Hello and welcome. It's July 27th, 2023, and we're here in active guest strain, number 15.1 with Valeria Beccatini and Anna Sciunica. This is going to be a very interesting and cool presentation and discussion on selfless minds, unlimited bodies, homeostatic bodily self-regulation, and meditative experiences. There will be a presentation followed by a discussion, so thank you both for joining and to you Valeria for the presentation. Thank you, Diana, very much. I'm very happy to be here with Anna presenting Pathavara Wither Project. This is a paper about what happens in selfless state from a homeostatic bodily self-regulation perspective. So it's, as I said, it's part of a Wither Project that consists in both theoretical and experimental components, and so today we're gonna look at meditation. So for people that are not really familiar with that, meditation is a practice that engages attention to self-regulate physiological and cognitive activity, and what we're interested here is that people that meditate with a certain experience, so for example, meditating in the past two years with regularly like some hours per week, they consistently report losing one's sense of the self or having selfless experiences, but not only that, they also report to have bodily alterations. So alterations in the procession of the body that has been called expansion, oceanic boundlessness, dissolution of body boundaries, and since you are particularly interested in this kind of phenomenal experience, we have proposed to frame them at unlimited body just for clarity. So our question here is what exactly, and the question that will follow the whole presentation in the background is what exactly is lost when experienced meditators report losing their self and the body. So let's first look very briefly at what the self is or the sense of self is. So this concept is so complex and so wide that has been debated since the beginning of philosophy. And of course, it might be so interesting that it is also very hard to define. But one very old and used definition is the unitary or unique individual eye, the first person's perspective that Latin was called the subjectum. So something that lay under all our stream of experience, thoughts and whatever else that happens to us, that's the subject. However, more recently in cognitive science, we are appealing to a more common definition of sense of self and a bit more exhaustive that is defined as a multidimensional construct. And here, we will come back on this on this concept later and we'll unpack it a bit more. So the aim of this presentation will be to, first of all, lay down the fact that in self experience is the biological organism. So to speak, the human body, we may success feedback self related. And this might be very intuitive, but it needs us then to see that during selfless experiences, what we propose is that they may be tacitly accompanied or implicitly underlined by enhanced connectedness with this successful self regulation that we propose to link it with a perceptually attenuated body or what has been already called transparent body. And this allows us to propose, but it's of course on a working process. And we are very open to feedback at any stage of this presentation that the term selfless states may be misleading, because what is lost is an ordinary way to mentally model the self relation to the body and the world. So what is composed as follows. First, I will pass him through debates and definitions of losing one's health and body. So that means I will go through alterations in these three dimension during massive states. And then I will introduce key concept of predict the process in the active input framework that are useful in our explanation. So that then I can unpack the role of the biological self organization and almost static self regulation in constituting our sense of self. And then pass to our claim that the so much process is like some mother sense retinuation and transparent self modeling are key mechanism underlying the phenomenology of the matter to states. And this then will allow us to draw our conclusions and present ongoing related projects. So let's come back to the sense of self. So in the in when one has to investigate the sense of self, of course, as I said, it's so wide concept there. So many definitions and characterization of the sense of self has come up in philosophy and cognitive science. So we have terms like minimal self self experience, selfhood, sense of ownership and all of this. And for other part, I think we have just to stick to a common definition. That comes, for example, from from a similar paper from colleague 2000 that defines as a multi dimensional construct, composed by minimal or embodied components, and narrative or reflective components. So to unpack a little bit these two concepts, the minimal embodied experience of the sense of self is the basic implicit functioning of the body to of the ongoing moment. So the stream of experience that happens to me right now can be defined as my minimal sense of self. So I don't really need to have an explicit knowledge about myself to have this kind of dimension. And these can be further unpacked through the concept of pre effective self consciousness that comes from a phenomenological tradition, tracing back from about to my local team, argue that parts of our self conscious does not does not really need any reflection to happen there or implicit explicit thought, it happens in a way tambourine is consciously before reflection. And then on top of this, we build our narrative or our reflections about ourself. And these is more linked to self identification processes or self monitoring self recognition and introspection introspection. It's, it's the ability of introspection so perceive yourself or reflect about yourself in an explicit way. So you do need to have a biography or an explicit memory about yourself in order to tackle this aspect of the sense of self. So in deep matters of state, the there is alterations in the sense of self. And it's up to debate what which dimension are affected by that. And it's far from clear what actually happens to these kind of dimension and more and many more other dimension of the sense of self. And we're here to unpack a little bit this, we propose these quotations from fashion 2008, where it suggested that in doing deep matters of state one experiences oneself as these very moments of consciousness. This is a position that may reveal some position about this debate what happens to the sense of self. So in this case, it's argued that meditation reveal a very moment of consciousness. So there is something that is true consciousness or something that is the real consciousness. And these actually has brought to the concept of pure consciousness. So something that it stays there. And it's purified by everything by also the body. And there is so many definition of this pure consciousness, we wrote some example like, ownerless consciousness, the consciousness that doesn't have an owner that doesn't have a self. So it doesn't have a proper sense of self that what or that owns this consciousness. Mathsinga has worked on the meaning of phenomena experience defining a special a temporal dimensional consciousness. And this is very supported because it's consistent with the Buddhist philosophy philosophical standard of no self or for the most traditional Buddhism, the there is no self, the self isn't it's an illusion. And it comes to our psychology when we enter in contact with the world and with the sensations of the world and certain patterns of behavior, then at least in the sense that we have a self. So as I said, meditation, it allows us to access this pure consciousness for for support of these diseases, and reveals one truth and essential nature of subjective beauty. And we bring this into debate. There are also people that argue against this. And it's called, it has been called by Mathsinga really in during their special issues, the ubiquitous diseases. So the ubiquitous disease claim that the sense of self is ubiquitous to all states of consciousness. And sometimes it appeals to the immunity to error through this misidentification argument of self description, which is simpler than this long name. And it's basically the fact that I can say that I had a wonderful experience, or I can and this wonderful experience may be true or false. This is this on this weekend, I can do mistakes, I can make mistakes. But I cannot not say that I didn't have this wonderful experience. Because the moment in which I report, I have a perspective on this. So I cannot really be mistaken on the fact that I'm reporting this. Maybe I was dreaming maybe it wasn't a wonderful experience. But it's me there reporting. So the moment I'm reporting this, it means that I have to be there. And this is for applies also to when I described myself, a selfless state, I had a selfless state