Research on the effects of meditation has focused on understanding both the meditative state as well as characteristics resulting from long-term, regular meditation practice. Understanding these states and traits is of interest because of potential clinical applications and the possibility for better understanding of brain states and function. In particular, this is of interest for …
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Meditation-induced changes in anticipation and experience of pain
Human neuroimaging offers a powerful way to connect animal and human research on emotion, with profound implications for psychological science. However, the gulf between animal and human studies remains a formidable obstacle: Human studies typically focus on the cortex and a few subcortical regions such as the amygdala, whereas deeper structures such as the brainstem …
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Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness in experienced and beginning meditators
Most meditation traditions integrate attention to the internal state of the body into the practice of meditation, and teach that a central effect of the meditative practice is increased awareness of the body. To test whether meditators have increased body awareness we examined the performance of two groups of experienced meditators compared to one group …
Session V – Reparative Humanism: Exploring the Meaning of Ubuntu
A spirit of Ubuntu gestures towards both an embrace and a challenge that holds Others to greater moral accountability, and calls on them to be ethical subjects. Ubuntu is fundamental in both ethics and politics, and is relevant to the embodied politics of forgiveness after mass trauma and violence. I will elaborate on this notion …
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Regulating emotion in social situations: An fMRI study of experienced Buddhist meditators
In previous work, experienced meditators demonstrated sustained high-amplitude gamma oscillations during meditation at frequencies associated with mental processes such as attention, working memory, and perception, suggesting that meditation might lead to long-term behavioral and neural changes. We examined the effects of meditation experience on attention, perception, and decision-making through two studies of individuals with extensive …
Abrahamic Contemplative Traditions
To date, the traditions and techniques that have been most substantively researched in the field of contemplative science have largely derived from Buddhism and Buddhist-inspired movements. While there have been tremendous advances and developments due to this collaboration—indeed there would be no field without it—a natural consequence of this specific alliance is that insights from …
Varieties of Contemplative Experience
The Contemplative Development Mapping Project (CDMP) is a group of scholars, scientists, and practitioners who are personally and professionally committed to enriching our understanding of contemplative practices and experiences. This interdisciplinary “think tank” is comprised of researchers from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience and religious studies. By integrating first-person, second-person, …
Neural effects of mindfulness meditation training on working memory
We are presently undertaking a series of psychophysical pilot studies, recording extensive data from a small number of individuals. Using breath as the object of meditation, we are searching for EEG signals (possibly in the gamma-frequency band) that correlate with attentional quality. In response to a cue, subjects indicate by button press their subjective level …
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Trust and Christian contemplative practice: A social neuroscientific study of spiritual capital in a contemplative tradition
Growing recognition of the benefits of contemplative practice for the reduction of harmful stress and the improvement of prosocial behavior is prompting research into how these effects arise. We define contemplative practice as intentionally attempting to suspend all discursive and evaluative thought. In practice, most forms of contemplative practice emphasize compassion for self and others, …
The functional plasticity of attention
Recent studies suggest attention may be trained as a skill. While a large body of literature suggests that expertise in domains like chess or music requires 5,000 to 10,000 hours of practice, most previous studies examined changes in attention following far less training. We report performance on different attention tasks by 32 Buddhist meditators, who …
