Meditation practices often involve sustaining attention on the body. Typically, attention is understood to enhance both neural resource allocation and the subjective salience of the attended target. However, in deep meditative states, practitioners sometimes report a dissolution of bodily boundaries, a phenomenon known in Pali as bha[Formula: see text]ga. This presents a paradox: why does...
Criticality describes a regime between order and chaos that supports flexible yet stable information processing. Here we examine whether neural dynamics can be volitionally shifted toward criticality through the self-regulation of attention. We examined ten experienced practitioners of meditation during a 10-day retreat, comparing refined states of meditative absorption, called the jhanas, to...
Minimal Phenomenal Experiences (MPEs) represent states of consciousness reduced to their most fundamental elements, posing a unique challenge and opportunity for modeling consciousness. This paper introduces a novel computational framework based on Bayesian and active inference to model MPEs. We propose that MPEs arise when precision weighting shifts predominantly to the lower levels of a...
Mismatches between perceived and veridical physiological signals during false feedback (FFB) can bias emotional judgements. Paradigms using auditory FFB suggest perceived changes in heart rate (HR) increase ratings of emotional intensity irrespective of feedback type (increased or decreased HR), implicating right anterior insula as a mismatch comparator between exteroceptive and interoceptive...
The predictive processing theory refers to a family of theories that take the brain and body of an organism to implement a hierarchically organized predictive model of its environment that works in the service of prediction-error minimization. Several philosophers have wondered how belief-like states of prediction account for the conative role desire plays in motivating a person to act. A...
Buddhist Jhāna meditation and the Christian practice of speaking in tongues appear wildly distinct. These spiritual techniques differ in their ethical, theological, and historical frames and seem, from the outside, to produce markedly different states of consciousness-one a state of utter calm and the other of high emotional arousal. Yet, our phenomenological interviews with experienced...
Can we know God? If so, how? This essay considers Bernard Lonergan’s thoughts on God’s inner and outer Words (the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ) and how they are received in human consciousness. It applies these two ways of knowing God to two theologians who each emphasized one of these Words: Meister Eckhart, a medieval, Neoplatonic monk, who focused on union with the inner Word, and Eberhard...
Approximately 10–30% of individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exhibit a dissociative subtype of the condition defined by symptoms of depersonalization and derealization. This study examined the psychometric evidence for the dissociative subtype of PTSD in a sample of young, primarily male post-9/11-era Veterans (n = 374 at baseline and n = 163 at follow-up) and evaluated its...
Our paper takes as its starting point the recent proposal, at the core of this special issue, to use the active inference framework (AIF) to computationally model what it is for a person to live a meaningful life. In broad brushstrokes, the AIF takes experiences of human flourishing to be the result of predictions and uncertainty estimations along many dimensions at multiple levels of...
Predictive Processing (henceforth PP) is a recent, exciting framework emerging at the crossroads of cognitive science, statistical modeling and philosophy of mind (Friston 2005(Friston , 2010)).Informed by recent developments in computational neuroscience and Bayesian psychology, it offers a paradigm shifting approach to studying cognition, often being presented as "the first truly unifying...
Objective: Dissociation, a disruption or discontinuity in psychological functioning, is often linked with worse psychiatric symptoms; however, the prognostic value of dissociation after trauma is inconsistent. Determining whether trauma-related dissociation is uniquely predictive of later outcomes would enable early identification of at-risk trauma populations. We completed the largest...
The Predictive Processing (PP) framework casts the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that continually generates predictions of the causal structure of the world in order to construct for itself, from the top down, incoming sensory signals. Conceiving of the brain in this way has yielded incredible explanatory power, offering what many believe to be our first glimpse at a unified theory...
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of selfhood underpin both pathological and "enlightened" states of consciousness. People suffering from depersonalization can experience the loss of a sense of self as devastating, often accompanied by intense feelings of alienation, fear, and hopelessness. However, for meditative contemplatives from various traditions, "selfless" experiences are highly sought...
According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi:10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at...
AssessmentNovember 23, 2015E. Wolf, K. Mitchell, Naomi Sadeh et al.
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual includes a dissociative subtype of posttraumatic stress disorder, but no existing measures specifically assess it. This article describes the initial evaluation of a 15-item self-report measure of the subtype called the Dissociative Subtype of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Scale (DSPS) in an online survey of 697 trauma-exposed military...
Near-death experiences (NDEs) and advanced contemplative practices such as dark retreat are frequently reported to involve vivid inner imagery, encounters with non-ordinary agents, moral insight, and panoramic life reviews. Despite growing empirical interest, these experiences remain theoretically fragmented across neuroscience, psychology, and religious studies. In this paper, we develop a...
Encounter with supernatural agents and other drug-occasioned immaterial entities are a common aspect of psychedelic experiences. However, existing theories offer incomplete explanations for this phenomenon. This paper proposes a theoretical model of psychedelic supernatural agent experiences grounded in active inference. We review recent theoretical models of psychedelic neurological activity...