these, these is very controversial. Other problems on top of that are cross cultural problems also addressed in the literature. So these experienced selfless states may be influenced by certain vows or certain beliefs that meditators are indoors, especially during especially expert meditators. And the other thing is, these all cross cultural analogies and debates about the self may be also partially due to our verbal misunderstanding, so that the Western for Western for you may have problems about the self that actually the Eastern probably, philosophy is not really addressing. So there might be some incommensurability of problems there. There's also we said in the, in the paper, it's not that we want to address the Buddhist philosophical problems, but rather we want to bring insight from, from this to our, to our problems. So given this debate, we want to propose a shift in the focus. So we don't want to start by looking at consciousness and trying to solve things about the self, but we want start by the by focusing on the body. So we propose a shift in focus in the bodily experience, examine this deep, massive state. So let's start by the subjective experience of the body or the study or the subjective experience of the body, which is phenomenology. In the tradition, our body has a unique stages. So the anatomical structure of the body has been called by us a carpet. So the living body, the body that I can observe, and others can be a source is the object among the other object, they would say. But it's not only that because it's an object that I can leave from inside. So it has been called the life to leave body or the body as I leave it from inside, as I said. So what happens to these kinds of dimension again, we can unpack this and see how the medicine states affect them. So from the point of view of the life to leave body, we already know and I will unpack a little bit more. So we have already said that we have called unlimited, unlimited body experiences, the reports that spoke about this fading of the body bungee. So the body bungee has been defined as a cognitive emotional perception of one's body surface, right? That just a definition, we can also debate about this. But what it's important about for us that our sense of body boundaries is flexible and dynamic. It's not fixed, because we are in the realm of the body as falls from inside. There is an interesting study that exemplifies this concept in relation to meditation. And it's by John Brun in 2016, though it has worked later on on this as well. But I find it interesting to look at this image because this is part of a self-port measurement that they used on a sample of people that has been trained in meditation, in particular with the body scanning, so that people had to systematically scan sensation rising in the body. And the result is that in the last 10 or four months of practice, so not actually not the expert, they already started to report an increased tendency to go towards the almost imperceptible perception of the body. So they conclude that meditation can be actually studied in this sense, where it affects our sense of body boundaries. And they say these so significant results also in relation to increased mood, happiness and decreased anxiety, but this is another story that will come back later. So I find interesting also this quotation by Fink here in this paper is talking about why ego dissolution may be better understood as ego expansion. And then ego dissolution comes in a later interpretation. And so I will read it. It's not the feeling of self that dissolves, but the boundary between a feeling of self and the feeling of anything else in consciousness. So here again, Fink is talking about consciousness. But from our perspective, this position is pretty informing, because it goes in our direction as well because he says, it's not that you're losing really yourself is this this experience is dependent on how you actually perceive your boundary with you and what you don't consider you. So self fading out the self other distinction ability. So here it comes pretty processing acting from framework, because we want to basically breach these phenomenal subjective experience to how these phenomena and underlying mechanistic explanation. Indeed, pretty processing of things I have recently used for this purpose also meditation research, and psychopatology research and so on. So in this presentation, I will use them in an interchangeable way, but following certain trends, but it's not doesn't have to be it is also under debate.  I will not go too much technical. So briefly, these framework considers brains as predictive machine, or as recent likes to say, as a consider brain as a fantastic organ. Which is because not is not only able to do amazing things, but also because it really regenerates fantasies about the world. And this is because the in order to act interact with your with itself and the world around the brain constantly anticipates the future anticipate the state current state of affairs in order to make sense of the sensorium or the stream of experiences that happens. And so on. So it possess or embody or utilizes depends on the commitment a generative model, which is a model that take keep tracks or regularity of the world and forms prediction out of it in a hierarchical way. So highly prediction goes down to match sensory data. And sensory data goes up to map to affect the predictions to update the model. However, every prediction comes with a degree of error, which sometimes is called prediction errors. So this prediction is that discrepancy between prediction and sensory input so that a new model is generated. And they say the first imperative or the only imperative that the system is actually minimizing the prediction errors so that the model can more efficiently cope when interacting and acting the world. However, it's not the only imperative because as I will introduce in this slide, the system has also to estimate the confidence or likelihood or precision of prediction in order to evaluate the prediction errors that are coming from the discrepancy so that the generative model has to compute in a fine way how much precision to assign to the prediction or prediction errors. And I choose this image because it renders well how the distribution are set depending on the precision incitation. So if you have a precise prediction error, then the posterior distribution will be closer to the prediction error. Well, the imprecise prediction error have little effect on the prior so that the posterior distribution will be closer to the prior. And this is very important because if the precision estimate are not wasted correctly, then the system generates false inference that will not able to the system to interact efficiently and update model efficiently. So far we have mostly talked about prediction error minimisation by updating the model. However, the system can also active sample of the world, active modify the prediction error of the world in order to fit the prediction errors to the world. And this comes into play active inference that builds upon the free energy principle where it's based on the the idea that living organism maintain themselves with an optimal set of states. That comes from the second low dynamics of Schrodinger. So given that it comes into play how attention is analysed or examined under this framework. So given that the organism has to maintain within these optimal sets of states by maintaining an optimal balance between computation and precision optimisation. So waiting between prediction and prediction errors. Attention comes into place as a modulation of this precision of sensory data working as a search light. So in other words, it optimises the signal to noise ratio. It's one of the ways that we have to put in place this local optimisation of precision estimates. And this is very important. Why we bring into attention because meditation has a systematic and restorative use of attention resources. And we'll come back into that a bit further on in this presentation. And given that we are interested in okay, we have seen the lived body. What happens to the phenomena experience. Now we're interested in what happens to the corporate. What happens to the living body that can be observed by the organism during meditation states. In this we bring into play other two important concepts in active inference, which is way to self-regulate the underlying all and but experience. So all subjective experience. So two ways or one way that then is also active. So the first way is homoas, little homostasis, which is the maintenance of required optimal say by survival and reproduction of self-organising biological systems. So for example, I code and I use my internal resources to keep my states into this, into optimal states. So I start shivering. However, I can also put in place active modification in the world so that I'm not