“Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity“

Abstract:

“Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that “living in the moment” increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced meditators and matched meditation-naive controls as they performed several different meditations (Concentration, Loving-Kindness, Choiceless Awareness). We found that the main nodes of the default mode network(medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices) were relatively deactivated in experienced meditators across all meditation types. Furthermore, functional connectivity analysis revealed stronger coupling in experienced meditators between the posterior cingulate, dorsal anterior cingulate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (regions previously implicated in self- monitoring and cognitive control), both at baseline and during meditation. Our findings demonstrate differences in the default-mode network that are consistent with decreased mind-wandering. As such, these provide a unique understanding of possible neural mechanisms of meditation.”

Summary:

Aims: 9/10

Methods: 5/10

Interpretation: 7/10

Importance/Generalizability: 4/10

Overall: 6.25/10

The good: simple, clear cut design, low amount of voodoo, relatively sensible findings

The bad: lack of behavioral co-variates to explain neural data, yet another cross-sectional design

The ugly: prominent reporting of uncorrected findings, comparison of meditation-naive controls to practitioners using meditation instructions (failure to control task demands).

Take-home: Some interesting conclusions, from a somewhat tired and inconclusive design. Poor construction of baseline condition leads to a shot-gun spattering of brain regions with a few that seem interesting given prior work. Let’s move beyond poorly controlled cross-sections and start unravelling the core mechanisms (if any) involved in mindfulness.

Extended Review:
Although this paper used typical GLM and functional connectivity analyses, it loses points in several areas. First, although the authors repeatedly suggest that their “relative paucity of findings” may be “driven by the sensitivity of GLM analysis to fluctuations at baseline… and since meditation practitioners may be (meditating) at baseline…” the contrast would be weak. However, I will side with Jensen et al (2011) here in saying: Meditation naive controls receiving less than 5 minutes of instruction in “focused attention, loving-kindness and choiceless awareness” are simply no controls at all. The argument that the inability of the GLM to detect differences that are quite obviously confounded by a lack of an appropriately controlled baseline is galling at best. This is why we use a GLM-approach; it’s senseless to make conclusions about brain activity when your baseline is no baseline at all. Telling meditation-naive controls to utilize esoteric cultural practices of which they have only just been introduced too, and then comparing that to highly experienced practitioners is a perfect storm of cognitive confusion and poorly controlled demand characteristic. Further, I am disappointed in the review process that allowed the following statement “We found a similar pattern in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), another primary node of the DMN, although it did not survive whole-brain correction for signifigance” followed by this image:

These results are then referred to repeatedly in the following discussion. I’m sorry, but when did uncorrected findings suddenly become interpretable? I blame the reviewers here over the authors- they should have known better. The MPFC did not survive correction and hence should not be included in anything other than a explicitly stated as such “exploratory analysis”. In fact it’s totally unclear from the methods section of this paper how these findings where at all discovered: did the authors first examine the uncorrected maps and then re-analyze them using the FWE correction? Or did they reduce their threshold in an exploratory post-hoc fashion? These things make a difference and I’m appalled that the reviewers let the article go to print as it is, when figure 1 and the discussion clearly give the non-fMRI savy reader the impression that a main finding of this study is MPFC activation during meditation. Can we please all agree to stop reporting uncorrected p-values?

I will give the authors this much; the descriptions of practice, and the theoretical guideposts are all quite coherent and well put-together. I found their discussion of possible mechanisms of DMN alteration in meditation to be intriguing, even if I do not agree with their conclusion. Still, it pains me to see a paper with so much potential fail to address the pitfalls in meditation research that should now be well known. Indeed the authors themselves make much ado about how difficult proper controls are, yet seem somehow oblivious to the poorly controlled design they here report. This leads me to my own reinterpretation of their data.

A new default mode, or confused controls?

