Hey, look; episodic memory!

Searching for the meditative flash

Finding episodic memory

…

Go figure

1.  The existence of the “meditative flash”

At the centre of all types of human spirituality lay the meditative flash.  Liturgies are about engaging a series of “lessons” toward a transcendent meditative experience; the meditative flash.  Now; to me, “meditative flash” is a natural term emerging from the nature of the experience but, if i google it i don’t get anything solid.  Clicking on “what does a white light during meditation mean?” does mention a flash of white light and that experts agree ... . … Phh, experts; lol!

I suspected a meditative experience like a flash and went in search.  I found out that the apostle Thomas was particularly good at compelling flashes in others.  I even met a modern day Thomas and had a flash of my own.  As interesting as all that was, it doesn’t help with the scientific articulation of the existence of the meditative flash nor its physiological instantiation; i mention only so that you know i know.

There are a couple of good reasons to suspect the existence of the flash: the brain operates by firing rates and displays a cyclic brain wave, gestalt psychology speaks of a harmonic basis for neuropsychological function, other organs like the heart and gut use migrating electrical complexes to control their function.

So; there’s reason to think of it and, thinking of it i found it: i won’t argue its existence, the question is closed.


2.  The physiology of the meditative flash

The thing about the meditative flash as i imagine it that makes it self-identifying is the global harmonic nature of the event; it includes some kind of hypothetical wave traveling through the entire cortical environment in some fashion but, our traditional understanding of neural function is not a wave type of functioning.  As we understand it, a neuron will receive inputs from other firing neurons until it’s stimulated enough to fire itself: this is not a wave type dynamic.

What i mean by "wave type dynamics": two waves traveling in opposite directions can pass through each other without changing, as long as they stay within certain stability limits.  There is no immediate candidate environment for this to happen in the brain: i had to look and, you can guess what happened...

Now; i found a paper, “Solitonic conduction of electrotonic signals in neuronal branchlets with polarized microstructure” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5451471/).  With that i leverage the work of Stuart Hameroff with respect to microtubules being central to conscious awareness.  I’m suggesting that dendritic neural branchlets along the surface of the cortex heavily populated with microtubules would compel a sub threshold signal into the extracellular environment, like a transmitter. … There is an environment there; between the surface of the cortex and the Pia Mater, the innermost layer of the Dura.  I’m suggesting that our conscious experience is in fact electrotonic flow in this quasi-two dimensional region: i call it the noospace, between the Pia Mater and the surface of the cortex, where the noosphere is born.  The meditative flash would be a global harmonization of this noospace dynamic sufficient to drive some actual neural firing; in the visual cortex this would present as a universal flash of white.


3.  Voilà, episodic memory

Dendritic spines must sniff the extracellular electrotonic weather and compel the numerous microtubule control proteins to increase the population of microtubules in regions where a particular ionic flow is peaking in some sense or, perhaps it can incorporate (literally!) electrotonic flow direction and magnitude via polarity and density of population.  This is analogous to a needle transducing the incident air pressure to squiggles on a wax cylinder a la Thomas Edison: hence, i give you the electrotonograph that is episodic memory (before i new it was "episodic" i erroneously called it "short term" and, i had localized phosphorylation of microtubules where localized microtubule population and polarity ought to be):

Smell is more driving function than visceral input.  From a controlled systems perspective, the driving function makes up the memory addressing system.  The illusion of personal identity is a result of "your" recollections; different driving function=>different recollections=>different perceived identity. ... It makes sense to understand longterm potentiation as an incorporation of "episodic memory dynamics" into the driving function; the dogmatization of recurrent observation.

Thanks for your time.