Brainstates

We all recognize, at least occasionally, that our “state of mind”—the momentary configuration of mood, ideation, attention, intention, and expectation—can take various forms. Our mental activity can range all the way from deep sleep through light sleep; drowsiness; reverie; detached attention; concentrated attention; reactive attention; proactive attention; engagement; excitement; agitation and stress; fear and apprehension; and even hysteria. Each of these brainstates—more accurately thought of as a state of the whole biocomputer—has its own unique arrangement of programs in the biocomputer. Researcher Charles T.Tart, one of the pioneers in the study of consciousness, identifies a wide variety of brainstates, each with subtle differences. His book States of Consciousness became a foundation work for the study of consciousness, and what some practitioners refer to as “altered states of consciousness.” For example, Tart contrasts the state associated with going into sleep, which he labels the hypnogogic state, from the state associated with emerging from sleep, which he calls the hypnopompic state. “Micro-dreams,” those momentary images—like video clips or excerpts of dreams—that arise during the state of “half-sleep,” can be very vivid but often make no apparent sense as one returns from them.3 I often find that new ideas, fragments of ideas, strange verbal expressions, and half-formed concepts come to me during dreams or while going into or out of sleep.This is one reason why I keep a stack of index cards and a pen on the night table next to my bed. Brainstates such as apprehension, fear, strong intention, anger, intense concentration, amazement, amusement, disappointment, suspicion, guilt, shame, elation, and many others have scientific interest to researchers.To us ordinary civilians, they’re significant because they’re all part of our mental software. Harvard professor, psychologist, and researcher Herbert Benson, an authority on the subject of meditation and its biocognitive effects, traveled to remote Tibetan monasteries in the Himalayan mountains to study the monks who lived there. The monks, who practiced a method known as g Tum-mo meditation, could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 Fahrenheit degrees above their average body temperature. Similar measurements on advanced meditators in Sikkim, India, found that the monks there could reduce their metabolism by as much as 64 percent.To understand the significance of that finding, consider that metabolism, or oxygen consumption, typically drops by about 10 to 15 percent during sleep, and slightly more than that during simpler states of meditation. These practitioners could reduce their metabolic functioning to levels below what researchers had previously considered necessary for survival. Benson and his researchers caught the attention of the popular culture by making a video of nearly nude monks in states of deep meditation, drying cold, wet sheets with body heat, in temperature-controlled rooms at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
According to an account in the Harvard Gazette:
“In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6- foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.
“If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.
“Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monkwas required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.”4 Benson and his colleagues also videotaped monks sleeping through a winter night without shelter, at an altitude of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas.The event took place in February on the night of the winter full moon, with temperatures dropping to 0 degrees Fahrenheit. The video documentary showed no indication of symptoms of hyperthermia, or even normal shivering. Accounts of super normal human capabilities associated with special states of consciousness are so well documented and verified that we can reasonably take them as proven. The question we now seek to ask is: Can these advanced methods ever be accessible to “normal” human beings who don’t spend their lives studying and meditating? Is it possible that all of us have the possibility of increasing our mental functions to much higher levels than we’ve previously dreamed of? Maybe we won’t be able to find a magic pill that does it, but there is the hope that, by learning more about the human biocomputer and its software, we may be able to transform ourselves and our lives in ways heretofore unimagined.