Brewer et al (2011) report that, when using a verbally guided meditation instruction with meditation naive-controls and experienced practitioners, greater activations in PCC, temporal regions, and for loving-kindness, amygdala are found. Given strong evidence by colleagues Christian Jensen et al (2011) that these kinds of contrasts better represent differences in attentional effort than any mechanism inherent to meditation, I can’t help but wonder if what were seeing here is simply some controls trying to follow esoteric instructions and getting confused in the process. Consider the instruction for the choiceless awareness condition:

“Please pay attention to whatever comes into your awareness, whether it is a thought, emotion, or body sensation. Just follow it until something else comes into your awareness, not trying to hold onto it or change it in any way. When something else comes into your awareness, just pay attention to it until the next thing comes along”

Given that in most contemplative traditions, choiceless awareness techniques are typically late-level advanced practices, in which the very concept of grasping to a stimulus is distinctly altered and laden with an often spiritual meaning, it seems obvious to me that such an instruction constitutes and excellent mindwandering inducement for naive-controls. Do you meditate? I do a little, and yet I find these instructions extremely difficult to follow without essentially sending my mind in a thousand directions. Am I doing this correctly?  When should I shift? Is this a thought or am I just feeling hungry? These things constitute mind-wandering but for the controls, I would argue they constitute following the instructions. The point is that you simply can’t make meaningful conclusions about the neural mechanisms involved in mindfulness from these kinds of instructions.

Finally, let’s examine the functional-connectivity analysis. To be honest, there isn’t a whole lot to report here; the functional connectivity during meditation is perhaps confounded by the same issues I list above, which seems to me a probable cause for the diverse spread of regions reported between controls and meditators. I did find this bit to be interesting:

“Using the mPFC as the seed region, we found increased connectivity with the fusiform gyrus, inferior temporal and parahippocampal gyri, and left posterior insula (among other regions) in meditators relative to controls during meditation (Fig. 3, Fig. S1H, and Table S3). A subset of those regions showed the same relatively increased connectivity in meditators during the baseline period as well (Fig. S1G and Table1)

I found it interesting that the meditation conditions appear to co-activate MPFC and insula, and would love to see this finding replicated in properly controlled design. I also have a nagging wonder as to why the authors didn’t bother to conduct a second-level covariance analysis of their findings with the self-reported mind-wandering scores. If these findings accurately reflect meditation-induced alterations in the DMN, or as the authors more brazenly suggest “a entirely new default network”, wouldn’t we expect their PCC modulations to be predicted by individual variability in mind-wandering self-reports? Of course, we could open the whole can of worms that is “what does it mean when you ask participants if they ‘experienced mind wandering” but I’ll leave that for a future review. At least the authors throw a bone to neurophenomenology, suggesting in the discussion that future work utilize first-person methodology. Indeed.

Last, it occurs to me that the primary finding, of increased DLPFC and ACC in meditation>Controls, also fits well with my intepretation that this design is confounded by demand characteristics. If you take a naive subject and put them in the scanner with these instructions, I’ve argued that their probably going to do something a whole lot like mind-wandering. On the other hand, an experienced practitioner has a whole lot of implicit pressure on them to live up to their tradition. They know what they are their for, and hence they know that they should be doing their thing with as much effort as possible. So what does the contrast meditation>naive really give us? It gives us mind-wandering in the naive group, and increased attentional effort in the practitioner group. We can’t conclude anything from this design regarding mechanisms intrinsic to mindfulness; I predict that if you constructed a similar setting with any kind of dedicated specialist, and gave instructions like “think about your profession, what it means to you, remember a time you did really well” you would see the exact same kind of results. You just can’t compare the uncomparable.

Disclaimer: as usual, I review in the name of science, and thank the authors whole-heartily for the great effort and attention to detail that goes into these projects.  Also it’s worth mentioning that my own research focuses on many of these exact issues in mental training research, and hence i’m probably a bit biased in what I view as important issues.

“We are not interested in the logic itself, nor will we argue for replacing the .05 alpha with another level of alpha, but at this point in our discussion we only wish to emphasize that dichotomous significance testing has no ontological basis. That is, we want to underscore that, surely, God loves the .06 nearly as much as the .05. Can there be any doubt that God views the strength of evidence for or against the null as a fairly continuous function of the magnitude of p?”

Rosnow, R.L. & Rosenthal, R. (1989). Statistical procedures and the justification of knowledge in psychological science. American Psychologist, 44, 1276-1284.

