Meditation-Induced Self-Boundary Flexibility and Prosociality: A MEG and Behavioral Measures Study.

Background: In the last decade, empirical studies on the beneficial effects of meditation on prosocial capacities have accumulated, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Buddhist sources state that liberating oneself from a fixed view of the self by gaining access to its transitory and malleable nature leads to increased compassion and other prosocial traits. These, however, have not yet been empirically tested.

An Overview of Neurophenomenological Approaches to Meditation and their Relevance to Clinical Research.

There is a renewed interest in taking phenomenology seriously in consciousness research, contemporary psychiatry, and neurocomputation. The neurophenomenology research program, pioneered by Varela (1996), rigorously examines subjective experience using first-person methodologies, inspired by phenomenology and contemplative practices. This review explores recent advancements in neurophenomenological approaches, particularly their application to meditation practices and potential clinical research translations.

Suspending the Embodied Self in Meditation Attenuates Beta Oscillations in the Posterior Medial Cortex.

Human experience is imbued by the sense of being an embodied agent. The investigation of such basic self-consciousness has been hampered by the difficulty of comprehensively modulating it in the laboratory while reliably capturing ensuing subjective changes. The present preregistered study fills this gap by combining advanced meditative states with principled phenomenological interviews: 46 long-term meditators (19 female, 27 male) were instructed to modulate and attenuate their embodied self-experience during magnetoencephalographic monitoring.

Ayahuasca-induced personal death experiences: prevalence, characteristics, and impact on attitudes toward death, life, and the environment.

Introduction: Despite an emerging understanding regarding the pivotal mechanistic role of subjective experiences that unfold during acute psychedelic states, very little has been done in the direction of better characterizing such experiences and determining their long-term impact. The present paper utilizes two cross-sectional studies for spotlighting - for the first time in the literature - the characteristics and outcomes of self-reported past experiences related to one's subjective sense of death during ayahuasca ceremonies, termed here Ayahuasca-induced Personal Death (APD) experiences.

Methods: Study 1 ( = 54) reports the prevalence, demographics, intensity, and impact of APDs on attitudes toward death, explores whether APDs are related with psychopathology, and reveals their impact on environmental concerns.

Situational assessment of empathy and compassion: Predicting prosociality using a video-based task.

Classical psychometric approaches in social science measure individuals' tendency to experience empathy and compassion. Using abstract questionnaire items, they place high demand on subjects' capacity to introspect, memorize, and generalize the corresponding emotions. We employed a Socio-affective Video Task (SoVT)-an alternative approach that measures situationally elicited emotions-and assessed its predictive power over prosocial behavior against classical questionnaires in a sample of Israeli university students.

The (In)flexible self: Psychopathology, mindfulness, and neuroscience.

Clinical and neuroscientific evidence indicates that transdiagnostic processes contribute to the generation and maintenance of psychopathological symptoms and disorders. Rigidity (inflexibility) appears a core feature of most transdiagnostic pathological processes. Decreasing rigidity may prove important to restore and maintain mental health.

Enhanced declarative memory in long-term mindfulness practitioners.

Objectives: Mindfulness meditation (MM) practice is considered to benefit physical and mental health. In particular, several studies have shown a beneficial effect of MM practice on memory performance. However, it is still not clear how long-term training affects long-term declarative memory.

Age-related functional connectivity along the hippocampal longitudinal axis.

Accumulated evidence points toward a long-axis functional division of the hippocampus, with its anterior part primarily associated with emotional processes and the posterior with navigation and cognition. It is yet unclear, however, how functional connectivity between areas along the hippocampal longitudinal axis and other brain regions differ, and how they are affected by age. Applying an anatomically driven general linear model-based functional connectivity analysis on a large database of resting-state fMRI data, we demonstrate that independent of age, the posterior hippocampus is functionally connected primarily with sensory and motor areas, the middle hippocampus with the default mode network, and the anterior with limbic and prefrontal regions.

Self-Boundary Dissolution in Meditation: A Phenomenological Investigation.

A fundamental aspect of the sense of self is its pre-reflective dimension specifying the self as a bounded and embodied knower and agent. Being a constant and tacit feature structuring consciousness, it eludes robust empirical exploration. Recently, deep meditative states involving global dissolution of the sense of self have been suggested as a promising path for advancing such an investigation.

Effects of a Mindfulness Intervention Among Arab Teachers Are Mediated by Decentering: A Pilot Study.

Although mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in education are widely spreading in the world, examination of mindfulness effects in Arab schools is still scarce. This pilot study aimed to fill this gap by examining the effects of an MBI among Arab teachers in Israel. This examination was conducted within the framework of the mindful self in school relationships (MSSR) model, which suggests that the positive effects of MBI on teachers' emotion regulation are mediated by decentering.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Neurophenomenology - The Case of Studying Self Boundaries With Meditators.

