A #stablethread on the posterior cingulate cortext (PCC) and all its juiciness. I'm trying to map out the evolving understanding of how meditation effects the brain and the PCC became relevant for anxiety as it is highly implicated.
For more on the entire brain, the thread from which this one descends, please see this thread:

The posterior cingulate cortex lights up when we are stressed. Its associated with mind-wandering and self-referential thought processes, the thoughts in our heads.

Deactivation in this area predicted reductions in stress. Being an expert in the technique was not required for it
Interestingly, a reduction in the PCC was also correlated with an increase of activity in the ACC (see the attached thread) as well as the prefrontal cortex.

Both of these predicted reductions in stress.

For more on the prefrontal cortex, which mindfulness techniques increased activation, check out this thread on the Prefrontal cortex:

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Keep Current with Stewart Alsop III - Host of Crazy Wisdom Podcast

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More from @StewartalsopIII

27 Jun
I don't know what it is about this gym i go to but the conversations in the communal hot tub are getting wild.

Not wild in the sense most people think about when thinking about hot tubs.

But wildly divergent.

I think I was just adversarialy questioned by a sociopath type.
Along with the "guess who is Awake" game I sometimes indulge in I also like to play "guess who is on the dark triad"

We can never have certainty over the state of an individual we encounter, where they are and how much they deceive us or themselves.
Most of my podcast episodes have been with people of good faith. I've always wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with someone who is not of good faith and, while presenting a personality of warmth, are really after something else that is not in my interest.
Read 16 tweets
27 Jun
The idea that there are 7 chakras isn't actually some sort of "indian yogic philosophy"

It was a translation of indian yogic philosophy through the work of Jung (this doesn't mean it's not valuable).

In reality yogic philosophy is a vast storehouse of practices and theory
India, just like Greece, had a lot of thinkers spread over historical time.

There were MANY chakra systems all over the place and the one you used was dependent on the lineage you were brought into usually through caste or other conditions.
Now we live in a world where we can pick and choose which morphology we want to view the physical (and subtle) body.

When you imagine seven chakras it not like they actually exist in the body, like if you were to open the body up you would find a physical chakra.
Read 5 tweets
18 Jun
The human experience hasn't changed in millions of year. We still feel anger, shame, guilt, joy, pleasure in pretty much the same way that our ancestors did as they traversed the globe finding stuff to eat.

But what has changed?

Our ability to articulate that experience.
It makes me think about how people have been experiencing awakening for a long time.

The awakening experience seems to be something fundamental to human beings (see the being part of that statement).

But we have been able to refine our understanding of that state exquisitely.
But even this was pretty exquisite a thousand years ago.

I'm reading this book of a translation of a spiritual masterpiece from the Tantrik lineage in Kashmir from 900AD.

Its one of the most reliable God triggers I have found.

In it, it explicitly rejects that the void
Read 8 tweets
16 Jun
The thing that is different with censoring this time is that the bottom 90% now have the same communication tools as the ones that censor.

China's way of dealing with this was allowing the popular upswing to transition to in person protests.
Then after the heat of the moment they would quietly and metaphorically decapitate the leaders of the protests (prison or execution).

This does seem to be the way that our new direction in the west but mostly on the internet with large scale cancelling of accounts in big sweeps
The problem the authoritarian motivated bureaucrats are facing is that the west already has non institutional voices with large multinetwork scale who call it as it is and then a large percentage of small pseudo anonymous accounts.
Read 6 tweets
3 Jun
Excellent interview.

Here are some notes I'm taking as I listen.

Strap in your seat belts boys. We going for a ride through crazy town
5:30 seconds:

Talking about the beginning of the pandemic. All reports coming from China (before Milan became a hotspot). Typical time it takes to get published for peer-review in a journal is 9-24 months. The rise of pre-print reviews and Scientism.

This is going to get juicy.
From his professional opinion, from the get go, "the experts" were stuck in group fear based on the consistent messages that doctors needed to protect themselves through PPE and that patients weren't really talked about (this is before the virus landed in the US)
Read 53 tweets
2 Jun
One of my friends, who was also a founder in tech world where the in-group petty tyrants enforce ideological consistency, used to make really controversial posts on Facebook. The comments would be pure hatred. I didn't realize it until a year later that he just never read them.
To those of us who are caught up in social perception yet also recognize that its unwise to outsource our happiness to the fickle and untrustworthy herd mentality, it doesn't even occur that not every comment needs to be responded to. Actually, the vast majority don't need to be.
Its the same way now when I post about the 'Rona there when I need more space than Twitter provides to dissect the insanity of our current era. Most of my facebook friends are in the tech world and they pounce on the posts, demanding ideological fealty to Scientism.
Read 6 tweets

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