex during waking volition, and subsenquently infer that its inactivity during REM sleep may be related to the lack of voluntary volition in dreams. As to the second one, they mention a study that evidence the reduction of self-awareness during "highly engaging sensory perception in wakefulness" comes with a "deactivation of the prefontal cortex".

Therefore, I believe that if one use meditation to focus on the body by 'silencing' one's thoughts and 'listen' to it, then one may be able to 'alter' its physiology, mostly in brain parts, and consequently 'blurring the boundaries of the self'. I think binaural beats are one among many ways to somewhat 'help' the physiological changes, althought that seems to require some 'actions' from the listener in order to 'optimize' those effects.

As a last note, I link a more recent paper that cite the previous : EEG microstates of dreams

Haven't read it entirely yet, but thought the first paragraph of the introduction could be of interest :

A distinct feature of Non Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep is low-frequency (< 4 Hz, delta) EEG synchronization with frequent appearance of large oscillations (slow waves) that are associated with brief periods of neuronal hyperpolarization1. The switch between up- and down-states reflects the bistability of the membrane potential of cortical neurons during sleep, which underlies an impairment of causal interactions among brain networks and loss of neuronal integration and communication2–4. Single neuron physiology and modeling suggest that low-frequency activity is related to neural mechanisms of inhibition5,6.