Priscilla Xu

Reading Time: 6 Minutes

What meditations have you heard of before? Focusing your attention on your breath, your body movement, your entire body tone, the smell of a flower, the taste of a delicious soup, or even your eyesight. In this episode, we will be covering the science of meditation and understanding when to choose which type of meditation depending on how you want to shift your awareness. There’s also a powerful tool at the end to help you control attention fluidly depending on different contexts.

How the Brain Interprets the Body & Surrounding Environment: Mindfulness

• The triad of interpreting the body is the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex.
  
  • The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the emotional interpreter of body sensations. The left dorsolateral PFC is the big boss of the anterior cingulate cortex.
    
    • For example, if you are going to a concert and your heart is beating fast. Your brain interprets that as excitement. However, if you are sweating and breathing fast at home, your brain might influence that as anxiety or serious health issues. When the shift in body sensation does not patch the outside, it can lead to anxiety.
  • The anterior cingulate cortex interprets body signals, such as how fast your heart is beating and how shallow or deep your breath is.
  • Insula has many functions in the brain, but in this case, the other part works with the anterior cingulate cortex to interpret the outside context and signals. This can include knowing that you are running up the hill.
• The attention you are using in interpreting the body and mind wandering is called the default mode network.
• However, if we are not aware of the default mode network, we can fall into mind wandering. An exciting paper goes into depth about this. [A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind]
  
  • Humans like to anticipate the future and contemplate the past. This is called stimulus-dependent thought.
  • The paper is finding a match between the activity they are doing now and how they feel.
  • Result: Around 50% of People’s minds wander when doing something, and they are less happy.
    
    • What someone is thinking is a better predictor of happiness than what they are doing

The Exteroception and Interception Awareness Spectrum

• We have all met someone who lives in their head all the time or seems like a single cellular organism who doesn’t think much. In scientific terms, the people who live in their head most of the time is more interoceptive, and people who do not feel as profoundly are more exteroceptive.
  
  • Interoception means that you are more aware of your inside body sensations than outside, such as your subjective observation of how tense your muscles are, your breathing speed, whether your bladder is full or not, and whether you have acid reflux in your esophagus or not.
    • Being too interoceptive leads to anxiety issues.
  • Exteroception means that you perceive something outside the confines of your skin, such as using your senses of seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
    • Being too exteroceptive is dangerous because you lose context to your body’s health status if you never pay attention to what is happening in your body.
    • Someone who has a traumatic event can also be on the extreme side of exteroception. They are in a dissociation state. For example, if the person is scared, they will not have any physiological response such as a racing heart or sweating.
• Our attention can be split between what’s happening now, past thoughts, or anticipation of the future.
  • Meditation can move you along the inter and exteroceptive spectrum.
    To be mentally healthy, we want to sit in the middle of the spectrum.

Rule of Thumb for Deciding What Type of Meditation to Do

• Are you more aware of your breathing and heart rate or more focused on what’s happening outside?

The question to ask yourself:

1. Where are you on the spectrum of exteroception and interoception?
2. Do you want to be more focused or calm after your meditation session?

• Meditation is a refocusing practice. People who are better at focusing for a long time are just better at returning to the present or whatever task they are doing.
  
  • Your default network can be rewired through meditation and neuroplasticity. This is explained more in the book called Altered Traits.
• If you want to be more interoceptive with your body, do a breath-focused meditation or body scan.
• If you want to be more exteroceptive, do a walking, smelling, or mindfully eating meditation.
• Long-term meditation has immense benefits such as better emotional regulation, increased ability to fall asleep, and being mindful.

What is the Third Eye Center?

• In meditation practices, the third eye refers to the area between your eyebrows. However, that’s not the seat of consciousness.
• The Third Eye Center refers to the pineal gland that releases melatonin, influencing sleepiness at night.
  • Snakes and lizards have two holes in their skull that allows like to go into their brain so the pineal gland can control the sleep rhythm of the animal. Similarly, birds’ skulls are so thin that light can penetrate them to regulate their sleep cycles.
  • In humans, our pineal gland sits deep inside the skull and near the fourth ventricle.
• Huberman adds the importance of the location of the third eye center in terms of meditation.
  • The brain has no pain receptors.
    • When we focus our attention behind our forehead with nothing to feel, our thoughts, memory, and emotions mushroom up disorganizedly and take up our perception spotlight, which includes our core beliefs and mindset that we operate on.
    • When you focus on your prefrontal cortex, this is why it is very overwhelming.
      

Breathing Patterns in Meditation

• Calm down: If your exhale is more prolonged and more vigorous.

• More alert: If your inhale is more vigorous and longer than your exhale.
  • Vigorous means that you are drawing in more air.
• If you want to ground yourself, you can use complex breathing that involves more active attention control
• You can do cyclic breathing of the same number of exhale and inhales.
  

The Super Meditation Tool that Covers Both Exteroception and Interoception

• Dr.Huberman named this meditation space-time bridge. This procedure is essential because you cover all the spectrums of interoceptive and exteroceptive sensations.
  
  • This tool is helpful because we calibrate our inter and exteroceptive awareness. You move through all the positions along the continuum.
  • You are more connected and tuned in with your surrounding situation.
  • Many of us get locked on the continuum of exterior and interoception.
    
    • If you are very interoceptive, you might forget your context and misbehave in the wrong context.
    • Space-time bridging allows you to dynamically adjust your attention from what you are doing on your computer to listening to a lecture or answering a text message. If you are very sleep-deprived or not calibrated and forget to change your behaviors when you change context, your behaviors or emotions can be wrong in the wrong space-time domain.

1. Close your eyes and focus inwards for three breaths
2. Open your eyes, raise your arm, and look at your palms, so your attention is split between your breath and looking at your palms. Take 3 Breaths.
3. Put down your hand and look somewhere 15-20 feet away from where you are standing or sitting. If you are outside, you can focus on the horizon (that’s even better). Take three breaths. You are currently paying attention to the distant location and concentrating on your breath.
4. Bring your attention back to your body while thinking you are a speck of dust on this big ball floating in outer space. Take three breaths, focus on it, and bring your attention back into interoception.