Predictive Processing and Meditation in the Brain

On this episode, I'm joined by Ruben Laukkonen to describe his new model that makes sense of what meditation does to the mind, through the lens of predictive processing.

Ruben is a post-doc cognitive scientist at the University of Amsterdam, a contemplative with experience in traditions like Advaita and Therevada, has consulted for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, and writes on topics ranging from education, artificial intelligence, to psychedelics.

We cover:

• Predictive processing, meditation, and counterfactual depth
• How meditation affects precision weighting, leading to changes in phenomenology
• How deconstructive practices like meditation need guiding frameworks to support reconstruction
• Some differences between meditation and psychedelics
• How social institutions, like education, might change if we value things like cognitive flexibility

Enjoy!