This colorful quote came to mind while discussing significance testing procedures with colleagues over lunch. In Cognitive Neuroscience, with it’s enormous boon of obfuscated data, it seems we are so often met with these kinds of seemingly absurd, yet important statistical decisions. Should one correct p-values over the lifetime, as often suggested by our resident methodology expert? I love this suggestion; imagine an academia where the fossilized experts (no offense experts) are tossed aside for the newest and greenest researchers whose pool of p-values remains untapped!

Really though, just how many a priori anatomical hypothesis should one have sealed up in envelopes? As one colleague joked, it seems advantageous to keep a drawer full of wild speculations sealed away in case one’s whole-brain analysis fails to yield results. Of course we must observe and follow best scientific and statistical procedures to their maximum, but in truth a researcher often finds themselves at these obscure impasses, thousands of dollars in scanning funding spent, trying to decide whether or not they predicted a given region’s involvement. In these circumstances, it has even been argued that there is a certain ethical need to explore one’s data and not merely throw away all non-hypothesis fitting findings. While I do not support this claim, I believe it is worth considering. And further, I believe that a vast majority of the field, from the top institutions to the most obscure, often dip into these murky ethical realms.

This is one area I hope “data-driven” science, as in the Human Genome and Human Connectome projects, can succeed. It also points to a desperate need for publishing reform; surely what matters is not how many blobs fall on one side of an arbitrary distinction, but rather a full and accurate depiction of one’s data and it’s implications. In a perfect world, we would not need to obscure the truth hidden in these massive datasets while we hunt for sufficiently low p-values.

Rather we should publish a clear record, showing exactly what was done, what correlated with what, and also where significance and non-significance lie. Perhaps we might one day dream of combing through such datasets, actually explaining what drove the .06′s vs the .05′s. For now however, we must be careful not to look at our uncorrected statistical maps; for that way surely voodoo lie! And that is perhaps the greatest puzzle of all; two datasets, all things being equal. In one case the researcher writes down on paper, “blobs A, B, and C I shall see” and conducts significant ROI analyses on these regions. In the other he first examines the uncorrected map, notices blobs A, B, and C, and then conducts a region of interest analysis. In both cases, the results and data are the same. And yet one is classic statistical voodoo- double dipping- and the other perfectly valid hypothesis testing. It seems thus that our truth criterion lay not only with our statistics, but also in some way, in the epistemological ether.

Of course, it’s really more of a pragmatic distinction than an ontological one. The voodoo distinction serves not to delineate true from false results but rather to discourage researchers from engaging in risky practices that could inflate the risk of false-positives. All-in-all, I agree with Dorothy Bishop: we need to stop chasing the novel, typically spurious and begin to share and investigate our data in ways that create lasting, informative truths. The brain is simply too complex and expensive an object of study to let these practices build into an inevitable file-drawer of doom. It infuriates me how frustratingly obtuse many published studies are, even in top journals, regarding the precise methods and analysis that went into the paper. Wouldn’t we all rather share our data, and help explain it cohesively? I dread the coming collision between the undoubtably monolithic iceberg of unpublished negative findings, spurious positive findings, and our most trusted brain mapping paradigms.

I’ve been crazy busy the past year, primarily mastering Matlab and fMRI statistics. It’s been  a good run and I’ve both collected and analyzed a ton of data. In just a little over a year, I’ve completed a longitudinal study of meditation, including two event-related paradigms, resting-state, DTI, high-resolution T1 anatomical data, and a bevy of physiological and behavioral data. On top of that, I collected a similarly broad dataset for my Varela-award study “The Neurophenomenology of Mindfulness: Meta-cognitive Awareness in Adept Contemplatives”. Finally I’ve written and published a first attempt at a broad-based model of social-cognitive action control, the “Pre-loading Model”.

It’s been a pretty intense year, but I’m excited to write-up and publish my results and you can be sure that I’ll be sharing them here first. I look forward to discussing some of the more intriguing bits, and am also excited by the specter of what looks like a fascinating post-doctoral project.