called anymore. So for example, I take a blank. This is called allostasis. So it's active engagements and modification of all the environment in order to maintain myself in optimal states for survival. So we can say, of course, human bodies are self-organising biological system aiming at keeping these internal states within a certain viable range for survival. Now even that we will come back again to phenomenology of touch. I will go, I'm going to do this for the second time, to then wrap up everything again. So we have talked about phenomenology of the body. However, we haven't underlined importance that the touch and proximal sounds has for our lip body. So our as Chanukha and colleagues has already proposed our proximal sense are central for our minimal sense of self. And on top of that, we bring into play the fact that different kinds of touch can convey different experience of the sense of self or sense of boundaries. So for example, imagine yourself that you are in a sea of Portugal or California and you touching the whole environment with your body. You may feel that you have a sense of immersiveness or that your body boundaries are slowly a bit becoming less clear. And this experience, it's actually a bit similar to the experiences of sensory deprivation states where people are put in a salty water and they let them flow for some moments. Sensory deprivation states are not really, really all deprived because you have other activities in the body and movements that produce signals that you are actually aware of. However, in both these experiences, the body boundary seems to fade a little bit. However, if you're in the sea and you is moving and then you touch the rock with your hand, you clearly will feel yourself as separated as something different from what you're actually touching, like sense of separation. These phenomenology can be brought into active inference through the mechanism of somatocentric denuation which comes from the sensory denuation. So this process happens when the sea sound dissipates its own action. So for example, I take a glass and in this moment my rena has already created efferent copies of this action and the sensory consequences of this. So whenever I grab this glass, the sensory consequences that happen to my body are slightly attenuated. And this is why we cannot tickle ourselves because the prediction of earth comes at not surprising. This has an implication for our embodied experience in the world because we feel that we are immediate, immediate contact with ourselves in the world. And this is because our consciousness experience are mediated by trans-breath or non-perceived cognitive processes so that the system least can live behind or disattend self-related sensory processing. So and these allow to allocate resources to perception and action involved in the processing of the object of interest. So for example, when Le Mans confused this example of the cherry when I have to take an object that excels from me, I will be much more interested in picking the object and I will not really focus on my arm more in picking that. So that the system needs to compute and maintain a fine balance between external and internal components of some of the sensory intuition. And this is very important for the sense of self as well. So we need to understand and it's not that we need but in order for us to have a sense of self, we normally have a sense of what we are and what we are not. But for brain it has to or as as agents end up with the brain we compute this distinction. So where the self ends and where where begins or do I move my arm or my arm is moved by something or someone. So some of the central attenuation plays a role in these distinctions and in building multi-sensory bodily self- representations. So that the sense of the self and body is subject to the phenomenally transferred. That means that when we act in the world and we interact we normally desattend the way we are in the world. Because we need to be in contact, direct contact with the world. If we always attended to our body and our our self in the sense that we will be hyperreflexive then we will be actually we'll be impaired in what we normally do and this is actually a condition that we will talk about later. So that in actual terms the sense of self is an ongoing inferential process centre in the body. So what we propose is what is lost during selfless experience is an ordinary way to mentally model self in relation to the body of the world. So that if we think about the self as as I propose here the iceberg where the narrative tells you what we see but the renewal self is what we actually are composed of and it's actually larger but we are not aware of. Similarly when we have selfless experience we may have also these inferential process where we think we have lost our self. However we have gathered some evidence in the fact that meditation facilitate autonomic regulation involved in homostatic processes. That means for example that meditation increase the synchronization of cardiac and respiratory system. This is connected with reduced levels of blood glucose or blood pressure and heart rate variability. So there is a success meditation helps to successfully self-regulate the body especially in comparison to stress that actually does the opposite. And on top of that meditation help us to attune us to our physiological interceptive awareness and listen it does it so they say by enhancing the processing of extra effective interceptive stimuli which it doesn't have to be understood as a maladaptive increased body awareness but rather a adaptive body awareness which is a distinguished distinction that we can come back later if you if people are interested or they ask about it. These evidence are also in line with evidence of meditation that promotes self-regulation of pain and pain and pleasantance or through the attentional training that meditation allow you're actually able to self-regulate the pain and they are not not really like the sensation of the pain because it actually gets very fewer but the automatic behavioral patterns that comes in association with the with the pain so there is also also self-regulation on emotions and so on. So the body does not literally disappears actually stays as a very center as I proposed here at the center as we proposed in the paper and I proposed through this image at the center of a cycling so self-regulatory processes allow the subjective experience to lose oneself so that the sense of the body remains present in the background and these for example can it's very clear from this report from a person undergoing this kind of experience that they say that there remains a sense that there is a body without any experience of a sense of boundary. So this is not the very last slide but we come to our wrap-up of our claim attenuating the self and limiting the body which is also the title of our paper so starting from the fact that all medicine practices across the tradition require systematic and currently fully crafted body preparation to enter these deep methods of self state, selfless state so it doesn't happen that all of it like all of a sudden you just have a selfless state which actually may happen more similarly with psychedelic but with meditation you need you need to pass through gradually many different state or many different level of concentration that happens when you have around a predictable environment and you do so by building prior expectation so you have to keep your body in a certain position of posture as you say it is in this image the person is seated with a very straight not very but a straight back relaxed this is very important realization banded legs and so on and then you need at least in the most part of your practice you need safe predictable environments with temperature that are enables you to maintain your homostatic analysis and processes so all these conditions are necessary for your successful homostatic self formulation in this sense when this part first part of preparation to enter then after the state of confrontation the meditator can let go and live behind self-related processes and process the body transporting or it can attenuate them attenuate its body the body cannot can be attenuated so our claim is that a transfer and central cells in the body may underline the phenomology of losing one's self and blurring body boundaries as reported during meditative states so our conclusion is that we have proposed a shift in focus on homostatic body self-regulation in examining the meditative states the experience of having a body living in self-organism biological system is never lost in this process rather is a transfer the at its very center self attenuated yeah very much present in a hands life so that the self model is attenuated to a degree to become transparent and hence the process in the background now giving this conclusion now i'm going to