Psychiatric disorders remain a major global health challenge, yet research does not adequately incorporate first-person lived experience. A central component of lived experience is the sense of self, which is often profoundly altered in psychiatric conditions and can serve as a prognostic phenomenological marker, particularly in psychosis. In psychiatry, the most minimal form of self, i.e., the...
Abstract Background Hospital professionals face mental health challenges caused by the high demands of their work. Mindfulness meditation (MM) is a nonpharmacological practice with promising effects in promoting mental health and well-being across various hospital professionals. However, the benefits obtained from its implementation in the context of real work in hospital departments are...
Nonduality is a foundational but conceptually elusive notion across several contemplative traditions. Nondual traditions challenge the assumption that a subject-object structure characteristic of ordinary experience is an intrinsic feature of conscious awareness. However, little remains known about the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with such experiential state. Here, we investigated how...
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...
Meditation is thought to promote healthy aging by improving mental health, preserving brain integrity and reducing Alzheimer's disease risk. We examined the impact of long-term meditation expertise and an 18-month meditation training on brain aging in older adults using machine learning. We included 25 Older Expert Meditators (OldExpMed) with > 20 years of practice and 135 Cognitively...
Meditation and psychedelics have separately been studied as powerful tools for probing consciousness through their capacity to deconstruct the sense of self. Yet, direct empirical comparisons remain scarce, particularly in expert meditators. Here, we report for the first time a case study in which an advanced meditator and Lama from the Mahāmudrā meditation tradition engaged in a traditional...
Loneliness is a key predictor for mortality and a risk factor for dementia. Meditation training appears to be a promising intervention for loneliness in older adults, but long-term randomized controlled trials with an active control group are scarce. To fill this gap, this secondary analysis of the three-armed clinical randomized controlled Age-Well trial compares the impact of an 18-month...
Meditation practice has been shown to impact resting-state EEG activity in expert meditators, but its benefits on sleep, which is particularly affected with age, are poorly understood. Our aim was to better understand the effects of long-term meditation practice on resting-state EEG and sleep in older adults. Twenty-seven elderly expert meditators (mean age ± SD: 70.7 ± 5.0 years) were compared...
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...
With aging, slight changes in some cognitive processes can be observed. Therefore, we aimed to assess if meditation expertise is associated with preserved cognition in key domains affected in aging. We used data from two older-adult samples of the Medit-Ageing Age-well Study: 135 non-meditators and 27 expert meditators. We examined group differences in four objective cognitive domains...
There is a renewed interest in taking phenomenology seriously in consciousness research, contemporary psychiatry, and neurocomputation. The neurophenomenology research program, pioneered by Varela, rigorously examines subjective experience using first-person methodologies, inspired by phenomenology and contemplative practices. This review explores recent advancements in neurophenomenological...
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...
During wakefulness, our thoughts transition between different contents. However, there are moments that are seemingly devoid of reportable content, referred to as mind blanking (MB). It remains unclear what these blanks represent, highlighting the definitional and phenomenological ambiguities surrounding MB. We map out MB in terms of its reportable expressions, neurophysiology, and relationship...
Aging is associated with cognitive changes, even in the absence of brain pathology. This study aimed to determine if meditation training, by comparison to active and passive control groups, is linked to changes in the perception of cognitive functioning in older adults. One hundred thirty-four healthy older participants from the Age-Well Randomized Clinical Trial were included: 45 followed a...
The context for our paper comes from the neurophenomenology (NPh) research programme initiated by Francisco Varela at the end of the 1990s. Varela's working hypothesis was that, to be successful, a consciousness research programme must progress by relating first-person phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their third-person counterparts in neuroscience through "mutual...
Human predictive capacity underlies its adaptive strength but also the potential for existential terror. Grounded in the predictive processing framework of brain function, we recently showed using a magnetoencephalogram visual mismatch-response (vMMR) paradigm that prediction-based self-specific neural mechanisms shield the self from existential threat-at the level of perception-by attributing...
Meditation training in older adults has been proposed as a non-pharmacological intervention to promote healthy aging and lower the risks of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). Resting-state dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) highlighted two brain states, the "strongly connected" and "default mode network (DMN)-negatively connected" states, associated with protective factors for...
Shorter telomeres are associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and age-related diseases. Developing interventions to promote healthy aging by preserving telomere integrity is of paramount importance. Here, we investigated the effect of an 18-month meditation intervention on telomere length (TL) measures in older people without cognitive impairment. A total of 137 adults age ≥65 years...
Meditation is a mental training approach that can improve mental health and well-being in aging. Yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The Medit-Ageing model stipulates that three mechanisms - attentional, constructive, and deconstructive - upregulate positive psycho-affective factors and downregulate negative ones. To test this hypothesis, we measured brain structural MRI and...
Meditation is a mental training approach that can improve mental health and well-being in aging. Yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The Medit-Ageing model stipulates that three mechanisms - attentional, constructive, and deconstructive - upregulate positive psycho-affective factors and downregulate negative ones. To test this hypothesis, we measured brain structural MRI and...
Understanding the factors that predict why some individuals perceive to respond more to meditation training than others could impact the development, efficacy, adherence levels, and implementation of meditation-based interventions. We investigated individual-level variables associated with self- and teacher-perceived responsiveness to longer-term meditation training. This study presents a...
Short mindfulness-based interventions have gained traction in research due to their positive impact on well-being, cognition, and clinical symptoms across various settings. However, these short-term trainings are viewed as preliminary steps within a more extensive transformative path, presumably leading to long-lasting trait changes. Despite this, little is still known about the brain...
While consciousness is typically considered equivalent to mental contents, certain meditation practices-including open monitoring (OM)-are said to enable a unique conscious state where meditators can experience mental content from a de-reified perspective as "ongoing phenomena." Phenomenologically, such a state is considered as reduction of intentionality, the mental act upon mental content. We...
Within western social psychology and neuroscience, compassion is described as being conditioned by cost-benefit appraisals, such as the attribution of responsibility for the causes of suffering. Buddhist traditions maintain the possibility of cultivating and embodying unconditioned and universal forms of compassion. Whereas a growing body of empirical literature suggests that Buddhist-inspired...
Understanding the factors that predict why some individuals perceive to respond more to meditation training than others could impact the development, efficacy, adherence levels, and implementation of meditation-based interventions. We investigated individual-level variables associated with self- and teacher-perceived responsiveness to longer-term meditation training. This study presents a...