Mindfulness Meditation fights AIDS!!

Yesterday, I blogged about how Mindfulness Meditation causes brain rot. However, when you consider how in balance mindfulness is the right therapy for everything else that that troubles us, its a pretty good trade off to have a procedure that can at least cause us to be healthy way into our senile old age. In his book Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift foresaw this intimation of immortality, as Gulliver was shown a pile of dust by the wise academics of the Academy of Lagado. Although they cured mortality, they couldn't cure decay, so immortality was proof against all perils, exempting of course a wayward vacuum cleaner.

Your author 300 years in the future at the keyboard

So when I read recently about how Mindfulness Meditation fights HIV, I knew that we were one step closer to dust pile immortality. Until of course, I read the fine print. It seems that mindfulness worked because it reduces stress, which in turn helps the body in its fight against HIV. Would this not mean that any therapy that reduces stress fights aids? I kinda think so. The argument is reminiscent of those Bayer Aspirin commercials touting the effectiveness of taking Bayer as a therapy for heart disease. Sure enough, but was it Bayer or was it the aspirin? In other words, was it the 'brand' that made it work or was it the generic medicine that it labeled?

So the con is on! (Was it ever off?) To say relaxation therapies fight disease is too generic in this new age of brand management. I would gather it's much easier getting an audience, grants, and tenure when you change the topic by changing the label. Thank goodness the BS label has continued to serve us well in times like these!

Mindfulness Meditation causes brain rot!!!

It's a truism that exercise hurts, and if you don't exercise you'll eventually be in a world of hurt. The same thing applies to the 'exercise' of the brain, namely the rumination or thinking that occurs when we contemplate life's problems, whether they represent our contemplation of the nature of the universe or the nature of our kids behavior. So if we don't exercise, our body will eventually fall apart, and if we don't think about our problems eventually our mind will.

The latter result is due to the fact that rumination builds complex interconnections in our brain that (mainly due to the activity of dopamine neurons that are active when we contemplate problems) increase the efficiency of thinking, and as it turns out, enables us to resist degenerative diseases of the nervous system, namely dementia or Alzheimer's. This was confirmed recently by Israeili researchers who discovered that a consistent lack of rumination associated with much higher incidence of dementia in later life. Thus, if you don't think about your problems you stand a 40% increased likelihood of dementia later in life. The irony is that those who worry about this don't need to worry, and those who don't worry about this do. A no win or should I say no worry situation is there ever was one.

All of this goes against the grain (or should I say brain) of the don't worry, be happy school of thought (e.g. mindfulness meditation, positive psychology) that sees the future of humanity as a tranquil field of flower sniffing clones. Supposedly, if you're happy just non pensively looking at the world, you'll be even more happy as a human vegetable. It makes sense if your aspirations are to become not a couch potato, but just a potato.

Abracadabra

Magic tricks are all to do about the independent variable, that is the thing or things you manipulate to get an intended result. But magic is all about one thing, namely the unlikely or impossible variable that the eye does not see but cannot resist believing. Of course the magician doesn’t allow you in on the trick, but nonetheless lets you know it is a trick. In other words, there is more than one independent variable than meets the eye, and indeed, as the magician cautions, seeing should mean disbelieving.

As any magician will tell you, the ones who are easiest to fool have the greatest interest in being fooled, or in believing that sleight of hand is of sleight importance, and that magical accomplishments reside in the stolidity of magic words. Indeed, scientists are the easiest to fool mainly because they have a vested interest in extraordinary causes. So rather than believing that crop circles are caused by pranksters, that ESP is a magicians trick, or that ‘hypnotic’ behavior can be caused by ordinary motives, a ‘scientist’ would demur, and write articles, found journals, and avert the eyes of millions to a new intellectual movement that following the footsteps of Galileo and Darwin will revolutionize the world. And so in the large we have the trick of human behavior reduced to a magic word that is no more than metaphor, and ‘reinforcement’, ‘selfish genes’, and ‘intrinsic motivators’ change behavior like, well, abracadabra.










Now you see it....





So dear reader, I am sure that you personally think that you are quite resistant to this intellectual flimflam. To which I say that you too have a need to believe. So, here’s an intellectual trick for you, one that has been foisted upon the most banal and brilliant minds. Indeed, I will even reveal its secret to you, which a magician would only hint, and a con-man (or should we say scientist?) conceal or deny.

First, get in a quiet place, and eliminate all intrusive thoughts and distractions. Pronounce the magic words abracadabra, and keep doing so for the next twenty or so minutes. Voila! You will feel relaxed, alert, supercharged! And it’s all because you’ve learned to meditate, or more plainly, elicit a relaxation response. Since repeating a nonsense word seems to be the only independent variable around that correlates with all these great states of mind, it stands to reason that the magic is all in the word, and that nature has conspired to hard wire a relaxation response to the trivial neural buzz of a thought.

So where you may ask are the hidden variables in a psychological space so hermetically sealed? Why in the quiet of course. Doing nothing and thinking of nothing is an independent variable, since it represents the escape not only conscious thoughts, but also of the nonconscious arousal or anticipation of imminent things. In a resting state, thinking becomes more acute, our muscles are relaxed, and a magic word is merely a redundant and unnecessary key. Indeed, if abracadabra caused good feelings, it wouldn’t matter where you mumbled the words, but common sense reveals that perseveration in thinking doesn’t help much when you are in traffic, watching TV, or are awaiting the gallows. Magic words you see still need repose to work their magic, but repose needs only itself. But without magic meditation is a non thing, or nothing really. That’s the bad thing about behavior when it is made plain. It can’t make a living for a magician, and it can’t for a psychologist either. So economics if not truth dictates that we will always have magic, and for psychology, the eternal verity of magic words.

For more on the parlor magic of meditation, I have more than a few things to say, as you may find here.