present related project the first one is still on the theoretical side so we are in the real of active inference model in meditation research there is already literature about that that base that have studied different kinds of meditation techniques like focused attention open monitoring non dual awareness they and they all like i studied from black conan in 2023 or black conan and slaughter into 2021 um they have for example uh show that these uh attention techniques profoundly on alter typical mental experiences and uh for example focus meditation is the meditation um that engage attention on one specific object experience for example the breath and in active inference term it means that precision is estimated one sensory input which means that it reduces the impact of the other thoughts and parallel processes that going on or often open monitoring meditation is the uh is the engaging of attention to one's experience as a whole so the role the stream of experience without selecting anything in particular so that in an active entry term it has been um described as assigning equal precision uh to all of these experiencing promoting non-reactive sensing and this is connected also why many readers are uh good in self regulated uh regulate pain so in uh we will also build uh our model our own self modeling based on the previous literature which is in preparation and then going experimental uh we want to bring into the table uh applications of what we we're researching and a potential benefit maybe for uh cases or people or yeah individual that suffer from disrupted body awareness uh or destructive self-awareness and there is a uh relatively recent condition that has been um studied that is the process depersonization so depersonization um is the disruption of both body and self-awareness and it's a very heterogeneous condition there is a lot of different dimensions uh that occurs but generally uh it's connected with feelings of heaviness disconnection feeling the body isn't the as an object rather they're a transfer and medium of experience uh which is uh which simply uh called disembodiment it is linked with difficulties in concentration and attention often comorbid with depression permeation and anxiety and recently chaonuka and uh colleagues that also proposed aids are characterized by failures in attenuating so much of sensory signals so based on what we have uh previously said and based on uh how this um condition uh affects uh like number of population we want to test certain hypothesis so the first one would be that higher somatosensory attenuation correlate with more feeling of aliveness and wide openness in experienced meditators and rather lowest somatosensory attenuation correlate with feelings of unrealness thatness in people experience uh depersonization you know on the other hand severe homostatic dysregulation of bodily states doing deep methods states may lead to negative emotional outcomes and a burnout self-experience this comes from to the fact that um depersonization and meditator and meditation has some has um can both create uh stressing uh negative outcomes and it's interesting to see how this happened and what are the commonalities and differences in that and also we have dealt in the realm of spatial temporal perception which is uh connected also with mood disorders or like depression and anxiety uh and also with uh depersonization uh however in depersonization there is no specific items uh in the questionnaire that is usually uh used for measuring so we're which is a Cambridge the personalization scale so we're uh one to test this as well and we want to test it uh in people reporting selfless and disability experience so both pathological and non-pathological conditions so path of this hypothesis we are already going through this is our team coming from Hoopvault University where I come from as well, Simon Vendelman, but also a university called College London with Ines and Joseph. The first study is as I said about time perspective so we want to analyze um how people with high rates of depersonalization correlate with dimension of the time perspective so they are more future oriented or more negative oriented our hypothesis is that they're more negative uh past oriented so they're stuck in a very long present moment but also the their tendency of ruminating so always going to past negative memories since this is a title lasting dark times the effect of the personalization experiencing on time perspective and these we are already in the analysis of the data but it's an ongoing still study so we have preliminary data on this uh while studies too we are in the recruitment phases but we are almost there and encompass the high traits of people individual with high traits of depersonalization and many others I want to see through a uh set of questions and a behavioral task how they may different in the sense of self-body and motion of course they're very wide and complex concepts so there is always room for for feedback and replication and so on uh we want to this we wanted to we have selected these tasks the embody task of adapted from new manma uh where individual participants has to color parts of the body um in relation to activation that they feel uh by reading certain emotional story so these stories at least uh are supposed to be validated to uh at least see certain emotions in the body and then people colors parts of the body and then we will see how uh people with high traits and depersonalization emitters will uh with different this and we will also compare with other question that we have uh put this and uh potential title is emotional body map maps of self-detachment depersonalization and meditation and with this I thank you all and that's it now we are open for discussion thank you awesome thank you very much valeria you're muted don't you thank you valeria great of course well very fascinating presentation perhaps uh on on first and then our other colleagues who have joined would be awesome to hear your path to be here on this work and and any reflection or questions you have on it is it my turn did I miss yeah yeah so um obviously I don't have many questions because it's like we wrote this together so um but um I I think whatever I just to add that that's really a question is um I really like to see um um so for for us it's like in um in ideal world would be nice to you know get all the um the tradition of the meditative experiences and how to relate to the body and make a very precise prediction on what exactly they will kind of like predict in the terms of uh certain um uh sensory experiences and how this can be interpreted through different like theoretical lenses I think that could be really really interesting because I think one of the problems uh the challenges that we have right now is that we have so many concepts so many approaches and kind of like scattered all of the map and I think would be really nice to um you know narrow down because as you said Daniel um so everybody knows what meditation is everybody meets knows at least one person that meditates in life and everything but it's really unclear what exactly we are um we are after and why in certain cases this is kind of like um beneficial and one is another case is basically it has a negative consequences and this is why precisely we are doing this our project on our depersonization and meditation and I can share with you informally scoop but data is here so it kind of like I can share with so what we did in this project basically we took people with um typical controls that don't have depersonization and never meditated right so it's kind of like yeah never did that and then we took people that meditated but um and then we looked at whether they have kind of like high or low traits of depersonization and then we took people with depersonization that never meditated right um so I have this like this inclusion and exclusion criteria and um yeah it's it's really interesting to find what our findings is like it's really difficult to find people that have experienced meditators and low depersonization skills low depersonization traits right so most of them they actually have high depersonization but then it's interesting to see how that contrasts with like the people that have depersonization and no meditation experience right um so that's that's something I would like to um carry on and um yeah so to reach the community and um yeah that's something we'll definitely carry on with Valeria and the next steps and also with some people that I have here in the chat Julia and Simone uh so Simone will going to work with us on most for some other sense retinuation yeah through different senses and Julia we have some without scooping we have also some very very interesting results coming up um we just finished data collection on intentional binding and depersonization so related to the sense of agency yeah so yeah so that's uh