Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
George Deane, Mark Miller, Sam Wilkinson
88 citations
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of self can lead to either devastating depersonalization or sought-after selfless experiences in meditation. Using the active inference framework, the authors propose that selfhood emerges from a temporally deep generative model that tunes agents to counterfactually rich possibilities for action. Depersonalization may result from an inferred loss of allostatic control, contrasting with the euphoric selfless experiences reported by meditation practitioners. This unified account conceptualizes the experiential similarities and differences between these states, with implications for understanding dissociative disorders and the therapeutic potential and dangers of meditation.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2023
Julian Kiverstein, Mark Miller
6 citations
Playfulness, understood as a learned high-level prior that tolerates and explores uncertainty in safe contexts, can contribute to human flourishing by expanding the amount of surprise a person is prepared to accept. Playful individuals attend to the world in an open, expansive, and effortless way that fosters presence and deep engagement, leading to renewed appreciation for life. They actively seek challenges at the edge of their abilities, promoting growth in skills and relationships. Additionally, they monitor and learn from their own affective responses to uncertainty, turning it into something familiar and enjoyable to explore. Thus, openness to uncertainty may be an important ingredient in a meaningful life.
American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council
December 1, 2024
Josh Brahinsky, Jonas Mago, Mark Miller et al.
5 citations
Buddhist Jhāna meditation and Christian speaking in tongues, despite appearing very different, share key phenomenological features. Interviews with experienced practitioners in the USA reveal a dynamic interplay between focused attention, aroused joy, and a sense of letting go or release crucial to both practices. The paper theorizes that these shared features engage an autonomic field built through a spiral between attention, arousal, and release (AAR), analyzed through sensory gating and predictive processing theories of brain function.
Scientific Reports
April 3, 2025
Joel Patchitt, Sarah N. Garfinkel, William H Strawson et al.
4 citations
False physiological feedback—mismatches between perceived and actual bodily signals—can bias how people judge the emotional intensity of faces. Prior work using auditory feedback suggested that perceived changes in heart rate increase intensity ratings regardless of whether the feedback indicates a faster or slower heart rate, with the right anterior insula acting as a mismatch detector. This study used pulsatile somatosensory stimulation (vibration) at rates above, below, or matching participants' heart rate, or no stimulation, while they rated emotional faces during brain scanning. Feedback produced a bidirectional effect: intensity ratings increased over each 20-second stimulation block.
Neurosci Conscious
February 19, 2026
Valeria Becattini, Michael Lifshitz, Mark Miller
1 citation
The article proposes that body-scan meditation, a practice of systematically attending to different parts of the body, can lead to a dissolution of bodily boundaries—a sense of the body's limits becoming less distinct. It uses predictive processing theory, which frames perception as the brain's active inference about sensory input, to explain how such meditation might reduce the precision of predictions about bodily states. By learning to attenuate or down-weight these predictions, practitioners may experience a blurring of the self-other boundary. The account integrates philosophical and neuroscientific perspectives to describe how meditative training can reshape the sense of bodily self.
June 5, 2025
Valeria Becattini, Michael Lifshitz, Mark Miller
1 citation
preprint
Focused attention on the body, as in meditation, usually heightens sensation, but deep practice can paradoxically dissolve the sense of bodily boundaries—a phenomenon called bhaṅga. This paper resolves the paradox using the Predictive Processing framework, arguing that the body-scan technique, from Theravada Buddhism, enhances the precision of low-level predictions about somatosensory signals, which attenuates those signals and diminishes perception of the body's boundaries. The authors describe the technique, its phenomenological outcomes, and the attentional processes involved, concluding that this attenuation may contribute to well-being and offer therapeutic applications for conditions like addiction and emotional dysregulation.
arXiv (Cornell University)
November 26, 2025
Jonas Mago, Josh Brahinsky, Mark Miller et al.
During a 10-day retreat, ten experienced meditation practitioners showed that neural dynamics can be volitionally shifted toward a critical regime—a state between order and chaos that supports flexible yet stable information processing. Compared to regular mindfulness of breathing, a refined state of meditative absorption called jhana produced pronounced sensory fading, slower respiration, higher neural signal diversity, reduced chaoticity, and enhanced mismatch negativity amplitude over frontocentral sites. Spectral analyses revealed a flatter aperiodic component and reorganization of long-range temporal correlations. These findings suggest that criticality is a candidate neurophysiological marker of absorptive, minimal-content experiences.
July 21, 2025
Jonas Mago, Shamil Chandaria, Mark Miller et al.
preprint
Minimal phenomenal experiences—states of consciousness with very little content—can be modeled as arising when precision weighting shifts to lower levels of a hierarchical inferential system, producing a perceptual state with increased entropy and reduced complexity. Awareness of this simplified state is maintained through epistemic depth, the reflexive sharing of the organism's reality model with itself, so that a reflexive knowing of the empty field of experience remains. The paper proposes an in silico simulation to test the relationship between precision distribution and entropy, which could generate synthetic EEG data to empirically validate the framework.
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
January 1, 2025
Julian Kiverstein, Mark Miller, Erik Rietveld
Desire motivates action through affective sense-making within the brain's predictive processing framework. The brain implements a hierarchical predictive model to minimize prediction errors, but philosophers have questioned how belief-like predictions account for desire's conative role. The authors introduce 'first priors'—prioritized predictions—and argue that agents use them for affective sense-making, which has been overlooked in understanding desire. Affective sense-making modulates precision expectations (estimates of prediction reliability) in context-sensitive ways, causing agents to experience their environment through desire as a field of inviting affordances. Predictive processing thus bridges first-person phenomenological descriptions of desire with third-person ecological-enactive analysis.
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
November 1, 2020
Kathryn Nave, George Deane, Mark Miller et al.
The predictive processing framework describes the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that constructs sensory experience from the top down. This paper argues that this view of the mind is embodied, deeply affective, and compatible with cognitive extension. Perception, action, homeostatic regulation, and emotion are all underpinned by the same predictive machinery. The authors conclude that predictive minds are deeply interwoven with, and may extend into, the surrounding social, cultural, and technological landscape.