Meditation research mostly examines neurophysiology, but the actual moment-to-moment experience of meditating—what it feels like at different stages and in different practices—remains largely unstudied. This article reports a pilot project that used 'micro-phenomenological' interview methods to help meditators describe their lived experience with rigor and precision. The results show that such detailed descriptions can deepen understanding of meditation, improve practice, and inform teaching, revealing a valuable but overlooked dimension of contemplative science.
A dynamic approach to epileptic seizure anticipation, combining neuro-dynamic analysis of brain activity with pheno-dynamic analysis of subjective experience, can guide and determine each other. This method consolidates the foundations for a cognitive, non-pharmacological therapy for epilepsy. The neuro-phenomenological co-determination demonstrated through this example offers new insight into the gap between subjective experience and neurophysiological activity.
Neurophenomenology aims to combine neural and experiential descriptions of cognitive processes, but faces a practical difficulty: neural measures typically have coarser functional selectivity than the micro-dynamics of brief mental events. A new approach is proposed, using human intra-cerebral EEG (iEEG) to capture neural micro-dynamics with millimetric and millisecond precision, alongside disciplined elicitation techniques for accessing experiential micro-dynamics. This lays the foundation for a microcognitive science that practically implements neurophenomenology to investigate human cognition at the subsecond level.
Micro-phenomenology, an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience, can be turned on itself to reveal quality criteria. In a pilot series of five interviews, experienced micro-phenomenology researchers recalled one successful and one challenging instance of using the method. An auto-ethnographic dialogue between the authors illustrates the planning, conducting, and analysis of these interviews. An unexpected finding emerged: researchers judge the quality of an interview partly based on a sense of connection or contact between interviewer and interviewee. The article discusses this finding in relation to the method's means and intentions and suggests directions for future research.