all for me it's just like for now we're kind of like in between because Valeria presented very well like the theory part and the studies are literally just getting hot from over now and we hope that in September uh it's like we're going to um get them out there yeah but the data is in the box so that's very exciting and yeah we have the results yeah thank you Daniel again for this platform it's really nice and as I said I really hope that after this discussion we'll have more um you know opportunities to change exchange and um yeah discuss we also plan to organize something around alteration of self-consciousness in across various conditions and also depersonization in uh Lisbon next year so maybe you can cross the pond and check for yourself that we have a nice airport in Lisbon yeah cool well good to uh get the appetizer before the entrain so that's very awesome about just how much theory and um even unconventional scientific theory like world knowledge traditions come into play and then what it looks like to take that experimental step to make it scientific is is definitely what I saw in the talk um Julia or Simone do you want to give any reflection or any thoughts or questions yes I actually have a can you hear me yep I actually have uh three questions I know it down um I think the first one because it's just for me personally I'm curious about that is that those deep meditative selfless states I think that can also be reached while doing yoga right basically the opposite of like sitting still is like a sort of repetitive movement actually so I'm wondering do those movements have to be perfectly predictable in order to be attended and then reaching the same state or is that like a different uh different concept or how do you how do you put that in the in your in your framework can I answer um I think here you growth mainly to uh to top to top it one if is it possible to reach deep meditative states also uh not sitting in a sit still position and the answer is yes uh however there is not so much research on that so I can talk about anecdotal uh knowledge but I did not read so much about uh walking meditation effect usually walking meditation or yet of course you talk about yoga I know but that's what I would say that walking meditation is used as a complementary practice through the sitting so I would say it's hard to reach deep meditative states only by walking meditation um in regarding to yoga also yoga means unity so well we think about yoga now we think about movement but it's always uh accompanied by reaching states of constant concentration through meditation so uh you cannot have yoga with meditation otherwise we'll be stretching our glasses but uh second topic is that can it happen when you have when you don't have prediction of movement right no I meant like because in yoga I mean at least I don't really do yoga right but I can imagine that what when people reach those states doing yoga then they kind of do almost like in a in a trans type of way they're always doing the same movement over and over and over again so that they don't have to attend to those movements but it's just like an automatic process I was wondering if it if that also can I can I jump in so um um actually this is precisely the opposite what is what what Valerio was saying is so Valerio is saying this is precisely the opposite you want to reach through yoga just like the opposite of automatic yeah so basically when you do this movements you need to be united with your self doing it so you really need to um yeah uh so yeah I I'm doing yoga so they they in the past 10 years and precisely this is like they're trying to tell us it's like don't don't do it on automatic because it's like when you have your thinking happening there and your body's doing some stuff there right you need to be basically be present in every single type of movements you have like a fully fully a presence if you do it automatic that's like that's more like gymnastic or something yeah so it's but it's interesting uh so your point is really interesting because then would be really nice to have a control condition where we have people doing like movement meditation and yoga and then um uh contrast with the phenomena of like um uh some other sense retinuation and uh whether they have what type of like embodiment and disembodiment and gentility experiences they have yeah okay but yeah I don't know exactly what I was trying to get it but I think it was also more related to because you said that when meditating you have to sort of let yourself letting go letting go exactly and the idea is that everything has to be perfectly sort of predictable right that's that's the idea behind it so then I I'm thinking so you always when within yoga don't you have to do like the exact same movements in order for it to be predictable in order for for you to let go and not over attend to the environment does that make sense or if I thought when when will you both uh and then see what we're speaking I think on one side you see one maybe you're referring to the implicit procedural met um implicit procedural no knowledge that can uh you can acquire through yoga and you Anna are talking about doing a thing without being aware which is also automatic and left in them and if you both are right I think in this because on one hand if you Anna you would say like if you do yoga uh you learned how to do yoga right so you learn how to move yourself in this in this way so that when you do a certain position you know that you have to arrange your body and for arrangement you always have to keep monitoring yourself so there is the continuous going back to your body keeping track of your body and continue to monitor yourself but in this way because you have learned to do this these um constant constant going back and be aware on yourself and this comes also when you you do your movement you have learned that you certain posture are made in a certain way so that it becomes more or less predictable actually what you're going to do right but it doesn't mean that you don't have to be aware of it and actually there is a trick uh readbook here because you're very attentive with what's going on but at the same time the more you're attentive the more so much of sensory attenuation may happen and actually it's what we are trying to argue in our active uh inference model the the more predictable it gets the more it gets attenuated but it doesn't mean that you're not aware that's that's uh yeah that's thank you for this input because it helps us elaborate this I think it's super interesting because it's like when you when when you look at like people like climb or surf or whatever any type of sports right in the beginning in order to learn the skill you have to put a lot of attention to the individual movements but then later on in order to actually be good at it you have to take the attention away and then in those moments is when the people reported they're actually feeling sort of selfless days in these flow states right which is when this when the the movements are internalized so to speak I think it's it's super interesting can I can I just shoot the other two questions I had they're like sort of different or should we go to Julia first maybe it's Julia as well hi sorry yeah sorry for the lighting and sorry because I'm in the lab so it's probably not the best condition uh thank you very I thought it was very interesting and I'm really looking forward to um yeah look at the yeah the results you you have in your study especially yeah I mean since as Anna mentioned we had something interesting with the intentional binding and depersonalization and um yeah kind of happy about that and what I so I'm really sorry because I listen kind of doing something else unfortunately in the lab I was busy um while you were talking but I kind of like the idea of um yeah does the self is attenuated or not or increasing and kind of goes back to just Simon the last comment from Simon about expertise um I think in terms of motto uh interaction there is some literal job about the expert I was trying to google that um that I attended a workshop last year and I think it was about once you're an expert you at the beginning you have this kind of flexible you you have a better understanding consciousness and then at the end you kind of learn to let it go to ride the flow of the motion kind of so it's not that you are and I think it's probably me the same I don't know about you but attention in meditation is that you have to be maybe more like not focused attention at state but more like open um sorry I forgot the name of the meditation type of mission you know but open meditation like monitoring yeah yeah exactly so you I mean I don't know it's uh so it would be interesting isn't it Anna suggested to see what kind of meditation what type of meditation maybe change the sense of the self maybe at the beginning it's more acute because