When I look back I can’t believe everything I’ve learned in the year gone. It feels like every inch of my gray matter has been packed with vital information regarding BOLD timeseries and their statistical analysis. Finally sitting down to write something other than code feels great; I can’t believe the way my perspectives and research interests have changed in absorbing all this new knowledge.

As I move from analyzing my data to writing it up, I hope to return to regular blogging, as I believe this is the best place to vent and develop my ideas, in a living and shared format. I’m not sure exactly what direction i’ll take Neuroconscience in the months to come, but I hope to be able to have fun sharing my ideas and experiences with the community.

It’s not that i’m not sympathetic to the idea we spend too much time in front of a screen. It’s levying the weight of that argument around some BS neurobabble. The brain, and it’s astounding capacity for change, need not enter this debate in an alarmist fashion. If we want to discuss how our society spends its time, let’s not cling onto poorly understood scientific phenomena to do so. Let’s talk about radical capitalism and the 40 hour work week. I spend 38+ hours a week online, programming, and generally living on a computer as do many contemporary workers. Talking about the brain won’t change that- but it will sell books. And I think it puts a clear perspective on the 3-4 hours a week I might spend playing games. The problem isn’t brains, games, or anything in between. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise wants to make a fast buck off you.

Susan is hoping to use her high-standing to kick off some kind of alarmist movement akin to the global warming debate. She’s even been so cheeky as to give her cause a similar sounding name “Mindchange”, so that her would be activists might have some nice banner around which to rally. Plus, it makes for some pretty obvious best-selling book titles. Maybe even a series of self-help audiobooks filled to the brim with half-truisms, folksy inspiration, and plenty of badly misunderstood science.

And that’s just the problem. Beneath the seemingly innocent wish to make a legacy and buck for herself, Susan has denigrated one big problem (global warming), disrespected the science, and mis-educated her audience. Not only that but I believe she’s obscuring the real problem. Call me radical, but if we don’t start to take serious the cultural-systemic problems that threaten our world, we’re fucked. By capitalizing on sensation, the Baroness has obscured a legitimate debate about the way we spend our lives.

Here’s the abstract, via Evan Thompson

“How the human brain goes virtual: distinct cortical regions of the person processing-network are involved in self-identification with virtual avatars.”

Cerebral Cortex: Shanti Ganesh, Hein T. van Schie, Floris P. de Lange, Evan Thompson, and Daniel H.J. Wigboldus

“We applied functional neuroimaging to 22 long-term online gamers and 21 non-gaming controls, while they rated personality traits of self, avatar and familiar others. Strikingly, neuroimaging data revealed greater avatar-referential cortical activity in the left inferior parietal lobe, a region associated with self-identification from a third-person perspective. The magnitude of this brain activity correlated positively with the propensity to incorporate external body enhancements into one’s bodily identity. Avatar-referencing furthermore recruited greater activity in the rostral anterior cingulate gyrus, suggesting relatively greater emotional self-involvement with one’s avatar. Post-scanning behavioral data revealed superior recognition memory for avatar relative to others. Interestingly, memory for avatar positively co-varied with play duration.”

I’ll admit, I expected the usual “self x vs other x produces greater MPFC activity”. These findings are a nice extension to similiar work by Schilbach et al. I find it particularly interesting that the avatar-related activity correlated with a tendency to couple with external tools; a bit of an Andy Clark-esque vibe there. I look forward to reading the full article (and watching the media go nuts)!

I can’t imagine the extreme patience that goes into these studies! I’d love to hear more about how researchers in this area control for motion artifacts and other noise-elements. The entire data collection processes is really interesting- do let me know if you have any insight! You can read more about this research here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-build-a-better-learner

Results from incon > con, non-meditators vs meditators

In a nutshell, the authors find that meditation-practitioners show faster reaction times with reduced BOLD-signal for the incongruent (compared to congruent and neutral) condition only. The regions found to be more active for non-meditators compared to meditators are the (right) “lentiform nucleus, medial frontal gyrus, and pre-central gyrus” . As this is not accompanied by any difference in accuracy, the authors interpret the finding as demonstrating  that “meditators may have maintained the focus in naming the colour with less interference of reading the word and consequently have to exert less effort to monitor the conflict and less adjustment in the motor control of the impulses to choose the correct colour button.” The authors in the conclusion review related findings and mention that differences in age could have contributed to the effect.

