291–300 of 332 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you handle the placebo effect?
Just don't handle it. The placebo effect tells us that some things that have no reason for working, work anyways.
> Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing It's funny, because I just realised that πνεύμα(pneuma)/spirit in Greek has the same root as πνεύμων(pneumon)/lung: the verb πνέω(pnéo), which means I breathe. This is not Mr Portokalos talking from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, people: πνέω is traced to the older Indo-European stem pnew- , and the whole point of my comment is that there is a lot of heritage in languag…
In Portuguese the root “pneu” by itself means “tire” (as in a car tire). Fun stuff indeed!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because it is simple in your experience doesn't mean that is universally true for everyone. Certainly not for anxiety disordered or PTSD suffering people for example. See my reply to comment below which cites studies when these sort of practices backfire in a non-trivial fashion. Like I said, it is either too trivial as sit, breathe and relax which won't do much good, or it is potent enough to do some good in wh…
I have multiple problems with this statement. First, the problems you are describing are external to breathing. If you suffer from PTSD and get an episode at the grocery store, do you want to regulate grocery store visits also? Second, breathing has multi-thousand year old legacy spanning multiple cultures and eras touting it's benefits. Why would you obtain your perspective from a click-driven Vice article referring…
> If you suffer from PTSD and get an episode at the grocery store, do you want to regulate grocery store visits also?
I am not talking about triggering based on some external stimulus. I am talking about a nilly-willy prescription of a pscyhoactive exercise that has a non-trivial chance of interacting/activating pre-existing conditions.
> Why would you obtain your perspective from a click-driven Vice article referring to a study of 73 people instead of the infinitely more robust source of truth?
My perspective doesn't come from the article, I merely put it there as it gives a readable summary to the otherwise terse scientific papers.
Regarding the particular study, that study has tons of citations to other studies and meta studies, a good chunk of which complains about *adverse effects are not sufficiently mentioned", which I'm doing here. I'm not claiming that the score is settled on this matter, but the fact that there is no talk on adverse affects deserves attention.
> Second, breathing has multi-thousand year old legacy spanning multiple cultures and eras touting it's benefits
So does psychedelic mushrooms or circumcision. The good thing about science is we can systemically study traditional practices instead of taking their word for it. I don't think tradition is an infinitely robust source of truth, especially in comparison to scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, I value traditional knowledge too, but you can't claim traditional information and its context have propagated to our day sufficiently well (e.g. is circumcision a rite-of-passage anymore?), including the knowledge/caution on what to do with adverse reactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anyone else was confused (I was and had to google), the practice of alternate nostril breathing entails physically obstructing alternating nostrils with a finger as you take breaths.
There’s an advanced variant in which you don’t use the fingers and attempt to manipulate the breath using the lungs only—its called anulom vilom
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good meta study is: Lindahl et al (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. This vice article recaps it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbaedd/meditation-is-a-po... I'll list just the titles of select deep dive citations from the first study to give an idea, you can find detailed citations in the paper itself; - "Meditation-in…
- "cycling is dangerous" - "hiking is dangerous" - "swimming is dangerous" - "running is dangerous" - "cycling complications" - "running complications" ...all day long - just append certain keywords and you'll find many articles and studies to feed your subjective belief and win arguments. I did and talked with a lot of people doing mindfulness meditation and none of them warned me against it. I don't doubt your clai…
The difference is all of those are physical activities, and a reasonable person can easily infer the risks.
That's not the case with these prescriptions of rather potent, psychoactive exercises. A better comparison would be psychedelic mushrooms; it certainly wouldn't kill you but any reasonable prescription would have also cautioned about the importance of set & setting and to stay away from it if you have certain preconditions/proclivities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because it is simple in your experience doesn't mean that is universally true for everyone. Certainly not for anxiety disordered or PTSD suffering people for example. See my reply to comment below which cites studies when these sort of practices backfire in a non-trivial fashion. Like I said, it is either too trivial as sit, breathe and relax which won't do much good, or it is potent enough to do some good in wh…
Changing nothing can backfire too. The problem with this line of thinking is to assume that inaction is not also a choice that affect you.
Inaction argument is a strawman, I'm not arguing for doing nothing at all, I am just against informal prescription of rather potent, psychoactive exercises without due respect, especially in the form of "just try it, can't do any harm". If you want to get serious with it, find people/sangha/teachers/therapists who know their stuff and train in that context. But assuming no harm can come while assuming benefits can come is a contradiction and wishful thinking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With a lot of these things I would highly recommend to just try it. If it works for you, good. If not, don't do it. It doesn't cost anything and you won't harm yourself. I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. If something is potent enough to deliver benefit, it can also be potent enough to deliver harm. You can't have it both ways. Turns out breathing is rather psychoactive, and without proper educational…
You're over-reacting. Neither the benefits nor the harm is fast enough so that you don't have time to adjust. If you continue doing something despite it causing active harm, that's just on you (as in generally).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sure people believe they confirm 'profound changes in their own mental state' from energy crystals too. Not sure about you, but if someone tells me "I've been exercising lately and mentally I feel much better" I don't say "but does homeopathy really work" and wink at them.