you really scrutinize your sensation and and then after I don't know this is something that you plan to do right or should I go or do you want to go on uh the the first question it was I know there is a body of evidence it actually say that in expert meditators uh attention to start decreasing but there is also because you allocate less and less attention but I would be careful with that because with with this because they say there is a decrease that decrease activity in anterior singlet cortex so they make inference about it um as as uh meditators as well uh and having to know other people that are more experienced than me they would never say we lose our attention to that because our experience is so rich of sentry signals and related thought process that you cannot afford to not be attentive however we can bring into the plate different kinds of attention as you said there is focused attention or there's yet attention that requires more explicit uh thought about it so more explicit kind of uh way to focus on things and there is more like a bare bare attention so when you focus on the whole experience and you let it go with a non-judgmental attitude and a more open attitude and it's actually this attitude they're very stressed in meditation techniques that's why they're a bit uh grounded look and in research i feel because it's it's a lot about how we use attention but not the intent attention but not how we use intention so uh our attitude has the attitude that the meditators has to be very open and very non-judgmental and these reduce the non-reactive sense for for example and reduce the uh ability to self regulate the your experience and i feel have partially answered yeah no i mean i kind of like the idea that you link that with attention and um just i think maybe it would be interesting to look at different type of attention because uh yeah for a snare model you know you have like so maybe there is a difference between i don't know different type of meditation may develop different type of i don't know maybe the open um meditation is more prone i don't know because you mentioned the insular cortex and to me it's more associated with certain type of attention like more like maybe um more prone for like uh feedback um or negativity or these kind of you know uh error monitoring process so it's not like your attention you lose your attention it's just it's more like in the background and then when there is a mistake or something it kind of pops up more quickly i don't know and you may have more like uh frontal or at sustained attention i don't know i mean i'm not especially of attention at all so please take that with a bit of self um yeah i was wondering if this is something i don't know i obviously i mean because it's only you're not playing to do any g or neurophysiological measurement right so this is maybe like a follow-up study that would be interesting yeah not not yet yeah but in the in the pipeline yeah okay what we really want with um with valeria is um and other collaborators is to basically push against this idea that uh you can have selfless experiences i know it's controversial and many people talk about oh selfless experience below uh so basically we want to say radically speaking okay though so that works if you buy the bullet in your mind what do you do at least mean somehow consider that actually the body kind of like disappears in the process but if you're not my body do list then you need to basically put the body into an equation and realize that actually what allows the mind to disappear is the fact into the pureness of the experience is the fact that the impure body is kind of like put in a stable condition in such a way that basically can afford to leave it in the background and yeah to have like this type of like experience arising but without that in place uh you can't cannot really afford to you know go through the selfless experiences and this is why we want to be provocative in the titles that well actually maybe the experience of like selfless you know selfless experiences actually comes necessarily as to sign of the same coin of this experience of like having a unlimited body that actually expands to through the world but the body is there I mean the the thing the the entity that has the experience of no experience is that a body that kind of like is self-regulate in a certain way like the homeostasis is put at like a set point and we are using this metaphor of like think of a cyclone right moving cyclone so you have the steel eye of the cyclone in the middle doesn't mean that actually is not there it's just like it's around everything and because we are self-organizing biological systems we kind of like this animal this thing needs to keep track of this internal bodily state and there I mean this a successful system does this all the time all the time literally from second one when we basically get from one cell to you know the self-semitism some sort of like fascinating self-organization that is happening on the cellular level already and that like needs to be and death is basically this is what is happening it's like disintegration of like this you know self-organization and but that's clearly that's not what is happening on meditation right because you hopefully don't die when you meditate in that sense there is disintegration of a certain way to experience yourself in relation to the body in the world but clearly there's something that stays there needs to stay there for you to have those experiences so that's a bit of controversial radical claim that we like to defend and yeah we already had this discussion in several people for instance like whether or not we were meant to enlighten and this workshop on ethnology and neurocomputation we met there with people like Thomas Spetz again everything and obviously they have a different opinion so kind of like have a lively discussion about why we think it's like what does it mean to actually lose yourself and what is the self and what is a pure experience and why we basically need whether or like it or not the connection with the impure body to make sure that it can have at a certain point of pure experience but then again this is something that just speculation at the theory level and this is why I have this brilliant team here that we we can do some studies and actually measure stuff put the finger on it put the number yeah and see what we get these are these are awesome points and there's so many ways it could go I'll read a question from the live chat so G. Pagnani wrote the notion of increased somatic sensory transparency in experienced meditators associated with increased liveliness of the experience is intriguing can you say something about which levels in the hierarchical structure of the internal model or more likely to be affected by the meditative attentional task in terms of precision deployment do you think the attenuation of somatic sensory prediction error concerns more intermediate levels in a way increased meta-awareness rather than sheer sensory attention I can take the last one so I can I can give a first go and then you can go no I just wanted to ask rather than ensuing rather than sheer sensory attention yeah you can go on now please yeah so yeah so this is something I am I'm trying to develop this idea right now where a PhD student of mine Liby Liby Tisevus basically and this is why it's connected with the question that you ask you'll see is that you know your platform is active inference right and so people are kind of like you know lately kind of like realize wait a minute actually we're active and we need to explain action in the world and everything is kind of like come comes late right but if you look going back to the animal basically the action and the movement is there from the very beginning so this means that this is why it's so important to basically relate the you know a self-organization self-awareness, self-perception necessarily related with movement not so movement sort of an action is not something that you add on the top of this right like and some of like intention so you can have an intention but basically the first movements are kind of like automatic and need to be there right and basically our body moves all the time because we breathe all the time and our heart beats all the time so this means that for me this type of like attenuation is happening at the sensory level because that's the basic one so can you have sensory stuff without metacognitive stuff yes can you have metacognitive stuff without sensory stuff no so it's like what is basic does the first things needs to be attenuated and then it has to be a balance between metacognitive and sensory attenuation because this is precisely what I think it is happening in the personalization because if you focus too much right so if you lose the balance right between then you basically yeah it's just kind of like this type of you cannot