Introduction Although meditation practice encompasses both intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions, the differential effects of individual versus group meditation settings (IS vs. GS) remain largely unexplored. This study aimed to reduce this gap by comparing the effects of a mindfulness meditation session performed in the two settings, focusing in particular on mind-wandering (MW) dynamics....
Active inference describes motor action as a prediction-driven inferential process, whereby ascending proprioceptive prediction errors are attenuated to allow the fulfillment of expected movement. Meditative practices typically involve a heightened attention to bodily sensations, begging the question of whether this could partially offset the normal proprioceptive suppression during a simple...
A significant share of meditation research relies on trait psychometric measures of mindfulness, which neglect the complex and dynamic unfolding of experiential processes entailed by meditation over time. However, there have been a few attempts to capture ongoing changes in experience during meditation. In this study, we integrated and expanded on 3 of these previous approaches to create a...
Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past...
Active inference is a theoretical and computational framework that is producing a significant influence on how we currently think about, and conduct research on, the mind and brain. This paper discusses the fresh perspective it offers for the study of contemplative practices, where the sustained awareness to the apparent inactivity of the meditative posture may in fact enable the unfolding of a...
Independent component analysis (ICA) is one of the leading approaches for studying brain functional networks. There is increasing interest in neuroscience studies to investigate individual differences in brain networks and their association with demographic characteristics and clinical outcomes. In this work, we develop a sparse Bayesian group hierarchical ICA model that offers significant...
The perception of pain is sensitive to various mental processes such as expectation about the nociceptive stimulus or individual differences in the affective and cognitive evaluations of pain. A promising approach to the investigation of the neurocomputational principles of pain perception is the theory of predictive processing which offers a general framework to understand perception and...
This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as computational phenomenology because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy...
Through the practice of Mindfulness Meditation (MM), meditators become familiar with the observation of ongoing spontaneous thoughts, while maintaining an attitude of openness and equanimity. The aim of this systematic review is to present a synthesis of available findings of the short and long-term effects of MM on mind wandering (MW). We included studies that considered both first-person and...
The theoretical framework of active inference proposed by Karl Friston is currently one of the more actively developed research areas in neuroscience. According to this theory the brain adapts its synaptic activity and architecture in such a way that it de facto comes to mirror the causal structure of events that the organism both encounters and actively induces in its environment. In this...
Abstract: Activity changes in dopaminergic neurons encode the ongoing discrepancy between expected and actual value of a stimulus, providing a teaching signal for a reward prediction process. Previous work comparing a cohort of long-term Zen meditators to controls demonstrated an attenuation of reward prediction signals to appetitive reward in the striatum. Using a cross-commodity design...
The surge of interest about mindfulness meditation is associated with a growing empirical evidence about its impact on the mind and body. Yet, despite promising phenomenological or psychological models of mindfulness, a general mechanistic understanding of meditation steeped in neuroscience is still lacking. In parallel, predictive processing approaches to the mind are rapidly developing in the...
The theory of predictive processing in the comprehensive articulation proposed by Karl Friston is a framework that boasts an impressively wide explanatory power in neurobiology, where processes apparently as diverse as perception, action, attention, and learning unfold, and are coherently orchestrated, according to the single general mandate of free-energy minimization. In the present opinion...
In the last decade, a number of neuroimaging studies have investigated the neurophysiological effects associated with contemplative practices. Meditation-related changes in resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) have been previously reported, particularly in the default mode network, frontoparietal attentional circuits, saliency-related regions, and primary sensory cortices. We collected...
Neurophenomenology is a research programme aimed at bridging the explanatory gap between first-person subjective experience and neurophysiological third-person data, through an embodied and enactive approach to the biology of consciousness. The present proposal attempts to further characterize the bodily basis of the mind by adopting a naturalistic view of the phenomenological concept of...
Neuroimaging data suggest a link between the spontaneous production of thoughts during wakeful rest and slow fluctuations of activity in the default mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions with high basal metabolism and a major neural hub in the ventral posteromedial cortex (vPMC). Meta-awareness and regulation of mind-wandering are core cognitive components of most contemplative practices...
Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that are metabolically active during wakeful rest and consistently deactivate in a variety the performance of demanding tasks. This "default network" has been functionally linked to the stream of thoughts occurring automatically in the absence of goal-directed activity and which constitutes an aspect of mental behavior...
Zen meditation, a Buddhist practice centered on attentional and postural self-regulation, has been speculated to bring about beneficial long-term effects for the individual, ranging from stress reduction to improvement of cognitive function. In this study, we examined how the regular practice of meditation may affect the normal age-related decline of cerebral gray matter volume and attentional...
BACKGROUND: A significant share of meditation research relies on trait psychometric measures of mindfulness, which neglect the complex and dynamic unfolding of experiential processes entailed by meditation over time. However, there have been a few attempts to capture ongoing changes in experience during meditation. In this study, we integrated and expanded on 3 of these previous approaches to...
This paper is based on a presentation delivered at a 2024 conference on consciousness studies in Padova, Italy. The event, titled "The Elephant in the Room: Investigating Consciousness Beyond Reductionism," was a collaborative effort between the Italian Buddhist Union (UBI) and the University of Padova. A revised version of this work is slated for publication in the conference proceedings volume.