So, what are we to make of these findings? As is my usual style, I’ll give a bulleted review of the problems that immediately stand out, and then some explanation afterwards. I’ll preface my critique by thanking the authors for their hard work; my comments are intended only for the good of our research community.

The good:

• Sensible findings; increases in reaction time and decreases in bold are demonstrated in areas previously implicated in meditation research
• Solid, easy to understand behavioral paradigm
• Relatively strong main findings ( P< .0001)
• A simple replication. We like replications!

I’ll preface my conclusion with something Sara Lazar, a meditation researcher and neuroimaging expert at the Harvard MGH told me last summer; we need to stop going for the “low hanging fruit of meditation research”. There are now over 20 published cross-sectional reaction-time based fMRI studies of “meditators” and “non-meditators”. Compare that to the incredibly sparse number of longitudinal, active controlled studies, and it is clear that we need to stop replicating these findings and start determining what they actually tell us. Why do we need to active control our meditation studies? For one thing, we know that reaction-time based tests are heavily based by the amount of effort one expends on the task. Effort is in turn influenced by task-demands (e.g. how you treat your participants, expectations surrounding the experiment). To give one in-press example, my colleagues Christian Gaden Jensen at the Copenhagen Neurobiology Research recently conducted a study demonstrating just how strong this confounding effect can be.

To briefly summarize, Christian recruited over 150 people for randomization to four experimental groups: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), non-mindfulness stress reduction (NMSR), wait-listed controls, and financially-motivated wait-listed controls. This last group is the truly interesting one; they were told that if they had top performance on the experimental tasks (a battery of classical reaction-time based and unspeeded perceptual threshold tasks) they’d receive a reward of approximately 100$. When Christian analyzed the data, he found that the financial incentive eliminated all reaction-time based differences between the MBSR, NMSR, and financially motivated groups! It’s important to note that this study, fully randomized and longitudinal, showed something not reflected in the bulk of published studies: that meditation may actually train more basic perceptual sensitivities rather than top-down control. This is exactly why we need to stop pursuing the low-hanging fruit of uncontrolled experimental design; it’s not telling us anything new! Meditation research is no longer exploratory.

In addition to these issues, there is another issue a bit more specific to meditation research. That is the totally sparse description of the practice- less than one sentence total, with no quantitative data! In this study we are not even told what the daily practice actually consists of, or its quality or length. These practitioners report an average of 8 years practice, yet that could be 1 hour per week of mantra meditation or 12 hours a week of non-dual zazen! These are not identical processes and our lack of knowledge for this sample severely limits our ability to assess the meaning of  these findings. For the past two years (and probably longer) of the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute, Richard Davidson and others have repeatedly stated that we must move beyond studying meditation as “a loose practice of FA and OM practices including x, y, z, & and other things”. Willoughby Britton suggested at a panel discussion that all meditation papers need to have at least one contemplative scholar on them or risk rejection. It’s clear that this study was most likely not reviewed by anyone with any serious academic background in meditation research.

My supervisor Antoine Lutz and his colleague John Dunne, authors of the paper that launched the “FA/OM” distinction, have since stated emphatically that we must go beyond these general labels and start investigating effects of specific meditation practices. To quote John, we need to stop treating meditation like a “black box” if we ever want to understand the actual mechanisms behind it. While I thank the authors of this paper for their earnest contribution, we need to take this moment to be seriously skeptical. We can only start to understand processes like meditation from a scientific point of view if we are willing to hold them to the highest of scientific standards. It’s time for us to start opening the black box and looking inside.

I was lucky enough to receive a Varela award for my work in meta-cognition and mental training and so this was my second year attending. I chose to take a slightly different approach from my first visit, when I basically followed the program and did whatever the M&L thought was the best use of my time. This meant lots of meditation- more than two hours per day not including the whole-day, silent “mini-retreat”. While I still practiced this year, I felt less obliged to do the full program, and I’m glad I took this route as it provided me a somewhat more detached, almost outsider view of the spectacle that is the Mind & Life SRI.