afford to self forget yourself yeah and then it's kind of like the self stands in the way and that gets you even more disconnected so to speak so this is why I think it's important to contrast different type of like meditative experiences and meditative practices to see which one of them actually has more focus on what you do with the metacognitive meta awareness awareness awful awareness and which one are actually involving more like sensory movement for instance like let's say yeah so that's that's something that needs to be empirically tested but I would speculate and then obviously we can put it at test either by doing a simulation or you know actually collecting data to see how that plays into this distinction mm-hmm I think Simone wants to say something but I'm not the moderator so Daniel you decide yeah Valeria first then then Simone okay uh yeah thank you Anna that was very uh I don't have so much more to say because I agree with her but uh I thought when Daniel you were reading the question I for me the answer was more or less clear in the sense that as I say the so much essential continuation happens are the very low level predictions so in a very pre-reflective self-conscious so that the person who was asking if you know at least in the meditation techniques with the when you put the attention on for example your bodily signals there you have a top-down modulation of this uh of of precision wasting but the top-down modulation is on low level predictions so you're not putting top-down on what you think about your body is you're actually doing the opposite you're trying to forget about your previous expectations about the body because you're trying to have this known judgmental awareness about what's going on in your experience and then with this let's say less biased way to attend your body you start piercing and perceiving bodily sensations in your body or yourself or other kind of experiences so I would say this increasing precision on some of the sensory signals happens at the low level of the hierarchy um that then attenuates the sensory consequences of this of the posterior and the meta-awareness comes when you learn the when you're I think when you start having increased body awareness so you you make more experience I think then you start developing meta-awareness about how your body's actually um about higher representation of the body of your body but in the moment when this happens I think it really happens that the low-level sub-personal beliefs and then later on on the longer time scales then it starts becoming more abstract and ingrained in your personal at the personal level of your beliefs that's how I stay well of course if Simon has something to do with it then it's yeah it's really open I know I didn't I didn't want to comment that I just selfishly raised my hand to ask another question for later yeah okay or Daniel I don't know if you have an opinion on that I'll have this in here as well well certainly resonated with uh this comparative approach to studying the the diversity of methods and protocols we already have for mind and body and attention broadening the scope and just kind of pointing putting darts in the space of of what practices do people engage their mind and body in and then how can that territory be explored with also a variety of theoretical models and how does that relationship connect to the kinds of empirical work that we might do in a brain scanner or with other kinds of measuring and I think one thing I I want to explore more is like the in a hierarchical nested cognitive model which we often speak of ourselves and other types of sophisticated entities as where's our awareness where's awareness Matt picture and um and also to Simone's question about um when we're moving but we're expecting what we're moving then how does the extra receptive flow like the visual field you might be very familiar with walking and so you might be able to proprioceptively kind of zero out on your walking but there's this extra receptive um flow of novelty in the world so I think that that how um and then connected back to the comparative and staring at a candle or a blank screen or darkness and all these different methods um it it's it's there's a lot that these questions bring up yeah thank you Daniel so I I have something to add to that because I think it's super important so um so for me it's not so you know my background is like embodied cognition and activists and everything that for me it's really not at all surprising the fact that many of these techniques have been developed by people that kind of like lived in closed communities right so it's like you have a space where people can you know meditate walking I don't know and then they have this ritual they wake up at this time and they do this thing so you put yourself and yeah it's a ritual right like all the rituals so this means is like as I said it's like high predictability right and then that's that's something super super important yeah and even if even in the walking meditation you need to follow a certain path yeah so that's that's super interesting well in the last five or ten minutes I would love to hear from each of you like what are your directions heading forward and what's the what's exciting to you and where would you like to take this maybe Simone and Julia first of them will kind of make our way back to the authorship I mean I mean I'm not myself not working on the project right but like what I what I was really interested in sort of extending this is trying to understand because the way the way those deep meditative states are reported sometimes and the way people with depersonalization disorder report their experience is very similar they almost use like the same words right and to describe how they feel and I wonder why one is experienced positively and one is experienced so negatively as in it being at this order and completely disrupting someone's life so that was like this this comparison I think I'll be very curious about it awesome Julia if you want to add anything well now it's very interesting and yeah I mean again I mean I'm not also involving this study so it's a bit hard but I mean I'm really interested in the I mean all the self is affected by yeah our interaction with the world external world so and I'm completely already spoiled with the result we have with the intentional binding so it's very interesting I mean yeah to it's the self is attenuated or if it's disappear kind of but I think that's the key question you want to ensure and yeah I would be very curious to know I mean what very I found in data to see if we can have a common narrative about what's happening also with the personalization yeah it's very interesting to see how moving our body I mean the attention to the body can really change the self kind of of the way we process sexual information yeah so very interesting cool honor yes so it's like lots of work to do ahead but that's exciting right yeah so very short term it's like we need to write up this results that which is cut so yeah in relation to the body so basically we're going to have some numbers to show so that's that's super nice and then the next steps would be to you know create or develop computational model around this yeah with basically contrast you know the real world data with you know simulation data and then yeah so have a multi-layer type of like approach with different methods from physiological to behavioral to phenomenological to computational put potential also neural so that's something with would be nice to do in the next steps yeah so yeah and apart from that I think that's all for now and I'll let I'll leave the floor to Valeria well again thank you and by everybody yeah I I also want to thank you a lot for this platform this invitation it was yeah really nice you nice person and really nice conversation I'm working with Anna in these projects so she already said what what's the the next direction what I can add in this I think it would be on the theoretical side also start engaging was more closely to bodily reactions to meditation because the body boundaries the solution is just one part of it is like one part of the phenomenology but it's not the only thing that happens during meditation there is a lot of potential that can be discovered on this because because the body boundaries the solution again it's really study a lot but it's a phenomenon and there is so many other things that happens in our body while we meditate and you I speak for first first person experience but in the community it's really like already said other kinds of also more healing traditions like rest work for example there there is a lot of potential where people already work on that but there is no breach with the academic communities so people work pragmatically with this intuitive knowledge as well what happens in the body during these other states of consciousness but still we need to rage it with trying to make sense from a phonological and scientific point of view an experimental point of view as well so I think I see myself in yeah trying to step in these two words and like bringing insight from one word to the other and hoping to help myself and the other people around me yeah awesome well that's the block with the work that sounds really exciting love the idea of the the two-way street with difference bodily and cognitive practices and collaboration and and conversation that can bring in all these different experiences that that maybe don't have an fmri study already whatever that's worth thank you though always um any of your welcome back and really appreciate that you all came out thank you daniel thank you season


