Contemplative Neuroscience through the Lens of Diversity and Social Justice

Academic psychology and neuroscience have typically centered viewpoints of the dominant culture (WEIRD: White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), which has influenced both the process and content of contemplative neuroscience. By incorporating more diverse perspectives through a lens of social justice, Helen Weng will present new lines of work that center viewpoints of meditators who belong to minority groups, and use contemplative practices to heal identity-based suffering and build community.

Weng will highlight two main approaches to studying this deep contemplative work: 1) using community engagement to incorporate diverse perspectives and participants, and 2) using multivariate neuroscientific methods to measure meditation skills, which rigorously measure diverse mental states within and between individuals. Community engagement with the East Bay Meditation Center was used to culturally-adapt research procedures for people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities, and the fat community. Importantly, community members were involved at each step, thereby empowering groups that have been historically oppressed in scientific research. To accommodate experiential and neural diversity, the EMBODY Task uses individualized machine learning applied to functional MRI data to measure diverse mental states during meditation. The EMBODY Task honors each individual’s unique brain structure and function, and provides novel metrics of attention during meditation (such as time attending to the breath) that can be analyzed at the group level.

These methodological advances not only improve research in diverse populations but enhance the scientific rigor for the entire field. Throughout, Weng will highlight the importance of cultivating diverse scholars for enriching the field of contemplative research.