Conceptual development is a fundamental feature of contemplative practice but has received little attention in contemplative science. In Buddhism, for example, the eightfold path begins with right view, which includes comprehension of interdependence, suffering, and so on. In Tibetan traditions, foundational practices introduce conceptual frames, including aphorisms and visualizations, that...
August 9, 2017S. Bauer-Wu, A. Butler, Justin K. Rajendra et al.
According to constructivist theories of emotion, members of different populations experience emotion differently as a result of assembling different neural resources to produce it. To test this prediction, we sampled individuals from three populations (experienced meditators, cancer survivors, matched controls) and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess their neural...
The dysfunctional roles of mind-wandering have been noted widely both in contemplative traditions and in Western science. This chapter attempts to apply dual-process theories to contemplative practices that have existed for thousands of years in Buddhism. According to Buddhism, several important types of Involuntary Initial Response (IR) underlie dissatisfaction and unhappiness: grasping and...
Ruminative thoughts about a stressful event can seem subjectively real, as if the imagined event were happening in the moment. One possibility is that this subjective realism results from simulating the self as engaged in the stressful event (immersion). If so, then the process of decentering--disengaging the self from the event--should reduce the subjective realism associated with immersion,...
Studies have suggested that the default mode network is active during mind wandering, which is often experienced intermittently during sustained attention tasks. Conversely, an anticorrelated task-positive network is thought to subserve various forms of attentional processing. Understanding how these two systems work together is central for understanding many forms of optimal and sub-optimal...
This study sought to examine the effect of meditation experience on brain networks underlying cognitive actions employed during contemplative practice. In a previous study, we proposed a basic model of naturalistic cognitive fluctuations that occur during the practice of focused attention meditation. This model specifies four intervals in a cognitive cycle: mind wandering (MW), awareness of MW,...
Embodied theories are increasingly challenging traditional views of cognition by arguing that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences, and processed at this sensorimotor level, rather than being represented and processed abstractly in an amodal conceptual system. Given the established empirical foundation, and the relatively...