So this lecture is part of an online Galois theory course and will be about Veder Bern's theorem, or at least one of Veder Bern's theorems because he proved several. So the one that we're going to talk about is that a finite division algebra, algebra is a field, in other words it's commutative. So let's just recall what these mean. So a division algebra is just a sometimes called a non-commutative field, which is rather bad terminology because all fields are commutative by definition. But what it means is you just drop the axiom about being commutative from a field. So the standard example that everybody knows is just the quaternions, H, which have a basis of one i, j, k over the real numbers. And the multiplication is going to be i squared equals j squared equals k squared equals i, j, k equals minus one as Hamiltonian famously wrote down on a bridge. Now if you've got a division algebra, so suppose d is a division algebra, we can look at the center of d and this is obviously a field. So d is a vector space over f and what we're, in general if you look at infinite dimensional division algebras over a field, it's rather hard to classify them. But you can ask the following question, given a field f, find all division algebras over f such that first of all they're finite dimensional and secondly f is equal to the whole of the center. If f isn't the whole of the center, you just have a bigger field and repeat with that. So we would like to classify all finite dimensional central division algebras over a field where central means the field is the whole of the center. And Wetterburn did this for finite dimensional division algebras over finite fields by showing that there really aren't any apart from the finite fields. So here's Wetterburn's theorem. Let's prove that any finite division algebra d is a field. And let's stop by doing the easy stuff. So we put f to be the center. So f is a field and we classified the fields. They have order q where q is some prime power. And d is a vector space of dimension n. So the order of d is equal to q to the n, rather obviously. And now what we do is we're going to, let's put g to be the non-zero elements of d. So the order of g is just q to the n minus 1 and g is a group. And now the main key idea of the proof or the first key idea is to look at the conjugacy classes of this group g. So let's just look at the conjugacy classes and we're going to count the number of elements in each conjugacy class. And what we do is we get the following formula. We have q to the n minus 1. So this is the order of g and it's equal to various terms. So the first term is going to be q minus 1. And this is just the order of the center. And the center is just the non-zero elements of the field f. And then we have to add a sum over various conjugacy classes. So this is going to be some conjugacy class. And then we want the number of elements of the conjugacy class. It's just going to be q to the n minus 1 over q to the ki minus 1. So I'll explain this in a moment. So this bit here is the size of the conjugacy class. And y is the size of the conjugacy class equal to this. Well, the size of the conjugacy class is equal to the order of g divided by the order of h, where h is the centralizer of some element of the conjugacy class. So we need to know what is the centralizer of an element of the division algebra? The centralizer in the whole of d is a subdivision algebra. So this subdivision algebra will have order q to the ki, because the subdivision algebra will have dimension ki over d. And what we want is not the whole division algebra, but the non-zero elements in the division algebra. So if we call this subdivision algebra e, then the order of e star is equal to q to the ki minus 1. So we should also note that ki divides n because d is a vector space over e. And e isn't actually a field, it's a division algebra, but you can still define vector spaces over division algebras, and we find d is a vector space over this division algebra, and therefore ki divides n. So now we want to obtain a contradiction from this, or at least we want to prove that n is equal to 1. And what we do, the key point is we look at these terms here, and we notice that all divisible by the cyclatomic polynomial phi n applied to q. So here we're using the fact that ki is less than n and ki divides n, which implies that this term here contains q minus zeta for any primitive n through zeta. And this, it's divisible by the cyclatomic polynomial. So this is divisible by phi n of q. So actually, Wetterburn's original proof didn't actually use cyclatomic polynomials and it had a rather more complicated argument. In fact, it had a slight flaw in it which was patched up by Dixon. This is actually quite common that the first person to prove something, who very often has some minor gaps or glitches in it, but this is usually not a big deal. I mean, the pioneering work is always a bit clumsy and full of errors. That doesn't mean the first person who did it shouldn't get the credit for it. Anyway, so we've now got the following equation. We know that phi n of q divides q minus 1. Well, this easily implies n equals 1. And that's because phi n of q is just a product of q minus various n-th roots of unity. And if you plot the roots of unity, so here's q and here's 1 and here's zeta. And you notice immediately that this distance q minus zeta is bigger than q minus 1 if zeta is not equal to 1. So if n is not equal to 1, phi n of q has absolute value bigger than q minus 1, so cannot divide it. So n equals 1, so the division algebra d is actually equal to its center f and is therefore commutative. So I'll just finish by making a few background comments about division algebras. There's actually a group called the Brouwer group of field f. The elements are isomorphism classes of finite dimensional division algebras with center equal to f. And it's not at all obvious that these form a group.  Well, the multiplication, if you've got two division algebras d and e, you take that tensor product over the field f, and this is in general not a division algebra. However, it turns out to be a matrix algebra over some division algebra. And we define g to be the product of d and e in the Brouwer group. And you may look at this and think it's not actually even obvious that this product is associative, but that's not actually too difficult to check. And it's not at all obvious that this multiplication has an inverse. Well, the inverse is quite easy. The inverse of d is just d op, which is the same as d except you define x. You define a new multiplication x, y to be the old product but reversed. And then you can easily check that d tensed with d op over f is isomorphic to a matrix algebra over f where n is the dimension of d. And of course, the identity element is just the field f. Anyway, Brouwer showed that these form a group and this group turns out to be sort of quite important in class field theory. So Wetterburn proved that the Brouwer group of a finite field is trivial. That's just saying that all division algebras are fields. And the Brouwer group of the reals is a cyclic group of order two because how it's proved the only central division algebras over the reals are the real numbers of the quaternions. Of the complex numbers, the Brouwer group is trivial because the complex numbers are algebraically closed and it's quite easy to show that there are no division algebras over that. For other fields, the Brouwer group is often quite difficult to calculate. For instance, if you take a p-addict field, the Brouwer group turns out to be the rational numbers modulo the integers. If you take the field of rational numbers, the Brouwer group is even more complicated. It turns out to be a group of order two and then you take a sum overall primes of the Brouwer group of the p-addict fields and then that maps, there's a natural map from that to q over z and the Brouwer group of the rationals sits inside an exact sequence like this. So this is a sort of basic result of class field theory. You can calculate the Brouwer group of any field of algebraic numbers.  Okay, the next lecture will be about norms and traces of fields.