| Just about every project is looking at things from a material perspective. The "spiritual" perspective has legs with respect to life-extension, as well, though there are at least two distinct scientific definitions of spirituality, one based on mindfulness and one based on its exact opposite, mind-wandering resting. Both strategies (based on distinctly different meditation practices) have research suggesting that lifespan can be extended by their approach. e.g. For mindfulness: Molecules of Silence: Effects of Meditation on Gene Expression and Epigenetics
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... vs For the "other white meat": Transcriptomics of Long-Term Meditation Practice: Evidence for Prevention or Reversal of Stress Effects Harmful to Health
https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/57/3/218 See also: On the Neurobiology of Meditation: Comparison of Three Organizing Strategies to Investigate Brain Patterns during Meditation Practice
https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/56/12/712 For how distinctly different types of meditation have different effects on nervous system and body. A hint: the words used to teach meditation can lead to radically different measurable physiological outcomes depending on the context in which those words are spoken and the persistence of those effects is also very dependent on the context in which instructions are given, often leading to exactly the opposite effect on certain physiological measures: Compare Reduced functional connectivity between cortical sources in five meditation traditions detected with lagged coherence using EEG tomography
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538... with figure 3 of Enhanced EEG alpha time-domain phase synchrony during Transcendental Meditation: Implications for cortical integration theory https://www.brainresearchinstitute.org/research/totalbrain/T... https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S01651684050021... You can't get more distinct than "reduced" vs 100% coherence across all leads simultaneously. And thereby hangs the tale for explaining how and why different mental practices have different long-term, persistent changes in brain activity in favor of longevity: reduced EEG coherence => reduced resting; 100% implies that the brain is only resting; the longer you practice some forms of meditation, the less restful the brain becomes. Always mindful vs always resting or moving back into resting mode asap given the chance. |