There's a lot of evidence that exercising is healthy and helps people improve their mental state so that analogy doesn't work. The point is if someone says they're getting a benefit from something that doesn't have a ton of evidence around it - my first instinct would be to be skeptical but curious. When someone takes that skepticism and implies that the "far bigger and more pressing problem" is that I can't determin…
There's actually a lot of research out there. Did you try to search for any? It's not scepticism to compare something you cannot believe because you haven't bothered to investigate, with well known falsities such as crystal healing.
Not only does the research support the existence of a nasal cycle where one nostril is dominant at different times, it also supports a different pathway to the brain and a different neurological response. On top of that, psychological research shows links between breathing patterns and emotional response, in both directions, and then there's the wealth of meditative research. This stuff isn't controversial.
From [Taste and Smell]:
> The FN model may also explain the observation by Sobel et al. [36] that, when performing an odor threshold test, humans sniff longer when using the nostril with the lower flow rate. (Subjects usually have different flow rates in their two nostrils because of cyclic changes in the size of their nasal cavities.)
From [Nature]:
> The flow of air is greater into one nostril than into the other because there is a slight turbinate swelling in one. The nostril that takes in more air switches from the left to the right one and back again every few hours
From [Stanford News]:
> Michael Leon, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California at Irvine said… [the] data suggest, that the olfactory system maximizes the ability of its distributed receptor neurons to encode differentially absorbing odors.
From [Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle]:
> Nasal airflow is greater in one nostril than in the other because of transient asymmetric nasal passage obstruction by erectile tissue. The extent of obstruction alternates across nostrils with periodicity referred to as the nasal cycle. The nasal cycle is related to autonomic arousal and is indicative of asymmetry in brain function. Moreover, alterations in nasal cycle periodicity have been linked to various diseases.
From [Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names]:
> These findings are consistent with previously demonstrated neural laterality in the processing of olfaction, emotion and language, and suggest that a local and functional convergence may exist between olfaction and emotional processing.
From [Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion]:
> This article reports two studies investigating the relationship between emotional feelings and respiration. In the first study, participants were asked to produce an emotion of either joy, anger, fear or sadness and to describe the breathing pattern that fit best with the generated emotion. Results revealed that breathing patterns reported during voluntary production of emotion were (a) comparable to those objectively recorded in psychophysiological experiments on emotion arousal, (b) consistently similar across individuals, and (c) clearly differentiated among joy, anger, fear, and sadness. A second study used breathing instructions based on Study 1’s results to investigate the impact of the manipulation of respiration on emotional feeling state. A cover story was used so that participants could not guess the actual purpose of the study. This manipulation produced significant emotional feeling states that were differentiated according to the type of breathing pattern. The implications of these findings for emotion theories based on peripheral feedback and for emotion regulation are discussed.
I could go on.
As to meditative practices, there's been extensive research for nigh on 50 years now, and for the past 20 (at least, as far as I'm aware) they've been using fMRI scanners to provide objective results[Oser] on the link between meditation as a practice and mental state.
You just have to look.
[Taste and Smell] https://books.google.com/books?id=fuxS-p6bpuwC&pg=PA12
[Nature] https://www.nature.com/articles/46944
[Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5053491/
[Stanford News] https://news.stanford.edu/news/1999/november10/smell-1110.ht...
[Hemispheric lateralization in the processing of odor pleasantness versus odor names] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12712833_Hemispheri...
[Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0269993014300039...
[Oser] https://www.lionsroar.com/the-lama-in-the-lab/ I include this as it's a personal favourite of mine and covered more extensively in Daniel Golman's book, Destructive Emotions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time I don't understand how anyone can make that statement with a straight face. Unless one nostril is blocked, we use both simultaneously. There's no balance to be gamed.
70-80% of adults have a alternating congested nostril https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle https://www.rhinologyonline.org/Rhinology_online_issues/2018...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humanity has historically taken a trial and error approach to most things - medicine, engineering, cooking, etc. Advances in technology are usually the result of tinkering as opposed to directed research or science. The science usually comes later (if and when someone funds it) to explain why it works. It's ugly, but it's how we usually lumber along. And yes, many mistakes and pseudoscience take place along the way.…
> Advances in technology are usually the result of tinkering as opposed to directed research or science. In older times yes, but you can easily demonstrate that scientific progress was WAY faster once we developed actual methods to test things in a reliable way.