Neurophysiology, deep brain structures
Rahere
London
The current thinking pays a lot of attention to the mid-brain gyri as the seat of neuroception, so moving the focuses to visual and cognitive cortexes may not be as much use as it seems. Also, the importance of limbic and basal ganglia cannot be overstated. We have three shells of brain, basal (lizard, reflex), limbic (animal, emotional/habit) and cortex, and the latter is certainly classifiable by hemisphere. Therefore, just going for broadband cortex activity may be missing essential elements.
Meditation, we now know, suppresses the cognitive function, allowing hard-wired limbic responses freer play, for example in trauma healing. Cognition overwrites this.
Comments
Rahere, thanks.
One item to note is that conventional EEG is summing the activity of large ensembles of pyramidal neurons in the cortex ONLY. Activity of the brain stem, limbic system, cerebellum, etc., I don't believe is very accessible. I have seen in the past reference to weakly measuring amygdala activity. And this also required 3D source localization, so that generally means full scalp coverage: 19, 32 or more electrodes.
More generally limbic system is measured with fMRI or MEG.
https://www.google.com/search?q=measuring+eeg+amygdala
https://www.google.com/search?q=eeg+amygdala+source+localization
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08665-5
"Deep brain activities can be detected with magnetoencephalography"
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/48/E10465
"Sparsity enables estimation of both subcortical and cortical activity from MEG and EEG"
Regards, William
Many thanks - thats out of reach at the moment. Perhaps one useful step might be to focus on the mid-brain gyri, though, which is in reach.
The basal activity won't tell us much in practice, as it's mostly routine signalling to heart, circulation and gut. It does have first dibs on sensory input, though, referencing the amygdala for alarm patterns and triggering the IAS if needed (Terpou), through the limbic. I've spotted common ground in trauma healing therapies, they all suppress cognitive function to allow the limbic system to resolve the amygdala triggers: Levine (Waking the Tiger) was therefore wrong in suggesting nothing works once trauma's embedded. The closest we have right now's kinetic shift therapy, although the new MAPS psychopompic approach does much the same: it helps to have an adjunctive limbic motivation in a deep-rooted value/appreciation motivation to reset the original hurt with.
Rahere, good points.
You mention Dr. Peter Levine. I recall he created Somatic Experiencing, which has shown value in trauma resolution. I've had some sessions of this in the past, administered by a therapist / trainer, who was certified in S.E. So perhaps there are different degrees of 'embedding' addressed.
https://traumahealing.org/about-us/
MAPS is indeed breaking new ground,
https://maps.org/
William
We've moved on a way from then, it seems. Like you, I'm addressing my own issues, and was fortunate to sit in on Bessel van der Kalk's Boston Trauma Foundation Conference last May. One way of getting up to speed fast! Fortunately I'm bright enough to go from zero to hero in two sittings
The Somatic side is catered for more by polyvagal theory these days, with Steven Porges at its head, which leaves me unconvinced because it doesn't explain how the vagus system drives the rest of the brain. My somatic angle is meridian work, siding on Master-level Reiki, which I somehow picked up walking the same path Usui's circle did. That relates to another form of perception I'm calling transception, out of respect to Abraham Maslow, noting we have a bushelful of references to awareness of the intangible, running from empathy through Wendy d'Andrea's interoceptive crossover to the paranormal and the numinous. That may well include the chakra system, as it has a relationship with my vocal work, but is very coarse by comparison with acupuncture understanding. I'm a fully functional vocational seer medium (tested by both the Church and Harley Street), having worked for 18 years in WEU's crisis management team, the erstwhile European State Department.
At a more personal level, I'd be interested in high-performance, as my cortex is running at 30-100%, a 24-hour EEG showed. I may have reinforced the top bar for IQ aged 12, although I'm a little off that now, and have a decent share of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to back it: I actually made the East-West join they mention, and completed the loose end Gandhi left when he was murdered. A diagnosis of mild high-performance Aspergers came with it, leaving me furious that Attwood's circle are allowed to be as academically dishonest as they are: how can I be simultaneously a reference for intelligent and intellectually challenged? The fault lies in the Profession's approach, starting from Dabrowski's "over-excitability", which degenerated into exclusion and the nonsense of "we think differently". Logic is logic, and I essentially think MORE. A Neurotypical running on 11% of their mind is using around half that for short-term memory processed in beta-phase sleep (based on sleep deprivation work in the military: dysfunction starts after 48 hours)), whereas I only have vestigial beta-phase, processing my experience live in the 30% at-rest base load, making me very fast indeed on the uptake. I don't have to sleep on it, a drop into meditation and it's there. With 70% of my mind free to use, I cope with far larger information than most, 14 times as much, and so the Neurotypical can either cope with the Executive Summary, or a subset, but not the lot. Sizeable lateral influences may exist, stemming from counterarguments, creating useful circular insights. This is the nature of the "we think differently", Joe Normal can't cope with that. Yet our ladies multitrack with ease. Note, though, that this does not mention my experience channelling the numinous, both in its initiative and in channelling its power in Reiki. That is NOT neurotypidal, I think you'll agree.
My approach to trauma is much like yours, as a sufferer. Examining the field of techniques on offer raised a question, how come there's a dozen techniques and one mechanism? I'd already resolved a single-incident trauma which nearly cost the perpetrator his life a decade later - a job offer from Special Forces would be on the table within weeks, I was no longer the weedy adolescent bullied like hell, and I came on the guy by surprise. I'd knocked someone out with a single punch not long before, and my IAS fired a haymaker. My limbic pulled it, and only then did my visual cortex recognise the target. The force swung my back to him, I covered it up with a student whoop and went on my way. It took another decade to understand the value in what he did to me, and the meditation seems to have drained the amygdalic trigger.
That was the key to the techniques: Janae Elizabeth's work on ASD trauma slid BDSM subspace into line with the religious meditative space, they're the same with the exception of numinous presence, and the same applies to all the rest. Mindfulness is a typical New Age con, a technique used since the middle ages to empty the mind, and that's the same of all the others. They deliver the subject into a cognitively-suppressed meditative mindscape where the body's animal healing does the job. My own experience adds a sub-criterion, a strong emotional reason to heal, overwriting the trauma. This may be very helpful as an adjunct. And that's why I think Levine slightly off, he thought it couldn't happen. It may also explain why healing can be a process, although we shouldn't confuse it with normal scabbing from later experience, which patches it over rather than heals.