When I say spectacle, it’s important to understand how unconventional of a conference setting the SRI really is. Each year dozens of ambitious neuroscientists and clinicians meet with dozens of Buddhist monks and western “mindfulness” instructors. The initial feeling is one of severe culture clash; ambitious young scholars who can hardly wait to mention their Ivy League affiliations meet with the austere and almost ascetic approach of traditional Buddhist philosophy. In some cases it almost feels like a race to “out-mindful” one another, as folks put on a great show of piety in order to fit into the mood of the event. It can be a bit jarring to oscillate between the supposed tranquility and selflessness of mindfulness with the unabashed ambition of these highly talented and motivated folk- at least until things settle down a bit.

Nonetheless, the overall atmosphere of the SRI is one of serenity and scholarship. It’s an extremely fun, stimulating event, rich with amazingly talented yoga and meditation instructors and attended by the top researchers within the field. What follows is thus not meant as any kind of attack on the overall mission of the M&L. Indeed, I’m more than grateful to the institute for carrying on at least some form of Francisco Varela’s vision for cognitive science, and of course for supporting my own meditation research. With that being said, we turn to the question at hand: are monks objectively better at introspection? The answer for nearly everyone at the SRI appear to be “yes”, regardless of the scarcity of data suggesting this to be the case.

Enactivism and Francisco Varela

Before I can really get into this issue, I need to briefly review what exactly “enactivism” is and how it relates to the SRI. The Mind & Life institute was co-founded by Francisco Varela, a Chilean biologist and neuroscientist who is often credited with the birth and success of embodied and enactive cognitive science. Varela had a profound impact on scientists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists and is a central influence in my own theoretical work. Varela’s essential thesis was outlined in his book “The Embodied Mind”, in which Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, attempted to outline a new paradigm for the study of mind. In the book, Varela et al rely on examples from cross-cultural psychology, continental phenomenology, Buddhism, and cognitive science to argue that cognition (and mind) is essentially an embodied, enactive phenomenon. The book has since spawned a generation of researchers dedicated in some way to the idea that cognition is not essentially, or at least foundationally, computational and representational in form.

I don’t here intend to get into the roots of what enactivism is; for the present it suffices to say that enactivism as envisioned by Varela involved a dedication to the “middle way” in which idealism-objectivism duality is collapsed in favor of a dynamical non-representational account of cognition and the world. I very much favor this view and try to use it productively in my own research. Varela argued throughout his life that cognition was not essentially an internal, info-processing kind of phenomenon, but rather an emergent and intricately interwoven entity that arose from our history of structural coupling with the world.  He further argued that cognitive science needed to develop a first-person methodology if it was to fully explain the rich panorama of human consciousness.

A simpler way to put this is to say that Varela argued persuasively that minds are not computers “parachuted into an objective world” and that cognition is not about sucking up impoverished information for representation in a subjective format. While Varela invoked much of Buddhist ontology, including concepts of “emptiness” and “inter-relatedness”, to develop his account continental phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty also heavily inspired his vision of 4^th wave cognitive science.  At the SRI there is little mention of this; most scholars are unaware of the continental literature or that phenomenology is not equal to introspection. Indeed I had to cringe when one to-be-unnamed young scientist declared a particular spinal pathway to be “the central pathway for embodiment”.

This is a stark misunderstanding of just what embodiment means, and I would argue renders it a relatively trivial add-on to the information processing paradigm- something most enactivists would like to strongly resist. I politely pointed the gentleman to the example work of Ulric Neisser, who argued for the ecological embodied self, in which the structure of the face is said to pre-structure human experience in particular ways, i.e. we typically experience ourselves as moving through the world toward a central fovea-centered point. Embodiment is an external, or pre-noetic structuring of the mind; it follows no nervous pathway but rather structures the possibilities of the nervous system and mind. I hope he follows that reference down the rabbit hole of the full possibilities of embodiment- the least of which is body-as-extra-module.