This paper is a practical guide to neurophenomenology. Varela's neurophenomenological research program (NRP) aspires to bridge the gap between, and integrate, first-person (1P) and third-person (3P) approaches to understanding the mind. It does so by suggesting a methodological framework allowing these two irreducible phenomenal domains to relate and reciprocally support the investigation of one another.

Inter-participant consistency of language-processing networks during abstract thoughts.

Human brain imaging typically employs structured and controlled tasks to avoid variable and inconsistent activation patterns. Here we expand this assumption by showing that an extremely open-ended, high-level cognitive task of thinking about an abstract content, loosely defined as "abstract thinking" - leads to highly consistent activation maps. Specifically, we show that activation maps generated during such cognitive process were precisely located relative to borders of well-known networks such as internal speech, visual and motor imagery.

Contemplative neuroscience, self-awareness, and education.

Accumulating research in education shows that contemplative practices contribute to and foster well-being of individuals in sustainable ways. This bears special importance for teachers, as it affects not only them but also their students. Based on accumulating behavioral and neuroscientific findings, it has been suggested that a key process by which mindfulness meditation enhances self-regulation is the altering of self-awareness.

Fully immersed: State absorption and electrophysiological effects of the OVO Whole-Body Perceptual Deprivation chamber.

Absorption, the ability to highly focus attention, as well as openness to self-altering experiences, is an important psychological construct, closely related to deep-meditation states and other altered states of consciousness. Yet, little is known about the electrophysiological profile of states of absorption, possibly due to the difficulty to induce this state in the lab. While most studies have used a visual Ganzfeld (homogeneous perceptual field), here we use a novel technique of full immersion-the OVO Whole-Body Perceptual Deprivation (OVO-WBPD) chamber, which is an altered sensory environment in the form of a human-sized egg.

Individual EEG alpha profiles are gender-dependent and indicate subjective experiences in Whole-Body Perceptual Deprivation.

We use a unique environment of Whole Body Perceptual Deprivation (WBPD) to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC) in our participants, and employ online EEG recording. We present individual EEG alpha profiles, and show how these data can be analyzed at the individual level. Our goal is to investigate to what degree subjective experience matches EEG alpha profile, and in particular, the various alpha hemispheric asymmetries observed in the frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes.

When meditators avoid counting during time production things get interesting.

Time production (TP) with or without chronometric counting both instantiates and reflects the working of an internal clock, as originally posited by Treisman. We exploit the fact that a number of experienced meditators, who had previously participated in a study wherein TP was assessed, and who had employed chronometric counting then, would be coming back to the lab to participate in a second study. We specifically requested that they should not employ chronometric counting this time, thus allowing us to contrast TP with and without counting.

Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness.

In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of altered states of consciousness induced by classical psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, whose effects are mainly mediated by agonism of serotonin receptors.

Time Perception and the Experience of Time When Immersed in an Altered Sensory Environment.

The notion that exposure to a monotonous sensory environment could elicit reports indicating aberrant subjective experience and altered time perception is the impetus for the present report. Research has looked at the influence of exposure to such environments on time perception, reporting that the greater the environmental variation, the shorter is the time estimation obtained by the method of production. Most conditions for creating an altered sensory environment, however, have not facilitated an immersive experience, one that directly impacts both time perception and subjective experience.

Data for default network reduced functional connectivity in meditators, negatively correlated with meditation expertise.

FMRI data described here was recorded during resting-state in Mindfulness Meditators (MM) and control participants (see "Task-induced activity and resting-state fluctuations undergo similar alterations in visual and DMN areas of long-term meditators" Berkovich-Ohana et al. (2016) [1] for details). MM participants were also scanned during meditation.

Alterations in task-induced activity and resting-state fluctuations in visual and DMN areas revealed in long-term meditators.

Recently we proposed that the information contained in spontaneously emerging (resting-state) fluctuations may reflect individually unique neuro-cognitive traits. One prediction of this conjecture, termed the "spontaneous trait reactivation" (STR) hypothesis, is that resting-state activity patterns could be diagnostic of unique personalities, talents and life-styles of individuals. Long-term meditators could provide a unique experimental group to test this hypothesis.

Self-specific processing in the meditating brain: a MEG neurophenomenology study.

Self-specific processes (SSPs) specify the self as an embodied subject and agent, implementing a functional self/nonself distinction in perception, cognition, and action. Despite recent interest, it is still undetermined whether SSPs are all-or-nothing or graded phenomena; whether they can be identified in neuroimaging data; and whether they can be altered through attentional training. These issues are approached through a neurophenomenological exploration of the sense-of-boundaries (SB), the fundamental experience of being an 'I' (self) separated from the 'world' (nonself).