Ruben Laukkonen is a cognitive neuroscientist at the VU University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on sudden insight experiences and the effects of intensive meditation on the mind and brain. Using a combination of neuroimaging, machine learning, and neuro-phenomenology, Ruben is investigating some of the most rare states of consciousness accessible to human beings. He has published articles in leading journals, given talks at prestigious conferences, and has written on topics that range from artificial intelligence to psychedelics. Ruben has an eclectic contemplative background, including different meditation traditions such as Zen, Advaita, and Theravada.
“Just be here now, and all your problems will go away. You’ll be more peaceful, you’ll be happier and you’ll be kinder. Live in the present, breathe, just flow…”.
Familiar advice, isn’t it?
But from the brain’s perspective, being in the present moment is no joke. Because what concept, feeling, or experience, is not built on the foundation of time?
For example, how do we know the taste of a good coffee, recognize our mother, or open a door without a vast history of learning based on the past? How do we drink water, instead of detergent, unless we project our knowledge all over that neutral liquid?
We can go some (many) steps further. To truly be in the present moment is to not exist.
Time—or rather the organization of regularities in time—is the very currency of construction within the brain. Without moulding the present based on the past, there simply is nothing meaningful to experience. Those jolts of electricity that climb your nervous system are empty of meaning, without the brain and the body’s capacity to regurgitate its own meaning.
It’s sometimes tempting to think that we’re “drinking in” in the world, like a fancy cocktail of meaningful symbols that we saturate with our past, but basically, passively swig. But in fact, the brain is doing minimal drinking and much more vomiting. The brain-body is puking out this colorful world, full of self, relationship, feeling, thought, and…. Everything. Your very perception of these squiggles on the screen and their meaning is fundamentally compositional rather than passive, and what permits this generative organ its creative power… is regularities over time… patterns that we abstract into things.
“…because what concept, feeling, or experience, is not built on the foundation of time? ”
If this time-based construction of our subjective reality goes wrong, we can develop psychopathology. Hallucinations, delusions, forgetting, and misunderstanding—they all rely on some mistaken projection of the past onto the present two-dimensional impressions on our body. The body is also generating its own internal signals all the time like hunger, proprioception, intuition, etc., and the brain is also a thought-engine bursting with fireworks of its own.
So, the vast majority of our experience is manifested from within.
Not in some law-of-attraction sense, but in the sense that it’s all made up based on what we have come to know. We literally would not notice that our house was burning if it wasn’t for the wisely orchestrated projections of the past; and that of all those clever hairy ancestors of ours. And even more profoundly—and this is a tricky point to grasp—it may not even be based on the electricity of the present. It is quite possible that the whole kaleidoscope is made up based on the past, and simply tested against the present. Where the present itself —those electrical signals grounded on something external—never even make a dent on what is experienced as if it was the present.
So, here’s the warning I promised: If you’re going to hang out in the present, like really do it, then you and almost everything you know might just disappear.
This will make more sense if I now (somewhat superficially) describe our new theory of meditation.
I present this theory with a lot of humility. Meditation is a huge subject, and we’re obviously still figuring out how the brain works. But we know so much more about meditation today than we did twenty years ago—scientifically speaking—and we have this new understanding of the brain where it ‘predicts’ (cf. vomits) out our experience. And putting these two things together somehow felt—as the cliché goes—timely.
In our recent paper we propose that the progression of meditation is just a journey deeper into the present moment. And with this simple understanding, we can basically predict most of the wild things that can happen during very intensive and prolonged meditation practice. When you combine this present-centeredness with a view of the brain as a hierarchical prediction-machine that is habitually abstracting away from the present to create our experience, it all makes sense.
When you understand the brain as a system that builds our subjective experience in each moment in layers of abstraction, where the more abstract we go in this hierarchy the more ‘conceptual’ and less ‘present moment’ experience becomes, then all that stuff about non-self, impermanence, pure consciousness, timelessness, and perhaps even transcendence, begin to seem unsurprising.
“It is quite possible that the whole kaleidoscope is made up based on the past and simply tested against the present”
Technical detour: What are current scientific conceptualizations of the present moment? Let’s take as a starting point John Kabat-Zinn’s (2003) famous secular definition of mindfulness as the “The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.” There are several ways that this definition—which has informed hundreds of scientific studies on mindfulness—diverges from our view of the present moment. In Kabat-Zinn’s definition, there is still ‘paying attention with purpose,’ and there is still ‘the unfolding of experience.’ But, as we have briefly argued above, experience, purpose, and directed attention are very much still constructed through predictions derived from the past. Even the very process of paying attention to the breath implies the subtle generation of a subject with intentionality and agency, a thing which is the breath, and the idea that attention can be directed towards such a thing. There is nothing wrong with this view, but it is from the brain’s perspective premature to call that ‘the present’. It is perhaps “more” present than thinking, but it is all still a time-based abstraction. It is not yet being in the present moment because that would imply that time, space, the unfolding of experience, attention, intentionality, and the very idea of meditation or a meditator, are not constructed. This more radical view of the present opens doors for new empirical work. For example, we can potentially derive measures of meditative expertise, where the depth of the meditative state can be measured based on the extent to which one is constructing abstractions away from it: Even something as subtle as a startle response, responses to linguistic structure, or any signal of surprise in the brain, implies that one is not truly present.
To illustrate: Imagine you’re a super-meditator, with a perfectly refined ability to be in the here and now. And you’ve decided you want to go from being completely not in the here and now, to totally immersed in the present. And imagine that you’re listening to a song, let’s say, ‘Beautiful World’ by Colin Hay.
At first, being in some very ordinary state, you might be kind of hearing the song, but also partly lost in thoughts, and also making all kinds of evaluations and judgments about what you like and don’t like about the music. You might think, “it’s a bit slow, I’m bored, what should I listen to next… etc.”
Then, you might tune in a bit. Really get your attention on the song. Now maybe you start to flow with it, really feeling into the sounds themselves… vibing with it. Perhaps your body is even subtly moving with the rhythm. You’ve dropped the ‘evaluating and judging’ abstraction. Now you’re just ‘in it,’ ‘with it,’ the sensations are what dominate.
But you’re eager to go deeper into the present. And as you do that, suddenly the words stop making sense. Colin Hay is singing “I like drinking Irish tea”, and all you’re taking in is… pure sound. Just… sound, prior to any interpretation, before any meaning. You’re so ‘in the present’ that you’re no longer projecting anything you know about language and concepts onto the sound vibrations emerging from Colin’s mouth.
The thing is, that the sound, and the ‘you’ that hears the sound, are also made up! Just at a level that’s a little less abstract, a little more ‘here and now’… you could say. But as with understanding language, the past plays an inevitable role.
What could a ‘you’ be without categories, without some concept of you as a ‘thing’ consistent from one moment to the next? Even the very capacity to discriminate this from that (i.e., like, a body as separate from the chair you’re sitting on) requires an inference, an abstraction, a projection… from the past. How else could electrical signals come alive?
So now it’s really getting wild.
As you drop even deeper into the now, the sound goes ‘poof’. The whole idea of music… is gone. The whole concept of an organism that can listen to music has vanished.
But weren’t you just looking to ‘hang out in the present’? To be a bit more peaceful and relaxed? To reduce some stress?
Being in the present is no joke.
Ruben Laukkonen is a cognitive neuroscientist at the VU University of Amsterdam. You can find more information at his website. https://rubenlaukkonen.com/
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Tell us about your idea. Nearly any subject related to the science of mindfulness is fair game.