Still, I certainly couldn’t blame this particular scientist for his mis-understanding; nearly everyone at the SRI is totally unfamiliar with externalist/phenomenal perspectives, which is a sad state of affairs for a generation of scientists being supported by grants in Varela’s name. Regardless of Varela’s vision for cognitive science, his thesis regarding introspectionism is certainly running strong: first-person methodologies are the hot topic of the SRI, and nearly everyone agreed that by studying contemplative practitioners’ subjective reports, we’d gain some special insight into the mind.  Bracketing whether introspection is what Varela really meant by neurophenomenology (I don’t think it is- phenomenology is not introspection) we are brought to the central question: are Buddhist practitioners expert introspectionists?

Expertise and Introspectionism

Varela certainly believed this to some degree. It’s not entirely clear to me that the bulk of Varela’s work summates to this maxim, but it’s at least certainly true that in papers such as his seminal “Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy to the hard problem?” he argued that a careful first-person methodology could reap great benefits in this arena. Varela later followed up this theoretical thesis with his now well-known experiment conducted with then PhD student and my current mentor Antoine Lutz.

While I won’t reproduce the details of this experiment at length here, Lutz and Varela demonstrated that it was in fact possible to inform and constrain electrophysiological measurements through the collection and systemization of first-person reports. It’s worth noting here that the participants in this experiment were every day folks, not meditation practitioners, and that Lutz & Varela developed a special method to integrate the reports rather than taking them simply at face value. In fact, while Varela did often suggest that we might through careful contemplation and collaboration with the Buddhist tradition refine first person methodologies and gain insight into the “hard-problem”, he never did complete these experiments with practitioners, a fact that can likely be attributed to his pre-mature death at the hand of aggressive hepatitis.

Regardless of Varela’s own work, it’s fascinating to me that at today’s SRI, if there is one thing nearly everyone seems to explicitly agree on, it’s that meditation practitioners have some kind of privileged access to experience. I can’t count how many discussions seemed to simply assume the truth of this, regardless of the fact that almost no empirical research has demonstrated any kind of increased meta-cognitive capacity or accuracy in adept contemplatives.

While Antoine and I are in fact running experiments dedicated to answering this question, the fact remains that this research is largely exploratory and without strong empirical leads to work from. While I do believe that some level of meditation practice can provide greater reliability and accuracy in meta-cognitive reports, I don’t see any reason to value the reports of contemplative practitioners above and beyond those of any other particular niche group. If I want to know what it’s like to experience baseball, I’m probably going to ask some professional baseball players and not a Buddhist monk. At several points during the SRI I tried to express just this sentiment; that studying Buddhist monks gives us a greater insight into what-it-is-like to be a monk and not much else. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I’d like to think I planted a few seeds of doubt.

There are several reasons for this. First, I part with Varela where he assumes that the Buddhist tradition and/or “Buddhist Psychology” have particularly valuable insights (for example, emptiness) that can’t be gleaned from western approaches. It might, but I don’t buy into the idea that the Buddhist tradition is its own kind of scientific approach to the mind; it’s not- it’s religion. For me the middle way means a lifelong commitment to a kind of meta-physical agnosticism, and I refuse to believe that any human tradition has a vast advantage over another. This was never more apparent than during a particularly controversial talk by John Dunne, a Harvard contemplative scholar, whose keynote was dedicated to getting scientists like myself to go beyond the traditional texts and veridical reports of practitioners and to instead engage in what he called “trialogue” in order to discover “what it is practitioners are really doing”. At the end of his talk one of the Dalai Lama’s lead monks actually took great offense, scolding John for “misleading the youth with his western academic approach”. The entire debacle was a perfect case-in-point demonstration of John’s talk; one cannot simply take the word of highly religious practitioners as some kind of veridical statement about the world.

