Frontiers in Psychology
August 28, 2026
Alessio Matiz, Sara Sorella, Giuseppe Pagnoni et al.
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....
Neuroscience of Consciousness
November 7, 2025
Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Alexandre Foncelle, Éric Koun et al.
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...
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
July 1, 2025
Oussama Abdoun, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Stéphane Offort et al.
5 citations
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...
Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
April 1, 2025
Saampras Ganesan, Fernando A Barrios, Ishaan Batta et al.
6 citations
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...
August 2, 2022
Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Antoine Lutz
10 citations
preprint
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...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
2022
Maxwell J D Ramstead, Anil K. Seth, Casper Hesp et al.
75 citations
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...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
September 21, 2021
Susanna Feruglio, Alessio Matiz, G. Pagnoni et al.
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...
January 24, 2019
Antoine Lutz, Jérémie Mattout, Giuseppe Pagnoni
7 citations
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...
Progress in Brain Research
2019
G. Pagnoni
59 citations
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
2015
Phebe B Kemmer, Ying Guo, Yikai Wang et al.
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...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2013
Omar T Khachouf, Stefano Poletti, Giuseppe Pagnoni
34 citations
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...
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
April 11, 2012
Giuseppe Pagnoni
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...
PLoS One
September 2, 2008
Giuseppe Pagnoni, Milos Cekic, Ying Guo
189 citations
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...
Neurobiology of Aging
October 1, 2007
Giuseppe Pagnoni, Milos Cekic
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...
Oussama Abdoun, Arnaud Poublan-Couzardot, Stéphane Offort et al.
preprint
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...
Giuseppe Pagnoni
preprint
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.