Master’s Thesis

Portfolio of Applied Learning, including a Dissertation entitled:

“Evidence and Implications of Self-Distancing in Psychosis and Mindfulness Practices: A Narrative Synthesis”

ABSTRACT

Background

Psychosis and mindfulness meditation both involve central processes of distancing from one’s sense-of-self. Independently, this distancing is typically associated with a negative trajectory in psychosis and a positive one in mindfulness. Additionally, mindfulness-based therapies are successfully used as treatments for mild to moderate psychosis, implying shared biological loci of action. Despite this, the biological changes underlying the two self-distancing processes have never been compared.

Aims

This review aims to comparatively explore the nature of self-distancing-related structural and functional biological changes associated with mindfulness practices and psychosis, and consider their implications for future research, diagnostics, and treatment stratification. A secondary goal is to identify potential biological continua in the progression of psychosis and mindfulness practices.

Methods

This synthesis comparatively analyzes ten neuroimaging studies—six mindfulness-related and four psychosis-related—spanning three domains of self-related processing: Prereflective processing, Minimal Self processing, and Higher-Order Processing.

Results

Mindfulness practitioners exhibit increased sensorimotor-thalamic information gating while psychotic individuals exhibit decreased sensorimotor-thalamic information gating, potentially constituting a psychosis/mindfulness biological continuum.

Comparison of self-related processing involving the anterior cingulate cortex and alterations to the experience of Narrative Selfhood exhibit distancing-related variations in structure and function, but do not share sufficiently opposing directionality to substantiate a continuum claim.

Conclusions

Given the opposing valence of information-gating, further exploration of the potential biological continuum of psychosis/mindfulness thalamic structural/functional alterations may provide insight into the efficacy of MBIs for psychosis. Future research into self-distancing related structural/functional changes in psychosis and mindfulness is warranted.

Link to full text:

Key pages of Interest:

10 - Systematic Review/Meta-Analysis coursework

19 - Ethics Application Coursework

25 - Seed/Grant Funding Application Coursework

30 - SPSS Usage and Pedagogy Coursework

41 - Dissertation begins

Prodigal Son

A Novel by Robert Toms

#1 New Release in Religious Science Fiction & Fantasy!

It’s 2038, and Theo Freeman Jr. is on the cusp of manhood, yet remains a passenger in his own life, paralyzed by the increasing uncertainty of an ever-accelerating future. Nine years prior, he and his parents migrated to a newly established moon colony of Elites, separated from the strife of the world they left behind—that is, until his mother falls into a coma under suspicious circumstances while hosting a dinner for Bob Ditto, the unsettlingly charming frontrunner in the upcoming bi-world election for Head Programmer of the Societal Operating System. 

He is forced to return to Earth, where he is captured by the spiritual eco-terrorist commune Tovu Va Bohu, catching the watchful eye of their revolutionary leader, Butler, who is planning to infect the Societal Operating System with a virus that will “level the playing field of society”. As Theo begins to sympathize with their cause, he is forced to forge his own path in the face of uncertainty—should he join them and forsake everything he’s ever known, or will he stay true to his roots and find his way back home to his mother? Has he been sufficiently prepared for his unfolding future by the techno-modernist culture that raised him? How can he know who to trust, when truth itself has been turned upside down?

This 97,000-word sci-fi parable-of-parables was started on January 1st, 2020 as an exercise to analyze and assimilate current developments and credible predictions in science, technology, religion, and politics into a cohesive worldview, using the structure of a coming-of-age hero’s journey set against a Schroedinger-eqsue ticking clock of either ideology-induced Armageddon or the impending AI Singularity. The result is a highly allusive, intentionally constructed unit of culture designed to speak to both the reader's conscious and subconscious, meant to help us through what John Vervaeke, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and others have dubbed "The Meaning Crisis".