This isn’t to say that we can’t learn a great deal about experience, and the mind, through meditation and careful introspection. I think at an early level it’s enough to just sit with ones breath and suspend beliefs about what exactly experience is. I do believe that in our modern lives; we spend precious little time with the body and our minds, simply observing what arises in a non-partial way.  I agree with Sogyal Rinpoche that we are at times overly dis-embodied and away from ourselves. Yet this practice isn’t unique to Buddhism; the phenomenological reduction comes from Husserl and is a practice developed throughout continental phenomenology. I do think that Buddhism has developed some particularly interesting techniques to aid this process, such as Vipassana and compassion-meditation, that can and will shed insights for the cognitive scientist interested in experience, and I hope that my own work will demonstrate as much.

But this is a very different claim from the one that says monastic Buddhists have a particularly special access to experience. At the end of the day I’m going to hedge my bets with the critical, empirical, and dialectical approach of cognitive science. In fact, I think there may be good reasons to suspect that high-level practitioners are inappropriate participants for “neurophenomenology”. Take for example, the excellent and controversial talk given this year by Willoughby Britton, in which she described how contemplative science had been too quick to sweep under the rug a vast array of negative “side-effects” of advanced practice. These effects included hallucination, de-personalization, pain, and extreme terror. This makes a good deal of sense; advanced meditation practice is less impartial phenomenology and more a rigorous ritualized mental practice embedded in a strong religious context. I believe that across cultures many religions share techniques, often utilizing rhythmic breathing, body postures, and intense belief priming to engender an almost psychedelic state in the practitioner.

What does this mean for cognitive science and enactivism? First, it means we need to respect cultural boundaries and not rush to put one cultural practice on top of the explanatory totem pole. This doesn’t mean cognitive scientists shouldn’t be paying attention to experience, or even practicing and studying meditation, but we have to be careful not to ignore the normativity inherent in any ritualized culture. Embracing this basic realization takes seriously individual and cultural differences in consciousness, something I’ve argued for and believe is essential for the future of 4^th wave cognitive science. Neurophenomenology, among other things, should be about recognizing and describing the normativity in our own practices, not importing those of another culture wholesale. I think that this is in line with much of what Varela wrote, and luckily, the tools to do just this are richly provided by the continental phenomenological tradition.

I believe that by carefully bracketing meta-physical and normative concepts, and investigating the vast multitude of phenomenal experience in its full multi-cultural variety, we can begin to shed light on the mind-brain relationship in a meaningful and not strictly reductive fashion. Indeed, in answering the question “are monks expert introspectionists” I think we should carefully question the normative thesis underlying that hypothesis- what exactly constitutes “good” experiential reports? Perhaps by taking a long view on Buddhism and cognitive science, we can begin to truly take the middle way to experience, where we view all experiential reports as equally valid statements regarding some kind of subjective state. The question then becomes primarily longitudinal, i.e. do experiential reports demonstrate a kind of stability or consistency over time, how do trends in experiential reports relate to neural traits and states, and how do these phenomena interact with the particular cultural practices within which they are embedded. For me, this is the central contribution of enactive cognitive science and the best way forward for neurophenomenology.

Disclaimer: I am in no way suggesting enactivists cannot or should not study advanced buddhism if that is what they find interesting and useful. I of course realize that the M&L SRI is a very particular kind of meeting, and that many enactive cognitive scientists can and do work along the lines I am suggesting. My claim is regarding best practices for the core of 4th wave cognitive science, not the fringe. I greatly value the work done by the M&L and found the SRI to be an amazingly fruitful experience.

Here are the slides from the talk:

And the resulting video:

In this short film, specially commissioned as part of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations in 2010, Professor Uta Frith FRS and her young companion, Amalie Heath-Born, find out just what goes on inside our brains when we view the treasures on display at London’s world-famous Victoria and Albert Museum.

“The human mind/brain is exquisitely social and automatically responds to signals sent by other people. These signals can be artfully designed objects, and these can come from people long in the past. The art and design that is embodied in the object can evoke in the brain different streams of imagination: how it was made, the value it represents, and the meaning it conveys. The human mind/brain has ancient reward systems, which respond to, say, stimuli signaling food to the hungry, but also respond to social stimuli signaling relevance to the curious. This makes for a never ending well spring of spontaneous teaching and learning. Education in the museum environment is perfectly attuned to the curious mind.”  Uta Frith (2010)

You can read more about the event and the film on the Royal Society page.