Meditation Experiences, Self, and Boundaries of Consciousness

Our experiences with the external world are possible mainly through vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell providing us a sense of reality. How the brain is able to seamlessly integrate stimuli from our external and internal world into our sense of reality has yet to be adequately explained in the literature. We have previously proposed a three-dimensional unified model of consciousness that partly explains the dynamic mechanism. Here we further expand our model and include illustrations to provide a better conception of the ill-defined space within the self, providing insight into a unified mind-body concept. In this article, we propose that our senses “super-impose” on an existing dynamic space within us after a slight, imperceptible delay. The existing space includes the entire intrapersonal space and can also be called the “the body’s internal 3D default space”. We provide examples from meditation experiences to help explain how the sense of ‘self’ can be experienced through meditation practice associated with underlying physiological processes that take place through cardio-respiratory synchronization and coherence that is developed among areas of the brain. Meditation practice can help keep the body in a parasympathetic dominant state during meditation, allowing an experience of inner ‘self’. Understanding this physical and functional space could help unlock the mysteries of the function of memory and cognition, allowing clinicians to better recognize and treat disorders of the mind by recommending proven techniques to reduce stress as an adjunct to medication treatment

Functional and Neural Mechanisms of Out-of-Body Experiences: Importance of Retinogeniculo-Cortical Oscillations

Current research on the various forms of autoscopic phenomena addresses the clinical and neurological correlates of out-of-body experiences, autoscopic hallucinations,and heautoscopy. Yet most of this research is based on functional magnetic resonance imaging results and focuses predominantly on abnormal cortical activity. Previously we proposed that visual consciousness resulted from the dynamic retinogeniculo-cortical oscillations, such that the photoreceptors dynamically integrated with visual and other vision-associated cortices, and was theorized to be mapped out by photoreceptor discs and rich retinal networks which synchronized with the retinotopic mapping and the associated cortex. The feedback from neural input that is received from the thalamus and cortex via retinogeniculo-cortical oscillations and sent to the retina is multifold higher than feed-forward input to the cortex. This can effectively translate into out-of-body experiences projected onto the screen formed by the retina as it is perceived via feedback and feed-forward oscillations from the reticular thalamic nucleus, or “internal searchlight”. This article explores the role of the reticular thalamic nucleus and the retinogeniculo-cortical oscillations as pivotal internal components in vision and various autoscopic phenomena

Present status of development of damping ring extraction kicker system for CLIC

The CLIC damping rings will produce ultra-low emittance beam, with high bunch charge, necessary for the luminosity performance of the collider. To limit the beam emittance blow-up due to oscillations, the pulse power modulators for the damping ring kickers must provide extremely flat, high-voltage pulses: specifications call for a 160 ns duration and a flattop of 12.5 kV, 250 A, with a combined ripple and droop of not more than \pm0.02 %. The stripline design is also extremely challenging: the field for the damping ring kicker system must be homogenous to within \pm0.01 % over a 1 mm radius, and low beam coupling impedance is required. The solid-state modulator, the inductive adder, is a very promising approach to meeting the demanding specifications for the field pulse ripple and droop. This paper describes the initial design of the inductive adder and the striplines of the kicker system.Comment: Proceedings of LCWS'11, International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders, Granada, Spain 26-30 Sept 201