vue - John Vervaeke: Altered States of Consciousness and the Cultivation of Wisdom

This talk was given by University of Toronto professor Dr. John Vervaeke at the fourth annual Mind Matters conference, "Mind Matters IV: Altered States", held on Feb 27th, 2016. The original video of the same title can be found @ John Vervaeke - https://youtu.be/syWfyTMzSSw. Dr. John Vervaeke is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto since 1994, teaching in both the Psychology Department and the Cognitive Science Program. He also teaches a course in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health Program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science. He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students’ Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. His most recent publications include Relevance Realization the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science (2012) Relevance, Meaning, and the Cognitive Science of Wisdom (2012), Relevance Realization and the Neurodynamics and Neuroconnectivity of General Intelligence (2013), and a forthcoming chapter in Hypnosis and Meditation: Towards an Integrative Science of Conscious Planes entitled Reformulating the Mindfulness Construct: the Cognitive Processes at work in Mindfulness, Hypnosis, and Mystical States. His research interests are relevance realization, insight problem solving, general intelligence, consciousness, mindfulness, rationality, and wisdom. His abiding passion is to address the meaning crisis that besets western culture. One important feature of altered states of consciousness is that many individuals are highly motivated to seek them out. Many traditional explanations of this motivational drive have focused on pathological reasons for such motivation, such as the escape from suffering or the distraction from unwanted information, etc. However, these accounts are dependent on the altered state being first phenomenologically marked as beneficial in some manner. A process can only be hijacked by pathology if that process has an original adaptive value. Without that adaptive value, the deep motivation driving the pathology cannot be fully explained. Several prominent theories of consciousness are converging on the claim that one of the central roles of consciousness is relevance realization (i.e., how a computationally limited cognitive agent determines the information relevant to solving its problems within a complex and changing environment). This implies that the alteration of consciousness may serve the adaptive function of improving the ability to realize relevance by altering one's salience landscape. Vervaeke and Ferraro (2012) argued that such recursive enhancement of relevance realization was the central feature in the cultivation of wisdom. Flow is a clear case of such a sapiental, altered state, as is mindfulness (Vervaeke and Ferraro, 2016). Mystical experience has also been shown to have a lasting increase in openness (Griffiths, 2012) which affords more insight, which is, in turn, a central feature of wisdom.