measures like accuracy and reaction time and move toward reports about experience that are simple but not necessarily objectively verifiable as accurate.I will discuss studies demonstrating the effect of attention on visual awareness and how meditation practice could influence our perceptual experience.Fi nally, I will discuss the importance of control and prediction and how a hierarchical...
Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for cultivating it originated in eastern spiritual traditions. These suggest that mindfulness can be developed through meditation practice to increase positive qualities...
In this study, we set out to examine whether monastic debate practice can help with emotion regulation and reduce the experience of negative affect. Research on traditional contemplative practices—including mindfulness, loving-kindness meditation, and yoga—shows that they influence emotion regulation and emotional experience. However, systematic reasoning, appraisal, and emotion regulation in a...
Evidence from temporal regularities in perception, temporal phenomenology, and neural dynamics indicate that our awareness evolves and devolves over several timescales. However, most theories of consciousness posit a single timescale of processing at the end of which a percept is rendered conscious. To show evidence for multiple timescales, we utilized continuous flash suppression (CFS). Based...
A creative idea is always appreciated. However, it is still unclear as to what helps people in coming up with creative ideas. The current chapter explores how mind wandering, mindfulness and meditation influence creative ideation. Most specifically, we explore the cognition behind each of these faculties and how they interact to enable us in navigating across our internal and external...
Integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness proposes an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology. Through this assertion, IIT aims to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, despite its phenomenology-first stance, developments in IIT have overlooked temporality. As such, we argue that at present IIT’s phenomenological analysis is...
The gradedness or discreteness of our visual awareness has been debated. Here, we investigate the influence of spatial scope of attention on the gradedness of visual awareness. We manipulated scope of attention using hierarchical letter-based tasks (global: broad scope; local: narrow scope). Participants reported the identity of a masked hierarchical letter either at the global level or at the...
Temporality and the feeling of 'now' is a fundamental property of consciousness. Different conceptualizations of time-consciousness have argued that both the content of our experiences and the representations of those experiences evolve in time, or neither have temporal extension, or only content does. Accounting for these different positions, we propose a nested hierarchical model of multiple...
Many traditions in the East have proposed that consciousness without content is possible and could be achieved with mental training. However, it is not clear whether such a state is possible given that intentionality is a critical property of mentality and consciousness in many theories of consciousness. A prominent recent attempt to account for such states of "minimal phenomenal experience" is...
All of us consciously experience the world around us through our sensory modalities. Empirical studies on the relationship between attention and awareness have shown that attention does influence perceptual experience or appearance in addition to better performance in perceptual tasks. The practice of meditation also changes perceptual experience in addition to better perceptual performance....
Despite the acknowledged relationship between consciousness and attention, theories of the two have mostly been developed separately. Moreover, these theories have independently attempted to explain phenomena in which both are likely to interact, such as the attentional blink (AB) and working memory (WM) consolidation. Here, we make an effort to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, a theory...
Understanding consciousness is a major scientific challenge of our times, and perceptual awareness is an integral part of that challenge. This Theme Issue aims to provide a timely focus on crucial insights from leading scientists on perceptual awareness and its neural basis. The issue refers to key research questions and findings in perceptual awareness research and aims to be a catalyst for...
Brain oscillatory activity is associated with different cognitive processes and plays a critical role in meditation. In this study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of oscillatory changes during Sahaj Samadhi meditation (a concentrative form of meditation that is part of Sudarshan Kriya yoga). EEG was recorded during Sudarshan Kriya yoga meditation for meditators and relaxation for...
Many recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies have revealed the importance of investigating meditation states and traits to achieve an increased understanding of cognitive and affective neuroplasticity, attention and self-awareness, as well as for their increasingly recognized clinical relevance. The investigation of states and traits related to meditation has especially pronounced...
While enormous progress has been made to identify neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), crucial NCC aspects are still very controversial. A major hurdle is the lack of an adequate definition and characterization of different aspects of conscious experience and also its relationship to attention and metacognitive processes like monitoring. In this paper, we therefore attempt to develop a...
Research on attention has been closely linked with possible advances in the study of consciousness. Various theories and models have been proposed for attention in the past 50 years. Behavioural, computational, and neuroscientific approaches have been successful in improving our understanding of attentional processes. Given the current status of attention research, what can we say about the...
The mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm that is an indicator of preattentive processing was used to study the effects of concentrative meditation. Sudarshan Kriya Yoga meditation is a yogic exercise practiced in an ordered sequence beginning with breathing exercises, and ending with concentrative (Sahaj Samadhi) meditation. Auditory MMN waveforms were recorded at the beginning and after each of...